Now, imagine a person in a helicopter above the parade. This person can see person A1 and also can see that the parade is marching around the place where the other person is getting attended. So to person H (in the helicopter) this is not in the future but in the present. The point of this analogy is to show that this is possible for person H because person H is in another dimension. Since A is moving on the ground we can almost think of it as if A is moving in 2 dimensional space and H is moving in three dimensional space since he rose up into the air.
This is a simple explanation of why God can see the future, the present, and the path. Since time is a human invented dimension, God has no concept of time. He exists in a different dimension and so can see all that is to come.
Hermann
This concept of existense outside of time often drifts to the foreground of thought when considering what happens in the "time" between death and judgement.
ReplyDeleteDo we enter a waiting room where all the souls of generations past are also already waiting?
Do we enter a state of limbo and remain as such until judgement?
Do we transcend time and are transported immediately to that event?
Dante Alighieri writes in his famous Divine Comedy of purgatory (the place between earth, heaven and hell). Some interpret it as a "where" and others as a "when."
Since the human mind insists on understanding everything in terms of when and where (space-time), I believe the concept of purgatory or similar ideas to be natural constructs of the mind to make sense of the immediate hereafter.
I enjoyed the analogy of the two dimensional versus three dimensional perspective. As we often see in many fields, it helps to simplify the dimensions of the model in order to better grasp the fundamental concepts inherent therein. We see it with economics in the well known phrase ceteris paribus. We see it mathematics when we try to envision more than 3 spatial dimensions (This is well described in a book called flatland).