The theologians tell it is impossible for us to wrap
our minds around God's infinity, which is part of the reason we struggle so
much with it when it shows up on our radar screen. "On which part of what
radar screen?" you might be thinking.
How often have you heard
people say they would pray about something, but felt guilty about taking up
God's time? How often have you heard people say they are afraid to bother
God with a seemingly insignificant request? Or, like in the Bruce Almighty film of yesteryear, if prayers are
like emails, how could God possibility have time to think or even read them
all, let alone compose a response . . . which is what we all really want?
Or, sometimes people stumble over concepts like
"providence"--which is basically thinking through how God, as the one
who both sustains the cosmos and keeps it running, can possibly
keep track of all the details? Or, take things a step further, if God has
trouble with the present details, how could he know about the future details?
As a churchgoer and a student theologian, I've heard all of these
questions and more!
Principally, we tend to
get stuck on God's infinity when we think about God's ability to multitask, if
you will. A professor of mine at Westminster seminary cleverly called
this "omnicompetence" and I think of it as "perfect" or
"divine multitasking". How, when I pray, or when I think
about how complicated the world is, can I imagine the ways in which God's mind
works different from mine if I, quite literally, have no hope of comprehending
how God really works? Am I just stuck, or what can I do?
There are many ways to answer
these questions and some of them are very technical indeed. If you enjoy
that sort of thing, I am happy to recommend you a book or two. We're not
going to do that here. Instead, we are going to imagine.
In order to imaginatively
engage infinity, you have to make one of two choices. Basically you have
to think about something small and singular (a point-particle
in physics, or a point in math) or something big and multiplied (the unbounded cosmos or the biggest number you can think of, or a
infinite series of big numbers). So, itty-bitty, smaller-than-one-stuff,
or really big, really long stuff. That makes it hard to imagine God,
doesn't it? Either I think of him as not being spatial and thus he's
small--and hardly able to cope with the big stuff, or I think of him as being
really big and thus the little stuff is beneath his notice. Quite the
quandary.
Instead of rending our
garments in despair, we're going to try an imaginative process that gets us
small stuff and big stuff together.
Imagine with me the smallest
space into which you can insert your mind. Imagine the space between
spaces--zooming in on the space between dust motes in the air. Go farther
than that if you can and imagine what it would be like to be just one atom of
one of those dust motes--one dust mote is like a baseball stadium to your
baseball of an atom. Then imagine God looking square at that little atom,
giving it the eyeball, and quite calmly and quite lovingly saying: "I am
here." All of God's glory and personality and presence is focused on
that little atom. He knows it by name because he made it, and he still
holds it in existence in the palm of his hand. If you can, imagine him
holding that atom in the palm of his hand and just chillin' with it for a while
because he has nothing more pressing on his mind.
You know why he has nothing
more pressing on his mind? (Don't let go of the image of God holding the
atom. Imagine and read.) It's because God's
mind doesn't get pressed. How, you say? Well, as you may have
noticed as you've got this little picture of God hanging out with a carbon atom
(or whatever you chose--he does seem to like the number 12, so there's my
rationalization of carbon as a choice) . . . there is a major difference
between God's ability to be present to one little carbon atom and yours--you
are actually limited by your
bigness and God is not. Physically speaking, for me to be able
to get on carbon's level, I have to be its size. And I can't be its size,
because I am bound by my physical body. God isn't limited by body, which
is exactly why he is free to be as small as he needs to be. Or it turns
out, as large as he needs to be.
Bring back that picture of
God holding that atom again. Then make a picture like that again, with
another atom. And then do it again and again--and fill up the room you
are sitting in with images of God holding atoms. Then spread out to your
backyard, your city, your state, your country, the planet, and finally your
intergalactic zipcode (or whatever). That is more or less how you want to
imagine God's infinity--God's infinity is the infinity that fills you and fills all of space and
time to the nth and to the innermost degree. Only, when you are
multiplying pictures of God, you aren't making copies of God, you are just
noting his presence, over and over again.
But how do I get around the multiplicity aspect? How can I imagine
that the same Person holds all the carbon atoms from here to the center of the
Milky Way, to the Andromeda Galaxy, and to all those places we don't have a
name for yet? (And to the ones that we may never have
names for).
In order to handle the
multiple times and places aspect, I do a slightly different and more complex
act of the imagination. First, I think of a little sphere. Then I
think of a cube, then I think of an object like a diamond that I can imagine
has more facets on it. One has 12 faces, another 24, 46, however many
faces you like, but make the object more or less symmetrical. Then I keep
adding facets and complexity, until I have a little jewel in my mind that has
as many facets as a golfball has dimples. Phew--it's a light-refracting
machine!
Now, this is the tricky part.
Look at this little jewel with your mind's eyes. Know its form, its
complexity, its beauty. Then try this on for size: every single facet you
see, or if you've got better spatial intelligence than me, every line of
symmetry, represents how many ways you can divide your attention and still give it 100% of your
attention.
I'm sorry, did I say
"you"? I meant God. See, humans can't divide our attention and
give it 100% at the same time. For us, the multiplication and division
doesn't work out. You can never divide by something other than 1 and get
the whole thing you started out with. If I have 100% to give, and I
divide it into two tasks, or three, or five, or 12, then you're looking at
giving 50% or 33% or 20% or 8.3% to give per task. Some of us try to
handle multiple tasks and give each one of them 100%--which either means epic
fail, epic burnout, or epic amounts of self-delusion. (Take your pick, my favorite way to go is door
number two.) But God isn't like that--put as many tasks on his plate as
you like, and he always has 100% to give them. In that way, using the
"big" definition of infinity, you can say that God is
"infinitely present". Remember the little golfball-like
jewel--he has that many facets (and infinitely more) of 100% of himself to give
to you and me, everyone else on the planet, and in the cosmos, not even the
carbon atom escapes his eyes. That's why Jesus said God kept his eye on
even the sparrow . . . and it isn't a big deal for him to keep his eye on every
sparrow.
When I imagine that little
golfball, I think of it as "dimensions of personhood or awareness",
which you may or may not like very much. What do I mean by that? I
mean, life as we know it, seems to be more or less divided up by how aware or
non-aware things are. Non-living matter is the least alert (as far as we
know), then basic single-celled life, then fungus and plants, animals, and
higher animals, and us, and then angels sitting on the highest end of the
creaturely "awareness" chain of being. Let's arbitrarily say
humans are fully aware in three dimensions, and angels are even more fully
aware in five dimensions. In how many dimensions would you say God was
aware? Nine? Ten? One billion? See, that's the problem.
Your brain might have a near-meltdown at the thought of one billion, but
that's as close as we get to imagining the richness of God's personhood. His
life isn't like our life squared or cubed . . . we're talking about life raised
to the infinite power . . . which is exactly why he has so much life, love, and
presence to give away. He has an infinite "amount",
which is exactly why he can give it away infinitely.
All right, that's finally
all I have to say about this matter in as non-technical a way as I could come
up with. I really love the Christian concept of eternity as
expressed by a lot of thinkers of what they call "classical theism",
but I think it's pretty darn challenging. Much of the fun of metaphysics
for me is that metaphysics likes to talk about things that aren't our every-day experience, yet are
completely conceptually coherent and potentially applicable. (Granted,
people argue about that last part). I particularly love Thomas Aquinas
and some of the midevals because they dared to think (contrary to modern-day
popular opinion) that humans weren't the only creatures out there, they weren't
the coolest joes in the neighborhood (angels were), and they weren't the
brightest and best in the creaturely world either (again, angels). They
were also imaginatively engaged with their universe in a way the modern mind
really has trouble with. Part of our trouble with God is that we aren't
trained to imagine him
anymore--how God's ways might be different than our ways. God's not just
better than us morally, he's different in being.
Hope that was at all helpful
. . . if you feel like it, let me know which parts of this actually helped your
imagination and what was unclear. But if you do comment, make sure you
slow down enough to actually imagine what I said and not just think about it. These acts are
different and the former takes deliberate effort.
