Time Was the First Thing Made (1 of 2)

There is a question almost everyone has asked at some point and almost no one has been given a satisfying answer to. What was happening before God created the universe? Children ask it. Skeptics ask it. Honest believers ask it in the quiet hours when they think no one is listening. If God made everything, then before He made everything, there was just God. What was God doing? Why did He wait? Why now and not earlier? Why anything at all?

The reason no one gives a satisfying answer is that the question contains a buried assumption that does not survive examination. The assumption is that time is a stage on which creation happened — a pre-existing arena into which God placed the things He made. On that assumption, the question makes sense. There was a stage. God stepped onto it at a certain moment. What was He doing on the stage before that moment?

The assumption is wrong. There was no stage. Time itself is one of the things God made.

Augustine of Hippo worked this out in the early fifth century. He had been pressed with exactly this question. His answer is short and exact. The world was not made in time but with time. Time did not exist as a prior arena into which the world was placed. Time came into being when the world came into being. They are coextensive. Before there was a world, there was no before.

To the person who insists on pressing the question — but what was God doing in that previous time? — Augustine's reply is that there was no previous time. The word before is a temporal word. It belongs to a category of speech that requires time to exist. To use it about a state in which time does not yet exist is to make a grammatical mistake, not a discovery. The question dissolves under examination. It is not a question with a hidden answer. It is a question that cannot be sensibly asked.

This is not an evasion. It is a precision.

And this is where the engineer's instinct lights up, because the conclusion Augustine reached on theological grounds in the fifth century is the same conclusion physicists reached on cosmological grounds in the twentieth century, by an entirely independent path.

Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, treats space and time not as two separate things but as a single woven fabric called spacetime. Space and time are not independent. They are aspects of one geometric structure. Time can dilate. Space can curve. The two are interwoven at the deepest measurable level.

That insight has consequences. If space and time are one fabric, then a beginning of the universe is not a beginning of stuff inside a pre-existing arena. It is a beginning of the arena itself. The cosmological models that followed — the work of Friedmann, Lemaître, confirmed by Hubble's observations of an expanding universe and by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background — converged on a picture in which the universe has a finite age. About 13.8 billion years, by current measurement. The galaxies are moving apart because the spacetime they sit in is expanding. Trace the expansion backward and you reach a state of extraordinary density and energy, the Big Bang, and beyond that you reach a point at which the equations themselves give out. Not because something is hidden there. Because there is no there there. Spacetime itself began.

Stephen Hawking, who held no theological commitments and would have resisted any I tried to credit him with, said this as clearly as anyone has. To ask what happened before the Big Bang, he said, is like asking what is north of the North Pole. The question uses a direction that does not exist at that location. There is no before, because before is a temporal word and time is the very thing that began.

Augustine, on theological grounds, in the fifth century. Hawking, on physical grounds, in the twentieth. They are not saying compatible things. They are saying the same thing.

When two paths that started in entirely different terrain arrive at the same destination, the destination deserves attention. We have a name for it in engineering. We call it independent verification. When the calculation done by one team using one method produces the same number as the calculation done by another team using a completely different method, the number is taken seriously. Not because the teams agreed in advance. Because they did not, and arrived together anyway.

So time is a created thing. The implications are larger than they first appear.

The first implication is that God's relation to time is not the relation of an older thing to a younger thing. God did not exist for a long while and then start making things. He exists in a mode that is not temporal at all. The medieval theologians had a word for this mode. They called it aeternitas, eternity, and they distinguished it carefully from sempiternitas, which would mean existing in time forever. God does not exist in time forever. God exists in the mode that is the ground of time, not extended along it. Boethius, in the early sixth century, gave the classic formula. Eternity is the complete and perfect possession of unlimited life all at once. Not endlessness. Wholeness. Time spread out for us is, for God, possessed entire.