Recently in the comments section of one of the articles here, a reader named World Questioner asked:
Why did God take 15 billion years to create the physical world? Couldn’t he have done it in just six days? What is a good reason for God to have all species descended from a common single-celled ancestor? Couldn’t he make all species distinct and create each creature to reproduce after its kind? Why did God decide humans should be descended from apes? Couldn’t the first humans have just been created separately, distinct from all animals?
You can see the comment here, and my original response here. This article is an edited and expanded version of my original reply.
Hi World Questioner,
All these questions zero in on a single aspect of how God creates things:
God creates things, not instantaneously, but by using step-by-step processes. Nothing just pops into existence. Everything develops over time.
Why?
It’s a very good question. I’m still thinking about it.
One answer is that God is working with material reality, which is pliable, but also resistant to change. Compared to divine reality, which operates outside of time altogether, and is present in all time and space simultaneously, and compared to spiritual reality, which also has no time and space as we know it, but which does have distance and nearness and a sequence of events, material reality exists within space and time. In material reality, things must unfold over spatial distances and on temporal time scales. This means that doing things instantaneously is contrary to the very nature of physical reality.
Why did God create material reality in this way?
The created universe must be different from God
One answer is that for anything to be not-God, and therefore able to have a relationship with God, it must have distinct differences from God. And yet, it must still express something of God’s nature so that there are commonalities between God and Creation that make a real relationship possible.
If we were nothing at all like God, if God were a totally alien being, how could we have any understanding of God? How could we come to love God? How could we have a relationship with God, and God with us, if we couldn’t comprehend God at all? If we could form no concept of God, God would mean nothing to us. And we can’t love nothing.
But we can love God if we are created in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis 1:26–27 says. We can love God if God is sort of like us, only far greater.
We can’t really love someone that we have nothing at all in common with, can we? Even people from very different nations and cultures still share common human thoughts, feelings, and experiences that make a relationship between them possible. But it is the differences that make the relationship real—and make it interesting and even exciting!
The way God accomplished this similarity and difference was to spin out Creation from God’s own substance so that it expresses God’s nature, but to impose limits on created reality, both spiritual and material. This means that Creation expresses the character of God, but it is also different from God. God is infinite. God has no limits. Created reality does have limits. That makes it, and us, different from God.
God put fewer limits on spiritual reality, and greater limits on material reality. One of the limits of material reality is that things must develop and unfold over time, within space. This means that things in the material universe must happen via processes, not instantaneously.
Material reality both responds and resists
Another answer is that material reality, and the material world, must provide the opportunity for sentient, spiritually aware beings (us) not to choose a loving relationship with God.
If we were not free to reject the relationship God wants to have with us, we would not be human, and the relationship wouldn’t be real. It would just be something God programmed into us, making it meaningless. How much does a friendship mean if both people are simply programmed to have that friendship? That’s just an algorithm, not a real human relationship.
Designing the physical level of reality to have the ability not to do what God wants it to do means designing it with a certain amount of resistance to divine and spiritual influences. It means making things somewhat—or even very—inefficient, so that the material world doesn’t always do what God and the angels want it to do. It means that God and the angels must labor to get physical reality to do what they want it to do. This is the meaning of the six days of Creation, and of the six days of labor, culminating in the seventh day of rest. There is real work involved in producing the finished product: angelic human beings who will live forever in heaven.
Pan out to the grand scale of the physical universe, and an answer to your question emerges: The material universe is naturally resistant to what flows in from God and spirit. It takes a long time for material reality to respond. It took over nine billion years for the universe to get to the point where it produced Earth—a planet capable of supporting life. It took another half a billion years or so before Earth began hosting life. It took another three or four billion years before that life developed to the level of organization and complexity required to host a sentient, spiritually aware mind: ours.
God does not work by forcing things, and people, to do what God wants them to do. God works by bending and influencing things, and people, to do what God wants them to do. This means that particular people, and particular parts of creation, can opt out of God’s plan. Not every planet is capable of hosting life. Even fewer planets are capable of hosting complex, sentient life. It’s quite possible that even some planets that could host life don’t host life. No one is forcing them to. God makes it possible. But the material universe must say “yes,” or nothing will happen.
Mind you, I’m not speaking literally here. I don’t believe, as some do, that the material universe is conscious. But it does operate by its own rules, and there is a certain element of randomness built right into those rules. Sometimes that randomness may figuratively say “yes,” and sometimes it may say “no” to what God and the angels are working to achieve here in the material universe.
In short, God works by coaxing and cajoling Creation to move toward hosting human beings who can love God, love one another, and live forever in heaven. And just as it takes us the ol’ threescore and ten years of emotional and spiritual growth to become that sort of person, so on a grander scale it takes billions of years for the universe to become the kind of universe in which we soft, delicate human beings can live . . . at least, on a few rare and precious specks in the vast voids and violence of the physical universe.
Time means nothing to God
Why does it take so long? About 13.8 billion years, by current estimates of the age of the universe.
Keep in mind that for God, time is meaningless. God is present in all of time all at once. For God, it doesn’t matter if it takes six days or 13.8 billion years or 13.8 trillion trillion years. All time scales are the same for God, because God is present in all of them simultaneously, from a realm of being that is outside of time and space. God sees and interacts with all time and space at once, no matter what their scale. As the Psalm says poetically of God:
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:4)
God has all the time in the world to make us. God is in no hurry. And God created a material universe in which things unfold over time—long periods of time.
Creation by trial-and-error
This also means that what does develop is very robust and resistant to forces that would tear it down.
Evolution is a process of trial-and-error that unfolds over hundreds of millions of years, and longer. What emerges, under the influence of divine and spiritual forces gradually coaxing evolution in a human direction, is organisms wonderfully adapted to survive in the conditions that this earth throws at them, and able to persist and thrive in those conditions.
On a different planet, under different conditions, the organisms, including the ultimate human organisms if there are sufficient time periods and conditions for them to develop, will persist and thrive in those conditions.
As for the specific evolutionary path it took to get from our single-celled ancestors to us, I’m hardly qualified to talk about that. I’m a theologian, not an evolutionary biologist. But once again, the development of complex, rational, spiritually aware beings under material-universe conditions is a long, complex task that had to go step-by-step from the primeval amoeba all the way to the human body and the mind it contains. Apes just happen to be one of many steps along the way. Apes have a lot of what we have, but they’re not quite there yet. It took several more evolutionary steps to get to us.
An infinite God means a vast universe
One more thing:
Creating a universe this vast, having such huge time scales, gives us time- and space-bound humans some sense of the greatness of God.
If the universe were a small little thing—only about the size of earth’s orbit around the sun, as we once thought—we might admire God, but we wouldn’t necessarily be in awe of God. But it’s hard for a believer to look out on just how huge and old the universe is, really contemplate its unimaginable vastness, and not be overwhelmed by the omnipotence and infinity of God!
Why would an infinite God create a puny, quick little universe when God could create a vast, ancient universe? Anything else would hardly be a worthy expression of God’s infinite love and wisdom.
Here is a shorter video version of this article:
For further reading:
- How did God Create the Universe? Was the World Really Created in Six Days?
- On Pluto, Atoms, and Other Things (such as Heaven) that Just Keep Getting More Complex
- God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
- Do Galaxies Have Heart and Lungs?
- Containers for God
- Spirit: The Final Frontier
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Hello Lee, after reading your article, a question has been on my mind for some time regarding Swedenborg’s claim that the physical universe is a constant creation that will never cease.
If the purpose of the universe is to serve as a “nursery” for angels, there is a temporal gap that I find fascinating. Science estimates the universe to be about 13.8 billion years old, yet organic life as we know it is an extremely recent phenomenon. This means there was a silence of billions of years where the nursery was “empty,” waiting for stars to cook the chemical elements necessary for biology.
In light of current cosmology, could Roger Penrose’s theory (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) be the key to understanding this? Penrose proposes that the end of the universe, or heat death, connects to the start of a new Big Bang. If this is the case, the infinite creation Swedenborg spoke of could function through cycles or aeons.
I wonder: given that time does not exist in the spiritual world, would that interval of billions of years in which no new angels reach heaven be irrelevant? Could the universe “die” and restart infinitely by divine will so that the expansion of the spiritual world never stops, with entropy being simply the closing of one sowing cycle?Best Regards
Hi Fernando,
These are big questions. Definite answers are elusive, in part because we’re still only at the barest beginnings of our scientific understanding of the cosmos and its ultimate fate. We really don’t know whether we live in a one-off universe, a cyclical universe, a multiverse, or something else. So it’s best not to tie our theology too closely to any particular cosmological theory. In general, I figure that God has a plan, and has set things up to work both materially and spiritually, even if our minds and our knowledge are too small to grasp it.
But on to the specifics of your comment.
First, it should be said that Swedenborg’s statement that procreation on Earth will never cease is more of a theological pronouncement than a scientific one. It is made in the context of his refutation of a literal end of the world and subsequent Last Judgment, as believed in traditional Christianity, when all people will rise from the grave and be judged at once. His main point is that this won’t happen. The Earth will keep right on producing generation after generation. This will not stop at the time of some future Last Judgment.
Having said that, Swedenborg apparently did believe that Earth would never cease to produce new human beings. This idea is all tied in with his statements that the spiritual world depends upon the material world, and vice versa. In particular, angels, he says, depend upon humans on earth to provide a natural foundation for their spiritual life. There is a regular ongoing relationship, albeit mostly an unconscious one, between people on earth and angels in heaven. This means that if current science is correct, and this universe will have a limited time span in which it can host life, the problem for Swedenborg’s system is real.
The problem isn’t that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and intelligent, spiritually aware life on our planet began perhaps only 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, which is a tiny, tiny amount of time compared to the current age of the universe. Clearly, producing immensely complex biological life capable of hosting a human spirit is a stupendous task, requiring immense amounts of time and space to accomplish. If anything, the vastness of the universe in space and time compared to the tiny blip on the radar screen of our human culture and civilization should put us in awe of vast things God did in order to bring about our existence.
No, the problem is one of looking into the distant future, when this universe ceases to have the capacity to host life. And just to give the problem its full scope, the time period in which our universe will be able to host life is infinitesimally small compared to the total theorized lifetime of the universe: 1014 years in which it can host life, compared to 10100 years subsequently when it will not be able to host life. We’re talking about nanoseconds, relatively speaking, in which the universe can produce life.
Of course, if this is the only universe that has ever existed, and the only one that will ever exist, this means that once the stelliferous era of our universe is over, there will be no more humans living in the material world to provide the needed foundation for the angels and spirits in the spiritual world, ever.
But even if Penrose’s theory is correct (thanks for bringing it to my attention; I had not heard of it before), there will be an unimaginably long time period in which there will be no humans living in the material universe before the next Big Bang happens, and for a brief blip early in that universe there will be another potential crop of humans reproducing and living in the material universe.
A multiverse could save heaven from that fate. But it’s a highly speculative idea, and may not even be subject to scientific exploration and the scientific method. I.e., it may not even be a real theory from a scientific perspective. Personally, I don’t like the idea of a multiverse. But of course, if that’s what God did, then I’ll accept that God is considerably smarter than I am in designing things. 🙂
And one more issue:
Infinite regression seems even more problematic than a universe that either comes to an end or continues in endless cycles of life and death.
For one thing, according to Swedenborg, only God is infinite, whereas everything created is finite. The very means of creation, according to Swedenborg in True Christianity #33, was that “God first made his infinity finite in the form of substances put out from himself” (emphasis added). This suggests to me that even though we can talk about infinity and use it in our mathematics, there are no actual infinities in the real world, including both the real material world and the real spiritual world. If the material universe goes back in time infinitely, this would violate that principle.
Going forward “to infinity” doesn’t violate that principle, because we never actually reach infinity. We just continue to move forward in time, or in the spiritual equivalent of time, which is state of mind. But no matter how long we have gone so far, there is always an infinity of time, or state, ahead of us. We never actually reach infinity, and we are therefore never infinite.
Going backwards though, if something were always in existence, that would mean that something would have had to exist for an infinitely long time going backwards. And that is a problem. So the theory of my admittedly small brain is that the universe as a whole, meaning everything material, whether single or cyclical in nature, did have a definite beginning. And if it did, it seems likely that our universe is the first one, since I believe God would have become human at the first opportunity rather than delaying to a later one.
However, I could very well be mistaken about this. And in general, I defer to science and the scientists to determine how this physical universe works. If it turns out that Penrose’s theory, or one of the other cyclical universe theories, is correct, I won’t lose too much theological sleep over it.
I do like the idea of a cyclical universe better than the idea of a one-shot universe. It better fits what seems to be the regular pattern of nature, which is cycles of birth, life, death, and new birth, generation after generation.
However, if it turns out that the universe we see is a one-off, I won’t lose theological sleep about that, either. After all, each one of us has only one life, not multiple lives as the reincarnationists believe. So there would be a certain symmetry to a universe that has only one life, too. Perhaps the humans that this universe produces simply form the “adult” that lives for the rest of eternity as heaven, in relationship with God, similar to how each of us reaches adult stature, and then stays there. We don’t just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger forever.
As for how a universe that spends the vast bulk of its time not producing humans to feed heaven, I figure that God must have had a plan for that when creating the universe as it is. Most likely, Swedenborg is not correct that heaven cannot subsist without a foundation on earth. But how this works, I don’t claim to know.
Early on (decades ago) before I knew just how vast the timescale would be in which the physical universe would not produce new humans, I thought perhaps heaven as a whole would go through a period of sleep, and wake up when the next cycle of humans came along in a cyclical universe. But I can’t imagine a scenario in which heaven is awake for far less then a nanosecond for every year of its existence, proportionally speaking.
This brings me back to believing that Swedenborg to the contrary notwithstanding, heaven is able to continue in its happy existence without having people on earth and new arrivals from earth. Another analogy that comes to mind is that parents raise their children, and while they are doing so, a large amount of their mental, emotional, and physical energy is focused on that task. But once their children grow up and are emancipated, their parents can go on to live a very full, productive, and happy life during the rest of their years on earth.
So, my friend, once again you’ve brought up a material conundrum that, if we focus too much of our mental energy on it, could have us foundering on the shoals of disbelief. But this, once again, is why spiritual faith, knowledge, and understanding cannot be derived from the material world and material thought. It must come from revelation.
And I do not believe that Swedenborg’s extensive experience of the spiritual world, and millions of other people’s much briefer experiences of the spiritual world, are all just a bunch of hallucinations and products of fevered brains, as the skeptics imagine. In fact, people, including Swedenborg, who have these experiences regularly report that the realm they visited is far more real than this material world—which is dark, shadowy, and insubstantial by comparison.
This is why, even though I do not have good answers as to how heaven can survive without people living on earth—a situation that will apparently last vastly longer than the tiny amount of time that there will be people living in the material universe—I believe that God must have it all well in hand. Even if it came as a surprise to us humans as we entered into this scientific era that our earth will come to an end, it does not come as a surprise to God, who is present in all time and space from a position outside of time and space, and who literally knows everything.
This, therefore, is another one of those areas that I like to exercise my brain on from time to time, but that I don’t allow to get me too worried about the reality of God and spirit. Revelation gives us huge amounts of human and spiritual evidence that God and spirit are real, and that we will live eternally in the state of mind that we have chosen for ourselves here on earth. And that is the most important thing to know to put our earthly life and meaning in its true place and perspective, so that we can make the best of it while we have it.
Hi, thanks for your thoughts. I pondered the matter for a while and finally concluded that Swedenborg based his ideas on the cosmology of his time, which held that the universe was infinite and eternal—a mechanistic view based on immutability. From this perspective, he formulated the premise (likely, as you say, from a theological standpoint, to dismantle the belief in an end times with an apocalypse and final judgment) that the spiritual plane cannot exist without the natural one, and vice versa.
I think the correspondence theory speaks more to the interconnection between both planes and the fact that everything that vibrates at the same frequency of love or selfishness corresponds to/attracts to one another.
I mentioned the CCC theory because, after much thought and considering different theories, as you did, it seems the closest and most reasonable to me. Rather than a dream in the spiritual world, I would see it as rest, just as winter precedes spring and the reproduction associated with that season. It would be a time of rest/vacation until the next cycle. In any case, the concept of time is something from our dimension, and surely even if an eon were to pass (as Roger Penrose expresses it), it wouldn’t be noticeable to them in the same way. And even if it were noticeable, they could surely assign many other functions to those in charge of working with incarnate humanity.
The idea of photonoes being the seeds of the next big bang resonates deeply within me as an analogy for how matter transforms in our dimension and how everything is recycled by God.
Hi Fernando,
Yes, Swedenborg was likely influenced by ancient Greek ideas of an infinite, eternal universe. This was what he had available to turn to once he had rejected the traditional Christian idea of a young earth and an imminent Last Judgment in which the current earth would be replaced. Like it or not, revelation must come through human minds. And it must work with the natural concepts that are present in those minds. The revelation embodied in Swedenborg’s writings is no exception.
The trick is to distinguish the human container from the divine contents. That is not an easy task. It’s one that will keep us busy for many generations, as each generation requires a fresh understanding to adapt the divine message to its present-day mind, knowledge, and culture. Anything we do in this generation will be provisional. It will be both built upon and superseded by future generations. And yet, a thread of truth runs through it all, and can be seen starting with the earliest New Church writers, not to mention many other writers and thinkers going back for thousands of years.
I also like the CCC theory, even if I don’t understand how the transition from the heat death of the previous universe is supposed to lead to the Big Bang of the next. While it makes abstract sense in that it follows the pattern of death leading to new birth, the physics of it are beyond me. I can understand a Big Crunch leading to the next Big Bang. But if Penrose is right, there’s hope for a cyclical universe even if there never is a Big Crunch. That’s what I like about it.
Reality may beg to differ, however. And we won’t be around to find out.
About the lack of time in the spiritual world, this is something that’s rather difficult to understand for those of us who haven’t been there. Dreams can give a taste of it, in that you’re not looking at your watch in a dream. You’re just in the flow of the dream, experiencing the present moment as the events of the dream unfold.
The spiritual world is a waking state, not a dream state. However, there is a similar sense of living in the present without reference to time. There is still a passage of events, just as there is in a dream. There is still a past and a future. But for angels and spirits, all of that is contained in the present. There are no worries about the past or the future. Life is lived in the present.
How this interacts with the time and space of the material world is a fascinating brain-bender. After all, people die at a specific time, one after another, and enter the spiritual world at that time. Before that time, they are not in the spiritual world—at least, not consciously present and regularly visible there. After that time, they are in the spiritual world. You would think, then, that you could construct time in the spiritual world by noting the time of death of each person, and correlating that with their arrivals in the spiritual world.
But from the spiritual-world side, it doesn’t work that way. Yes, there is a before and after of when a loved one arrives in the spiritual world to join you. But there is no sense of time about it. You’re still living in the present, both before and after your loved one arrives. It’s not a temporal thing.
And if that doesn’t bend you brain, I don’t know what will! 🙂
As for incredibly long times, such as the 1086 years that the universe will last after it can no longer support life, it’s hard to imagine that this won’t feel like a long time to angels and spirits. But “a long time” has no meaning to them. They will just continue living, and when the 1086 years have passed, it won’t be any different than if a minute had passed. But there will still be unimaginably many events in their lives in the meanwhile.
It’s not something that our material brains can comprehend.
Really, the bigger problem is whether the spiritual world actually does need the physical world, and people living in it, in order to survive and thrive.
I’m inclined to think that it doesn’t. Otherwise, if our current science is anywhere near correct, God didn’t design things very well. If there is only one universe, and it’s not cyclical, perhaps a universe in a state of heat death will be sufficient as an outer envelope for the spiritual world. Or perhaps there are some kind of time dynamics related to that state that mean that the spiritual world continues to relate to a more dense universe. I don’t know. It’s beyond both my knowledge of physics and my knowledge of spiritual dynamics.
Meanwhile, as Candide said, we must tend our garden.
Hallo Lee
This is a very nice short article again that even freshly inspired me! Thank you very much. I haven’t read the discussion yet…
Radko
Hi Radko,
Good to hear from you again, my friend! I hope all is well with you and yours. Feel free to post any thoughts or questions you might have if you do go ahead and read the discussion.