With the atemporality argument (the argument that God is outside of time), people make the assumption that time is still a line, but that God can see the whole line at once. Under this theory all of time is a TV show and God can scrub to whatever moment in it he likes.

But recent discoveries in science are overturning this understanding. Particles can be in two places or once, or pop from place to place in ways they shouldn’t be able to, or be two things at once. In fact, there’s really no reason to think of time as a line.

And if you stop for a moment, that makes more sense. The only moment we ever really experience is now — we never experience the past, or the future. They’re just abstractions in our mind, impressions and memories locked in the configuration of neurons. The only time that is real is the time right now.

We already know that time is not a line — it’s a continuum that is one with space; the space-time continuum. Time slows down near gravitational sources and speeds up near them. It is more accurate to say that time is a dimension that exists all at once, like space, and that we experience it in a limited way. People more eloquent than me have said “Time is the dimension of change.”

This has a big implication on the nature of choices. All of time exists as one, so all choices are being made as one. We’re moving through time one event at a time and so to us it seems as if it’s not the same time, but the reality of it is that all these things are happening, have happened.

We can’t say all of time is ‘happening now,’ per se, because that is a statement of when in time something is. When speaking of time, we cannot say more than that it exists as one.

God, however, does not experience anything in a limited way. His perception is complete; all that can be perceived, he perceives. So God perceives the whole of time as it is; complete and formed.

A brief note on divine intervention: God is still able to divinely intervene. If we understand time as a line, God has to enter this line to mess with the line and then again exit the line, which raises a lot of contradictions. But time is not a line, it is a whole object, and modifying it for God is much like a Sculpter modifying his art; the sum of the object has changed all at once. In this way, for us, the thing which existed before his intervention does not exist anymore — indeed, for humans, the thing it was before his intervention has never existed. We necessarily can only experience it’s final form.

This has a lot of theological implications. We often think of God as having ‘created’ and now he’s waiting for it to ‘end,’ but the reality of the situation is that he can create and do away with this abstraction as he pleases. We can’t say “this is but a moment to him” because his existence is unchanging and timeless. We can’t even say “he has already created and done away with it” because that still is a linear understanding of time.

It’s hard to think about precisely because of our limited viewpoint. This is the sort of thing we can’t study directly; like black holes, we have to study it by examining the impression it leaves, piecing together circumstantial evidence into a picture we can only express in mathematics.