I want to give a little overview before we begin, because I think we all have some assumptions about many things, and I think for the purpose of this series, we need to think about those assumptions. As humans, we have only experienced life as humans, so we tend to assume that the experiences of everything else in the universe are similar. We do this innocently with our pets, ascribing human thoughts and feelings to them. We assume that our dogs and cats see, think, and feel similarly to how we see, feel, and think. It is called personification, and it is pretty natural. We also do this with God, and we sometimes very wrongly assume that God is experiencing the universe like we do, in a three-dimensional experience, moving through the 4th dimension (which is time), and now for us is now for God.
To think outside of our context, we need to understand our context. We experience reality as three-dimensional beings. The first dimension being a line, with only length. We can't see the first dimension, because there is no width to it, so it is a line without a thickness. We can, however, see the second dimension; you are looking at it now. It is length and width. A flat screen, a sheet of paper, a drawing. The cartoons or pictures cannot move off the paper, so if you were a 2nd dimensional being, you could move anywhere on the flat sheet of paper, but you couldn't come forward or backward. If you draw a box around a 2-dimensional being, it would be trapped, unable to get out.
In the third dimension, we add height, so we go from a square to a cube. We can move in any direction within that three-dimensional plane. A square would not hold us, so if I put a hula hoop around you, you could step over it, because while it has length and width, it does not have the height to contain you. I would need to turn it into a cylinder with a closed top and bottom to be a trap.
This is where things get tricky, because there are multiple aspects of the 4th dimension. As noted earlier, the 4th dimension is time, but there is also a 4th spatial dimension, where we add something else to length, width, and height. We cannot conceive of this 4th dimension, but we know theoretically a 4th-dimensional cube would be a tesseract. There is no real way to explain it, because we cannot conceive of what it would be; we are unable to perceive the 4th dimension. We know that just like we can see everything in a 2-dimensional world, a 4th-dimensional being would be able to see everything in the 3rd dimension, so it could see behind closed doors and in a closed box.
Time as the 4th dimension means a 4th-dimensional being would experience time like we experience the 3rd dimension. Just like I can see down a path, walk back and forth along it, and stop to change direction. A 4th-dimensional being can move back and forth in time, see all of time, and time does not unfold for that being, just like a path does not unfold in front of me as I walk down it, I can see it, stop, go back, go forward, and move as I will. So while we experience time, we cannot move at will in time; we are simply experiencing the passage of time as it moves. We are not a swimmer in the movement of time, simply a toy boat that is moving with it in one direction.
As we consider this aspect of reality, viewing God as a 4th-dimensional being changes all perception. For God, there is no past or future; there is just time. God is able to be at all times at the same time, and look at it laid out before Him, like we would look at a timeline. It is not a valid question to ask if God knows their future, because to God there is no future. Time from beginning to end is laid out in front of Him. It places God as the God of time, having created it, but not subject to it.
Now those are just the first 4 dimensions; in the posts to come, I want to consider the higher dimensions, what we propose they may be like, and how they impact our understanding of life and theology.
