Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at Mind Matters AI
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News. This week we're headed back to school for Baylor University Distinguished Professor Robert J. Marks class on multidimensional signal analysis with with a lecture entitled where is Heaven? Enjoy.
[00:00:38] Speaker C: I thought today I would give kind of an introduction to multidimensional signals. And this is just going to be a fun lecture. I think you're going to have mostly fun looking at it. Now it does turn out that as we started out the class with a prayer, and I confess that I was a Christian and Baylor is a Baptist university, so I want to introduce multidimensionals through the lens, if you will, of Christianity and show you some things which I think are kind of surprising. And whether or not you're a Christian, I think you're going to find this fascinating. So I have a bunch of different slides and I'm really into apologetics.
Apologetics. If you're not familiar with this in any faith, you can have Muslim apologetics, Hindu apologetics. But it's the idea of defending your faith with facts. I mean, how do you know what you believe is true other than a spiritual epiphany? It should resonate with reality. And there's a lot of faiths that don't resonate with reality, and I think you kind of got to reject them. So with that, I'm going to go into a little bit of apologetics from the mathematical point of view and also introduce you to the concept of higher dimensions and some of the weird stuff that happens in higher dimensions. And this is MD Speculations. Now, MD stands for a bunch of stuff. It just occurred to me it's a medical doctor, it's muscular dystrophy also, but it's also multi dimension. So this is multidimensional speculations. And one of the places that we'll touch is where is heaven? Do you ever think about that? I think that most, most faiths believe that there is a heaven. And so where is it? You know, where is it? We'll explore that from a dimensional thing. And what I'm giving you is, is kind of my interpretation.
So I am not a theologian by training by, but I like this stuff and what I present to you might be good, it might be bad. That's up for you to decide. But hopefully it introduces you to some interesting things. So we're actually going to get later on into the idea is, where is heaven? And it also addresses some other interesting aspects that we'll see. Now, it turns out that when we look at life, it's through a glass, darkly, if you will.
If you're a fan of Shakespeare, there is a great line in Shakespeare where Hamlet is talking to his friend Horatio and saying, you know, there's lots of weird stuff out there, Horatio, that we don't understand and we'll never understand.
And the actual quote is shown on the bottom of the screen here. There are many more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. So there are things that we will never know.
And in fact, it's also echoed in First Corinthians. It says, now we see only reflection in a distorted mirror.
Then we shall see face to face. So they're talking about the afterlife right now. We just see things through all of this muck.
Now, I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. Now, Plato addressed this in something called Plato's Cave.
And he was discussing our perception of reality.
And our perception of reality he equated to these prisoners that were looking at these shadows on the wall of a cave, and that was their perception of reality. And what these shadows were, were the result of these. Whatever was behind them. And behind reality here was a fire, and they were only able to look at the shadows. And so clearly there's lots of information which is hidden.
And I think that that's a very, very good description.
Now, there's also a part in Plato's cave where this one guy, he kind of escapes. This one prisoner, he escapes. He goes out and experiences the world.
And it reminds me of a Emo Phillips joke. Excuse me. Emo Phillips is my favorite comedian. He said that.
He said one day as a child, he noticed that the cellar door was open just a crack.
And my parents told me never to go and open the cellar door. Don't open the cellar door.
But I was so curious, and I went and I pushed open the cellar door, and I stepped through the cellar door.
And I found wonderful things, things great to behold, things I'd never seen before, like trees and grass and clouds.
Okay? If you don't get the joke, you have to think about it. I think it's hilarious.
So anyway, this guy climbed up the stairs and he went out and he perceived reality as it is. And then he came back in and he tried to explain it to These people. And I think that explaining things to people that are, that, that have never experienced before is a very difficult thing. In fact, we read incidents about people with near death experiences.
Hopefully you're familiar with near death experiences. They came back and they, they actually say, I experience things which I have no language to communicate. They were so incredible.
I'm sorry, I just don't have the ability to explain what I saw.
And These are the NDEs in the bottom left here, the near death experiences. So they experience stuff above and beyond what they experienced in their finite earthly body. Here's an example.
Suppose you had the job of explaining to somebody sight.
Now you see, but this person has been blind since they have been born. And you want to replicate your idea of sight in this person and you would like to explain to them what seeing was like.
That'd be rough, right? Because they don't have the senses to experience.
They don't have the experiences to see things. And so you could, you know, given things to feel. And I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Helen Keller and how she was deaf and dumb since birth, but was able to finally break through.
But she never saw, but she did. She was able to interface with the world in other ways, but she would never understand sight.
There is a great Short story by H.G. wells. How many have heard of H.G. wells, one of the great science fiction writers.
He was, he wrote like War of the Worlds and a bunch of other stuff. He wrote the country of the Blind. And it talked about this guy that fell in this valley where Everybody for like 20 generations had been blind. And he went in and he started to explain to him what seeing was like. And it's a great short story because it shows the resistance that these people have.
They, they said, no, you know, we don't believe, ah, oh, you're experiencing this. You must be, you must be the devil. They didn't understand it and they, they ended up ostracizing. And I won't give away the ending of the short story. It's really, it's really a fascinating short story. Very readable too. It's available on audio. I listened to it on audio. And the way it ends up is, is very sad. But imagine him again, this guy falling in the country of the blind, trying to explain what seeing was like to other people.
There's something else, and this is this idea of dimensions. We use dimensions all the time.
Anytime you do a vector, a long thin vector, say of 20 elements, that's a coordinate in a 20 dimensional space, right. But you really don't think about the physical spaces as much.
And one of the books that kind of changed my life because I read it in college that let me believe, wow, there could be a God. Because I looked around and I said, where's God? Where is heaven? You know, I don't know where it's at, but this was a book, it was called Flatland.
And I don't know if any of you have read Flatland, but it was, it was published In, I believe 18, 1884, by a guy named Edwin Abbott. He's shown here on the right. And it was Flatland, a romance of many dimensions. And it was written by, the actual author was a square. Now he put his own name, Edwin A. Abbott, there, but the actual author was a square. And it was about the story of a square that lived in Flatland.
Now if we think about dimensions, this is what we get. We get one dimension. Why do we call it one dimension? Because we're living in one dimension. And in order to get from any point to another point, you have to share one number. So it's one dimension, you have two dimensions. Two dimensions, you have to give it two coordinates in order to get to a point from any starting point, you have to figure out what the X is and you have to figure out what the Y is. So that's the reason it's two dimensions, because you need two numbers. We also have three dimensions. So most of like Google's Google Maps and stuff is two dimensions. But if you're going to go to the Empire State Building or something, you need three dimensions. You need the X, you need the Y and you need the Z. You need to know how many floors you go up, up. So that's three dimensions.
And then there is the fourth dimension, which is a curious dimension and that's the dimension of time. And we'll talk about that just in a minute.
So here's Edwin Abbott's Flatland.
It was written from the perspective of a square. So this square lives in a two dimensional world and he is totally in a two dimensional world. And that's his entire universe.
He lives on the tabletop. There's no, there's no third dimension.
And he goes and he looks at life in one dimension because there's a one dimensional life form in his land. And he looks at it and these, he notices that these little line segments that are alive on this line land don't know anything about the second dimension. They only knew this one dimension. That's the only thing that they could comprehend. And so he studied that for a while and then he looked to Point Land. Now, Point Land is kind of cool. I know some people like that. Anything that happened in Point Land, that's zero dimensions, right? Anything that happened in Point Land, the point said, wow, that was so cool. Okay, so if it heard a voice or something like that, they said, that was me. That was incredible. So he studied Point Land for a while.
So he recognized that Line Land was kind of contained in the two dimensional plane. So why could not we have a third dimension?
So what he did is he said, I'm going to form a theory, and this is called the Theory of Up.
So he was on a plane and he formed the Theory of Up. And this Theory of Up was.
And they said, well, point to Up.
And he couldn't do it because up was outside of his universe. He was unable to do it.
In fact, the best he could do was he could point maybe north, if you will. That's the best he could do.
And indeed, today, when we talk about heaven, where do we point?
We point up, right? Even though we're in three dimensions. So he just had to point north because that was, that was the only thing he could do. Whereas we, on the other hand, point up because that's the best we can do. We can't imagine four spatial dimensions.
And I thought that that was intriguing.
Well, all this time there was a three dimensional creature, and this three dimensional creature was watching and hovering above the two dimensions, and he was watching all of this.
And the creature said, wow, you know, this guy is really, really smart.
So he appeared in the universe of a square because he became a little circle, then a big circle, and he disappeared. And he says, you know, you're right, I've been listening to your lectures. There is an Up. There is a Theory of up, and I want to show it to you. So he went down and he, before he went down, he says, you know what? He says, I can see inside you.
I can see what you had for lunch.
Because the people in Flatland could only see their surface, but the sphere could see inside the person and what they had for lunch.
And also houses in, in Flatland were just kind of different geometrical shapes in two dimensions. And there was a little doorway, there was a little open area that somebody could come in. But he said, I can see inside your houses too.
And he could see everything in this two dimensions. So what he did is he went and he touched the middle of a square and he took him on a trip and the square was Just amazed. He said, wow, look at that. I can see all my friends, I can see inside them, I can see what they had for lunch. All these houses. I can see inside these two dimensional houses. That is pretty astonishing. And this a square. Said I, man, I, I think this is the best thing in the world. This is really cool. And then he asked the sphere something the sphere couldn't answer. He says, okay, we have, we have two dimensions, we have three dimensions.
Can you show me the fourth dimension? I want to see the fourth dimension. And you know what the sphere's response was?
He says, it would be kind of like ours. He said, there is no fourth dimension. There is no fourth dimension.
Of course, what the sphere was doing was since he was in a three dimensional world, that's all he could experience. And he couldn't, he couldn't experience the four dimensional, fourth dimensional world. Now the idea of dimensions has come about in a number of different ways. For example, we talked about H.G. wells.
He wrote the Invisible Man. If you've ever heard about the Invisible man, he was the one that wrote it. He says, I have found a general principle of formula, a geometric expression involving four dimensions. And that's how he became invisible.
And just like in three dimensions, this is kind of weird. In three dimensions you could have a number of overlapping planes, right? Not overlapping, but parallel planes. Each one of these planes could be a different flatland.
In four dimensions, you can have a number of three dimensional spaces side by side and have an idea of a parallel universe. And there's some people that talk about parallel universes in, for example, string theory, which we'll get into in a minute. However, there's absolutely zero evidence for other dimensions. So I don't know if you watched the original movie Superman, but one of the things they had was on Krypton they had this jail called the Phantom Zone.
And this Phantom Zone took things and took three dimensional people and put them in a two dimensional prison in the fan. In the Phantom Zone. There used to be a series on television. I don't know how many have heard of this, the Twilight Zone. It was, it was a great sci fi. And there was one about these parents that woke up to hear their girls screaming. And it turns out that she was, she was going, help Daddy, help Daddy. It was an episode called Little Girl Lost. And they called up a physicist and the physicist says, oh my gosh, she's fallen into the fourth dimension. And this is kind of a fun little clip from that series.
[00:16:24] Speaker D: You're traveling through another dimension,
[00:16:26] Speaker E: probably the fourth Dimension.
It just wouldn't be laid out like our world. Chris.
[00:16:33] Speaker C: Okay, So I don't know. I thought that was funny. And they had to go in. They had to rescue her out of the fourth dimension.
So that's, that's, that's all well and good. Why do we have three dimensions? Well, it turns out if you talk to the cosmologists, the theoretical cosmologists, there's no reason that when the universe was created, we had to have three dimensions. We could have had two dimensions or eight dimensions or whatever.
It doesn't. It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't matter. But what's interesting is that where did our dimensions come from?
If you believe in the Big Bang and you read Stephen Hawking's book, Stephen Hawking, of course, was agnostic. Agnostic to atheist.
You will find out that time and space were both created at the Big Bang. So before the Big Bang, there was no concept of time, there was no concept of space.
It was literally created at the time. So you think about the Big Bang. I don't know what you think of. I think of a. It was a big space. And then.
And then. No, you can't have a big space. So you have to get rid of space in your mind when you think about the Big Bang. So can you get rid of space in your mind? Okay, no space in the mind. So you go, okay, the Big Bang. There was. There was no. There was no space. Then all of a sudden. No, you can't talk about all of a sudden either, because what does all of a sudden mean?
It means there's the flow of time. In order to have all of a sudden, you have to have the flow of time. So that didn't exist. So it was without time.
And that is beyond my comprehension. I cannot comprehend things without time and space. But the physicists say that that is indeed what happened and that before the Big Bang, there was no time, there was no space.
And in fact, this is substantiated in, in the Bible, if you're interested in the sort of things. I mean, there's a bunch of places in the Bible, Genesis, the whole Bible starts in the beginning. What was the beginning?
Second Timothy says, grace was given to us in Christ before the beginning of time.
And I've asked a friend who knows the original language, and I said, can you translate that for me? And he says, yeah, let's see. It means before the beginning of time. So it was a literal translation. Titus talks about before the beginning of time, and Jude talks about before all time.
And therefore we do see the idea of time starting at some point, not only in the Big Bang.
Now, it does turn out that time is a dimension also.
In fact, if it's a dimension, how long is a second? Well, a second turns out to be 186,000 miles.
Turns out that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. And if you multiply that by one second, you get that the one second is 186,000 miles.
This is talked about very nicely in a book by William Lane Craig about time and eternity.
And it was very influential to me.
So time is a dimension. Let's talk about time as a dimension.
We've talked already about one dimensional. You need one number. You need two numbers in two dimensions. You need three numbers at three dimensions.
Well, not only if you go to the Empire State Building, do you need to know the X, Y, and you have to know the floor, the Z dimension. You also have to know what time to get there, right? Do you get there at 2, 3, 4 or 5? So if you actually make an appointment, you need to know four numbers. And those four numbers constitute the fourth dimension, in fact.
And maybe we'll go into this, I think it's fascinating, but as you know, time only goes in one direction. You can't go backwards in time, where in space you can go backwards and forwards. And this actually makes a big difference.
In circuits, for example, we have causality, which requires the flow of time. But if you have a spatial system like an optical computer, where things are operating in space, you don't have to worry about causality.
Very, very fascinating stuff. Now, is there anything in physics about this other than other than four dimensions? Four dimensions you've probably heard of. Well, it turns out there is something called string theory. And string theory, by the way, is getting more and more discredited. I follow the remarks of Roger Penrose. He was a Nobel Laureate in physics who helped establish the existence of black holes. He says that. Nah. He says that a string theory is something which is never going to be proven. To prove string theory, you have these little vibrating strings that are down on the order of a Planck length.
And a Planck length is the smallest interval you can generate that physics can look at. Why is that? Because it turns out, if you think about it, if you're trying to image something, if you're trying to image something, you have to have a wavelength, you have to have a frequency, which is on the order of what you're trying to image, right? So if you have something small, you have to have a Lot of wiggles. If you have something big, you can actually use a frequency which is very low. So if you're going to image something very, very small on the order of a plank length, then you're going to have to have something which wiggles a lot, right? You're going to have to have an incredibly high frequency. Well, it does turn out physics says that as the frequency increases, so does the energy.
And there will be a point where the energy, in accordance to physics that's understood by people smarter than me, that the frequency eventually is going to get to the point where it needs an energy that forms a small black hole.
So if you try to get down to a Planck length and you try to image that really, really high frequency, then you got a problem because you're going to form a itty bitty black hole. So we can't image down to a Planck length, and it's currently considered the smallest interval that is possible.
I wrote an article which is very interesting. It was called Measuring Length in Beard Seconds. We all know what a light year is, right? It's how long light travels in a year.
And then there a beard. There's a beard second. A beard second is how long a beard grows in a second. Okay. That's also a unit of length, right? And it turns out to be a few nanometers, which is really incredible because the modern electronics is down at the level of nanometers. That is, if you looked at a growing beard next to a modern electronics, here would be the modern electronics, and the beard would be growing like this.
Really astonishing.
So here's something interesting that'll blow your mind. It blew my mind. There are more Planck lengths in a beard second than there are beard seconds in a light year. Let me say that again. There are more plank lengths in a beard second than there are beard seconds in a light year.
And if you were to take the diameter of a proton, assuming it was a particle, if you take the diameter of a proton and consider that. And now we're going to take a Planck length and we're going to scale it up. We're going to stretch it so that the Planck length is on the order of an inch. It turns out that the diameter of the proton is several light years.
So Planck lengths are really, really small, aren't they? So anyway, the people that do this idea of string theory and why are they trying to do string theory? They're trying to do string theory in order to form a theory of everything or a toe.
This is my granddaughter Merrily, and my kids don't let me babysit their kids very much because I babysitter one time and we spent time drawing pictures on her toes. So this is pictures on her toes. So this is the, this is the theory of everything.
And what they're trying to do is they're trying to put all of the theories of forces together in one big theory. And they haven't been able to do that yet. And string theory isn't going to happen. But anyway, the proponents of string theory, they talk about things such as 11 or 26 dimensions. And these dimensions are compactified. What do we mean by compactified? We look around, you know, there's three dimensions, there's not 11 dimensions, they're not 26 dimensions. But they say down at the string level they're compactified. What do we mean, compactified? Well, let's talk about compactifying a two dimensional sheet of paper into one dimension.
To do that, what you do is you compactify the two dimensional space by curling it up into a tube, which you can see here. And if you look far enough away, that looks like one dimension, doesn't it?
So they're compactified in that way. At least that's the way they wave their hands and get rid of the idea that we live in a three dimensional universe.
As I mentioned, we have parallel universes just like in, or we could have, at least in theory, parallel universes just like in Flatland. We could have an arbitrary large number of flatlands next to each other in a three dimensional world. And if we had a four dimensional world, we could, we could have a number of parallel universes in three dimensions stacked on each other.
So this is me and my wife illustrating parallel universes. I love that picture.
And we're going to talk about multi dimensional signal analysis in the book as we, as we get to it. And we are going to, we're actually going to be able, I'm going to show you how to play three dimensional tic tac toe in two dimensions and also four dimensional tic tac toe in 12 dimensions.
And so we can actually think about these higher, higher level things.
Now one of the reasons that we look at these, at these higher dimensions, or one of the insights that we can get from these higher dimensions is we can look at properties that happen in lower dimensions and we can get an idea of what happens in these higher dimensions. But sometimes our intuition leaves us. Let me give you an example. If you take a circle and you put it on a square, what's the distance between the center of the circle? Assume it's unit radius. Okay. What's the distance between the center of the circle and the edge of the circle? It's one unit. Right.
What's the distance between the center of the circle to the edge of the square? It's root two. Correct. Square root of two. What about in three dimensions? We have a sphere. So we have a sphere inside a box.
Unit sphere. What's the distance between the center of the sphere and the, the edge of the sphere? It's one unit. Right.
What's the distance between the center of the center of the sphere to the edge of the box? Now it's root three.
So it's the square root of whatever dimensions there are.
So here's something which is fascinating and I actually had a meeting earlier today where we talked about this as to whether you use a square or a sphere. And it turns out in higher dimensions you got to be careful. Say we had 10,000 dimensions, then 10,000 dimensions. If we had a unit, unit sphere in 10,000 dimensions, whatever that is, the distance between the midpoint and the surface of the sphere would be one.
What would be the distance between the center of the sphere to a, a vertex of the sphere, a corner of the sphere, if you will, it would be 100 units.
So you would take one step and you would be at the edge of the sphere. But in order to get to a corner of that 10 dimensional, 10,000 dimensional sphere, you would have to take a hundred steps. So weird things happen in higher dimensions that you have to be careful about.
Nevertheless, there's a lot of stuff that we can generalize, but we have to be careful in that generalization, if you will. As I mentioned, Stephen Hawking wrote this great book, A Brief History of Time. That's where I first learned that time and space were created at the Big Bang. He also wrote the idea that it was very fortuitous that in our creation that we had three dimensions, because there's lots of advantages to having three dimensions. And he gave the following example. He said, suppose that we had a, a two dimensional universe.
We didn't luck out, we had a two dimensional universe. He said, you couldn't have a dog in Flatland.
Why couldn't you have a dog in Flatland? Now this is Stephen Hawking's explanation. You can poke holes in it, and we will in a second.
But if you, if you have an organism, it has to eat and it has to expel what it eats after it uses the good part of the food.
So if we only had a two dimensional dog, then how would it eat and expel. Well, if it, if it was separated, you'd have to separate, you'd have to have the dog into two pieces.
Whereas in three dimensions you can run a tube through the three dimensions. You can't do that in two dimensions.
So that's Stephen Hawking's explanation of why we couldn't have a two dimensional dog.
I think we could. You know how we could, we could have it held together by magnets or something.
That's my interpretation.
So let's look about some of the implications of these higher dimensions and what we can learn about this.
We have Flatland on the left. Here we have Plato, he's the old guy and Aristotle is the younger guy. And so here's a question. Socrates mentored Plato.
Plato mentored Aristotle. Who did Aristotle mentor?
Alexander the Great.
That's an interesting piece of trivia. So anyway, here we have Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right. Plato being the old guy and Aristotle being the younger of the guy.
Now you remember they said which way is up?
So that's what we talked about in Flatland, that we had this idea of up and the best he could do was point north. I think again we do this when we talk about heaven.
Where is heaven? It's, it's our four dimensional equivalent of up. You know, it's, it's this. So we point up. Just like in Flatland they pointed north.
So here's some interesting implications about higher dimensions. If you were in Flatland and you were a hand, and these are all hands and you can see that the thumb is always on the left of the palm, right?
Now if you were restricted to Flatland, to always have your thumb on the left, it doesn't matter how you traveled around in Flatland, your thumb would still be on the left. You agree with that?
It doesn't matter what happened.
So if you are a righty, you would always be a righty. It doesn't matter. However, if you were at access to a third dimension, what you could do is you could take that one dimensional hand and you could flip it over and make a left hand, couldn't you?
So that's interesting. So you can go from left handed to right handed.
The implications of this are incredible. In sports, if we had access to the fourth dimension and could play around with it, which we don't.
But here's an application to baseball.
You have a baseball player that's a left handed batter and he's facing a picture and it'd be more advantageous if he was right handed. Well, if we had access to the fourth dimension, we could literally place him into the fourth dimension, bring him back as a right hander, just like we could flip around the hand. We could do this with pitchers too. We can make a left handed pitcher and a right handed pitcher if we flip them around in four dimensions. Of course there's a problem because if we did this, it could be that once he was flipped, he got confused and when he hit the ball, he'd run to third base instead of first base because that would be his new area of reference.
So that's okay. That's kind of interesting. Here's another one is breaking chains. Now this isn't really a chain, it's a puzzle piece. But you'll notice that I can't separate these puzzle pieces in two dimensions, can I?
But fortunately, when we're given jigsaw puzzles that we have the ability of separating these. How do we do that?
We take one of the puzzle pieces, we bring it up to the third dimension and we can remove it. Right. So we can actually take these pieces and we can separate them if we add a third dimension. Because we could lift them off of the plane and put them anywhere we wanted to, but in two dimensions. If we were restuck with two dimensions, these puzzle pieces would always go together.
Now this is true. This is true for any chains.
If we think about, about two dimensions. What about three dimensions? Suppose that we had a, a chain of this sort.
If we had a fourth dimension, we could literally take that chain and just like in two dimensions, we could separate it. Now that's pretty, pretty nice.
So there's an interesting piece in the Bible and I'll read this. It says in Acts, the night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers bound with two chains. And Cent stood guard at the entrance.
Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone on the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. He says, get up, he said, and the chains fell off Peter's wrists.
Now could it been that this miracle happened by transporting Peter's chains into a fourth dimension and breaking them? Yes, that's certainly possible.
But I think this is kind of weak apologetics. So could this be the explanation of the miracle? Yes, you could break those three dimensional chains in dimension.
Was it, was this the explanation of the miracle in the Bible? Maybe, probably not. But it is interesting that if you did have chains in three dimensions, if you had access to the fourth dimension, you could literally separate the chains. Here's another one. They had houses and places in Flatland that were prisons. Suppose this guy is sentenced to prison and he's placed in this little box and there's a little door that opens, but it's locked from the outside.
And so he's surrounded by four walls and he can't do anything. So there's nothing he could do in two dimensions to escape from this two dimensional space.
Could he, if he had access to the, to the third dimension, escape?
And the answer of course is yes, you could go and pick him up and take him outside and he would be outside. So you could indeed free him from prison if you had access to a third dimension.
There's something similar which happens in scripture.
In John 20, it says a week later his disciples were in the house. This was after Christ's resurrection, and Thomas was with them. Through. The doors were locked. Jesus came through, though the doors were locked. So they were in a locked room. Just like this other guy. Jesus came and stood among them and said, peace be with you. Now, if Jesus had access to the fourth dimension, could he walk through walls?
And the answer is absolutely just like the guy in the two dimension could walk through the two dimensional walls, if one had access to the fourth dimension, one could literally walk through walls. So these are some of the generalizations that we can use when we think about things in two dimensions, the higher dimensions.
It's really fascinating. But again, could this be the explanation of the miracle? Yeah, it could be.
Is it the explanation of the miracle? Maybe. I, you know, I, I don't know. I think it's a fascinating, fascinating speculation.
So with all of these things for, for the Christian God, there was a great scholar, Anselm, and he said he had an axiom where he proved the existence of God. And he says God is greater than anything we can imagine.
And that's true. So does God exist in higher dimensions? Does he exist in the fifth dimension, the 20th dimension, the infinite dimension? Well, that's something we can imagine. So God is greater than that. Okay, so it's a lot better than that. So the last thing I want to talk about in a dimensional context is the idea of predestination versus free will. This is something which is been argued in circles for a long time. Are we predestined to do what we're supposed to do or do we have the exercise of free will? There's two sides to this, two extreme size. There's the Arminian, who when a hole is dug, he said, Zeke created that hole. That's an act of free will. Zeke created that hole after free will. And then there's the Calvinist who is the predestination. He said, no, the hole was already there. Zeke just took the dirt out.
The hole was predestined.
And then the joke is, Zeke said, when do I get paid?
He really didn't care about the philosophy. But I think the idea of free will versus predestination is wonderfully illustrated by this example.
Did he create the hole or was the hole already there and he just took the dirt out?
Now, there's a great physicist that worked at Cambridge. He was in the same university as, as Stephen Hawking, and he was a theoretical physicist. He was the John Pokinghorn. And he got tired of being a professor and he decided, well, I'm going to go out and I'm going to go to seminary and become a Anglican priest. And so indeed that's what he did. And he was a good physicist. The queen was going to knight him. But it turns out if you're knighted in England, then you have to carry a sword.
That was one of the prerequisites. Or you have to be willing to carry a sword. And because Pokinghorn was a priest, he said, I can't do that. So he turned down knighthood from the queen.
So here's a conundrum that we have.
Do you have free will to choose where you will be in a month or maybe even tomorrow? Do you have free will to. Yeah, I think you do. Right. And then the other question is, does God know where you will be one month from now? And the answer is yes, I think, for both cases.
So it looks like in the answering of these, of these cases, and again, I might be rubbing some Calvinist or Armenians the wrong way, but I think that this illustrates both the idea of predestination versus free will.
So Pokinghorn, when he came back, he says paradoxes are often resolved at a higher level. And I think predestination and free will is an example of that. Now, he pointed out the paradox of particles in the early 20th century. Was it a particle? Was it a wave? Was it a particle? Was it a wave? Well, it turned out to be both of them. So that turned that, that, that contradiction turned out to be resolved at a higher level.
Yes, Depending on the way that you look at it, light is a particle, it's a photon, it's also a wave. And you can do diffraction things. It depends on the way that you measured it.
So remember, through a, Through a dark glassly, Through a dark glass, through a glass darkly. We've talked about this, we've talked about Plato's cave and this is what we're doing. And it's really wonderful if we get a glimpse into deeper truths by analyzing the pictures that we see on the, on the wall of the cave a little bit more.
So one of the greatest scientists that ever lived was Galileo.
And I've always wondered about this. Galileo's rule was begin by establishing, not assuming the perspective of the documentary.
So it always I now this is my interpretation. If you have a different interpretation, that's fine. So Genesis starts out in the beginning. God created heavens and the Earth. Now the Earth was formless, empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. That was, that was good. And so the, well, the point is, is that the Genesis is written from the perspective of an observer on the Earth.
So when it says, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, how can you have light before everything else?
And the answer is, if you look at the surface of the Earth and look at the history of the Earth, it turns out that in the early stages of the Earth there was such a dark cloud between us and the and space that all of the light was blocked out. But this began to thin and all of a sudden there was light. I like that explanation. You don't have to like it.
But anyway, God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness. Now notice that you have to have the separation of the light from the darkness, even if you're a young Earth creationist and say that it had to happen in a 24 hour period, because you had to have a 24 hour period. And this only happens when the light is separated from the day. So again, from the perspective of an observer on the Earth, this makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of people that say, like, whoa, Christ was the light. I think that's stretching it. But what do I know from an observer on the Earth? Light penetrating the dark shroud for the first time. And again, if morning and evening are taking literally, the observer is on the surface of the Earth.
So then we go through the different days of creation and the different days of creation. Basic. Basically follow what the people in look at geology, geology, geology and the history of the Earth. This is what they believe. You know, the water was separated from the water. There was the appearance of land, vegetation. And then God put the fish in the water and the birds in the air. And God makes animals, man and woman. And then on the seventh day, he rested so the point, the entire point of this is making sure that we know when we talk about something we need to know. Perspective, like Galileo said, remember? Perspective. Perspective help us make sense of the Genesis creation. And it also helps us make sense of the predestination free will paradox.
Now we talked about God creating the Big bang if you will. Now if he created time and space, that means that he existed outside of time and space.
So God exists outside of time and space.
What does that mean? I don't know. That's right on the edge of my mind being blown. I don't know what it means to exist outside of time and space. But clearly if he created them, he has to be outside of time and space.
So here we have the Big Bang theory again.
And if God created time and is therefore exists outside of time, free will assumes an unknown future and thus the flow of time. But God doesn't have the flow of time. He can look down the entire timeline. He can see into the past, the future and et cetera. So again, from the idea of perspective, from the perspective of God, there is no free will. He can look into the past or the future. And from the perspective of God, everything is predestined.
Now I'm going to get into something which is going to sound like a contradiction. It isn't. There's lots of things for example in quantum mechanics that seem like a contradiction.
But I think this is the only conclusion that we come from.
Now. God exists outside of time and space. We don't. We on the other hand are constrained to flow with time. And we make decisions using our own free will. But God who can see into the future knows what these decisions of are.
So this existence, this idea of free will from our perspective is something we do. Now here's the paradox. We are predestined. We do have free will. But God knows what we're going to do. So that's the, that's the resolution to the paradox at a higher level, which if you will, is a little bit mind blowing.
So predestination is true again Galileo, from perspective, from the perspective of God, predestination is true and free will is true from our perspective.
But no matter what I say, the debate's always going to continue. We have some staunch Calvinist at Baylor and we have some staunch Armenians at Baylor. Also the belief in free will. But I believe it's the argument over nothing that both are true. It depends on the perspective we get back to Anlem. God is greater than anything we could imagine existing out time and space. For example, the existence in 5 million an infinite number of dimensions. No God is greater than that. It's really astonishing.
And so this is looking through a glass darkly. We can only, we can only glimpse the reality of all the truths that exist. It's like Hamlet said, there are things beyond your philosophy is Horatio that you can't understand. And there's things beyond our philosophy that we can't understand.
So does God exist outside of time and space? Yes, but he's even greater than that.
So again, getting to Anselm's ontological God describes himself in Exodus 3. And I think this is probably the best explanation that you can have from the God that we've been talking about. He says I am.
And enough said. I mean that's, it's basically the best you can say because if you try to start defining God you're not going to have a total definition because we can't comprehend those sort of things.
So a higher dimensional entity is something which we, which might exist. So when we talk about heaven, it isn't up, but it's maybe, maybe at a higher dimension. I don't know. It sure sounds reasonable to me. But again, I'm not a theologian and I haven't debated this with anybody.
This also explains why God can be infinitely close without a physical appearance.
Just like that three dimensional object had become arbitrarily close to that plane, right? Without, without anybody in the plane knowing it. God can be infinitely close to us without actually intersecting our three dimensional space. And that's pretty cool. And the idea of time explains why he can listen to all of our prayers, for example, because he isn't constrained by time, he doesn't flow with time, is able to intersect our universe at will. Christians believe that he did intersect our universe with the life of Christ. He's able to see inside of you.
He talks about the number of hairs on your head being knowledge. But if we talk about this dimensional thing, remember this three dimensional object could see inside of all of the people in Flatland and it exists outside of time, which is really kind of interesting. So we looked at the explanation of certain miracles such as walking through walls, change dropping and ascension.
And that concludes my lecture and my introduction to higher dimensions and hopefully kind of shows you that we can look at things which happen in lower dimensions and generalize them to things which happen in higher dimensions. Okay, so that's a gentle explanation. We'll get into the mathematics of higher dimensions later and it's just fascinating.
And we're going to deal primarily with the higher dimensions in a mathematical framework. But what we've talked about here is the idea of higher dimensions in a physical world.
And as you can see, the idea of higher dimensions in a physical world get really, really weird.
So thank you for listening.
[00:48:07] Speaker F: This has been Mind Matters News with your host Robert J. Marks explained. Explore more at MindMatters AI.
That's MindMatters AI.
Mind Matters News is directed and edited by Austin Egbert. The opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the speakers. Mind Matters News is produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute.
