Appendix N

Relativity, the Block Universe, and the “Time Is an Illusion” Objection

Can Physics Undo What the Dying Soul Reports?

Full-Length Edition

Parent chapter: Chapter 14 (The Subjective and the Objective). Chapter 14 commits to the A-theory of time and flags the relativity objection as deserving fuller treatment. This appendix is that treatment.

The Strongest Scientific Objection

Throughout this book, we have argued that the dying soul experiences a subjectively extended encounter with Christ. The encounter may feel like hours or days. The bedside clock records only seconds. The entire case rests on one premise: that the soul's felt time is real. Not a trick of memory. Not a flash of noise in a shutting-down brain. Real experience, unfolding in a real present moment.

The strongest scientific objection to that premise comes from modern physics. It goes like this: Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, first published in 1905, removed the idea of a single, shared "now" across the universe. If there is no shared present moment, then the dying soul's "now" is no more real than any other point along its path through space-time. The whole idea of "living through" an extended experience dissolves into an illusion.¹

Einstein himself said it plainly. His lifelong friend Michele Besso died in March 1955. Einstein wrote to the family just weeks before his own death. His words have become famous: "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."²

If Einstein was right, then our moment-of-death thesis faces a real problem. The soul reports living through an encounter. But on the view Einstein endorsed, there is no "living through" anything. There is only "being at" a given coordinate in a static, frozen block of events. Past, present, and future are just as real. Nothing truly unfolds. The dying soul's sense that hours are passing is a subjective feature of its position along a worldline, not an experience of real becoming.³

This is a serious challenge. We need to meet it head-on. As we will see, the objection fails on several grounds. But we should first state it at its full strength.

The Block-Universe Argument

The formal version of this objection runs through three steps. First, special relativity says there is no single "right" answer to a simple question: "What is happening right now at a distant place?" It depends on how fast you are moving. Two observers who pass each other at high speed will each have a different set of events that count as "now" for them. This is the relative nature of sameness-in-time.⁴

Second, the philosopher Hilary Putnam extended this point in a 1967 paper called "Time and Physical Geometry." The physicist C. W. Rietdijk had reached a similar conclusion the year before. Their argument, often called the Andromeda paradox, runs like this: Two people walk past each other on a street. One is strolling slowly; the other is walking briskly in the opposite direction. Because they are in relative motion, their "now-slices" through space-time tilt at slightly different angles. At a distance as far away as the Andromeda galaxy, the events each person counts as "now" may differ by days or weeks.⁵

Third, the conclusion: if all events along every observer's light-cone are just as real, then the universe is a static, frozen block. Past events have not vanished. Future events are already there. "Now" is just a label for where you happen to be standing in the block. The technical name for this view is eternalism.⁶

On eternalism, the dying soul's "lived-through hours" reduce to a single complex event at one coordinate in the block. There is no unfolding. There is no present moment that passes into the next. The soul's sense of sequence is a feature of its content, not a feature of reality.⁷

That is the objection at its strongest. It is built on real physics. It has been defended by serious thinkers. And it fails.

Response 1: The Neo-Lorentzian Interpretation

The first and most direct response is this: special relativity does not require the block universe. The mathematics of the theory is just as well matched with a different view in which there is a real, special "now" that our instruments simply cannot detect.

Before Einstein published his theory in 1905, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré had already worked out equations that predict exactly the same experimental results. Their picture was different from Einstein's. They held that there is a preferred frame of rest in the universe, and that objects moving through that frame contract in length and have their clocks slow down. The reason we cannot detect the preferred frame is that our measuring rods and clocks are themselves distorted by their motion through it.⁸

This older picture never went away. It was set aside, not refuted. As William Lane Craig argues at length, Lorentz's reading and Einstein's reading are by experiment equivalent. Every experiment that confirms one also confirms the other. No test can tell them apart.⁹

Why did Einstein's version win over Lorentz's? Partly because it seemed simpler. But there was a deeper reason. The philosopher Lawrence Sklar pointed out that the original arguments for Einstein's picture rested on a strict philosophy called verificationism. That is the idea that if you cannot detect something, it does not exist. Garrett DeWeese, drawing on Sklar's analysis, puts it simply: if verificationism is wrong, the main reason for choosing Einstein's picture over Lorentz's picture falls apart.¹⁰

Verificationism is wrong. It was far too strict a standard to be workable. It ruled out not just metaphysics but also ethics, beauty, and even some statements of physics itself. Worse, the statement "only what can be tested is real" cannot itself be tested. It refutes itself.¹¹

Craig also traces a dramatic shift in the physics community's attitude. Developments in quantum physics brought what one scholar called a "sea change" in how physicists regard the Lorentzian picture.¹² The turning point involved Bell's Theorem. In 1964, the physicist John Bell showed that a famous thought experiment by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen could be put to a real test. When the tests were run, the results pointed strongly toward something Einstein had resisted: the instantaneous, non-local collapse of quantum states across large distances.¹³

The results are striking. If two particles separated by vast distances can instantly take on correlated states, that looks like a real, simultaneous event. And real simultaneity is exactly what the Lorentzian picture predicts and the standard Einsteinian picture denies. Bell himself drew a bold conclusion. In a well-known interview, he said the simplest way to read the results was to go back to the pre-Einstein picture of Lorentz and Poincaré. On that picture, there is a real causal sequence defined in a preferred frame.¹⁴

Karl Popper agreed. He called the experiments on Bell's Theorem the first decisive test between Lorentz's and Einstein's readings of relativity. If action at a distance is real, Popper wrote, then we must restore true sameness-of-time and with it Newton's true space and time.¹⁵

DeWeese reaches the same conclusion through a parallel route. Michael Tooley developed a modified version of special relativity that formally preserves true sameness-of-time. Quentin Smith praised Tooley's achievement as the first rigorous physical theory of true sameness-of-time based on quantum experiments. DeWeese concludes that since a neo-Lorentzian reading is both equally matched by the data and explanatorily stronger, we should actually prefer it.¹⁶

The bottom line: the step from "special relativity is true" to "the block universe is real" is not forced by the science. It is a move of ideas. And it is a move that rests on shaky ground.

Response 2: General Relativity and Cosmic Time

The second response comes from a surprising direction: the rest of Einstein's own physics.

Special relativity deals with objects moving at constant speeds in empty space. It removes the idea of a shared "now." But general relativity, Einstein's broader theory of gravity and curved space-time, tells a different story on a cosmic scale.¹⁷

In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint glow left over from the Big Bang. This radiation fills the entire universe. It is astonishingly uniform in every direction. Data from the COBE satellite in the early 1990s established this uniformity to better than one part in twenty thousand.¹⁸

More precise readings then revealed a tiny asymmetry in the radiation. That asymmetry allowed scientists to identify a special reference frame: the frame at rest with respect to the universe's expansion. In this frame, there is a global "now." It is called cosmic time.¹⁹

DeWeese quotes the physicist Paul Davies on this point. Davies observes that, to an excellent approximation, Earth's historical time coincides with cosmic time to about one part in a million.²⁰ What special relativity took away, general relativity quietly gave back. On a shared scale, the universe does have a clock that everyone effectively shares.

Craig develops this further. In the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker family of solutions to Einstein's field equations, which are the models that match our actual universe, natural symmetries provide what Craig calls a "preferred foliation" of space-time. Space-time is not an undifferentiated block. It has a structure that picks out a special way of slicing it into layers of simultaneous events.²¹

The British Royal Astronomer Martin Rees stated the matter clearly. As Craig reports, Rees wrote that the most remarkable outcome of fifty years of cosmology has been the finding that the universe is more uniform than anyone had expected. G. J. Whitrow of London's Imperial College drew the point: in a universe that has cosmic time, relativity is reduced to a local effect. Time, on the largest scale, is shared and the same for all viewers after all.²²

Response 3: Physical Time Is Not All of Time

Even if someone remains unconvinced by Responses 1 and 2, a third answer cuts deeper. Physics tells about clock-time. It tells about what clocks measure under various conditions. But whether clock-time exhausts the full reality of time is a question of ideas, not a scientific one.²³

Clocks are physical instruments. They count regular intervals in physical systems: the swing of a pendulum, the vibration of a cesium atom, the pulse of a quartz crystal. What they measure is real. But to say "nothing more to time exists beyond what clocks measure" is to say something that physics itself cannot prove. It is a claim about reality dressed up as a scientific one.²⁴

Craig makes this point sharply. Time can exist without space. If God, existing alone before creation, experienced a sequence of thoughts, then time would exist without any physical clock to measure it. Craig takes this as a decisive reason to reject the view that space and time are inseparably fused into a single frozen block. He notes the French physicist Henri Arzelies's verdict: the continuum should be regarded as a useful mathematical tool, not as a physical reality.²⁵

Response 4: Consciousness Time Is Not Clock Time

This is the most important response for our thesis.

Grant, for the sake of argument, that the physical universe is a block. Even so, the dying soul's experience of time would still be a real thing that needs explaining. The soul reports hours of encounter. The soul tells about sequence: first this, then that, then the next thing. The soul says it lived through something. That report is itself a fact in the world. It cannot be wished away by a theory about worldlines.²⁶

Here is the crucial point. Our moment-of-death thesis does not require a view of the cosmos. It requires only that the dying soul's subjective time-extension is real as experience. On the A-theory of time, which the author prefers, this experience is fully real. The soul's "now" truly passes into the next "now." The encounter unfolds in a fully real sense. But even on B-theory, the experience is still real as the soul's tenseless content. The soul still has the experience it reports. Either way, the thesis stands.²⁷

Something is lost on B-theory, though, and we should be honest about that. On the block view, the encounter is not truly "lived through" in the way the soul tells about it. There is no genuine becoming, no real passing from one moment to the next. The soul's "I lived through hours of encounter" reduces to "the block contains a complex event of a certain magnitude at one coordinate." The felt richness of the experience survives. The deeper truth does not. This is part of the reason the book commits to A-theory (see Appendix H).

The Contemporary Shift toward Time-Realism

It is also worth noting that the philosophical tide has been turning. The mid-twentieth-century confidence that physics had settled the question in favor of the block universe has given way to a more open and contested landscape.

The physicist Lee Smolin, in his 2013 book Time Reborn, argues that physics has made a serious mistake by treating time as unreal. Time, Smolin contends, is not a leftover illusion from our limited perspective. It may be the most basic feature of reality. He calls for a new physics built on the reality of temporal flow.²⁸

The philosopher Craig Callender, in What Makes Time Special? (2017), takes a more cautious but similar route. He argues that the standard reasons for denying time's reality are weaker than commonly supposed. The question remains truly open.²⁹

R. T. Mullins, in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, adds the theological dimension. His chapter on "Contra Eternalism" argues that the block universe conflicts with core Christian commitments. On the block view, every evil moment in a life exists eternally. Nothing is ever truly gone. God's promise to make all things new loses its force if the old things remain tenselessly real forever. For a book about dying, this is a decisive point: the block view means the dying person's past suffering is never healed but always there. On presentism, God can truly wipe away every tear. (The full development of Mullins's argument belongs to Appendix H; we note it here for its bearing on the block-universe question.)³⁰

Does Relativity Prove A-Theory False?

It does not. This question deserves a clear answer. Relativity provides strong proof for certain facts. The speed of light is the same in every frame. Moving clocks run slow. Moving objects shrink in length. These are well-tested results. But the step from these results to the claim that the block universe is the true picture of reality requires added premises. Those premises are what we have been contesting.³¹

The added premise is roughly this: "If we cannot detect a special frame, then no special frame exists." That is verificationism. It is not a finding of physics. It is a view, and one that most current philosophers have abandoned.³²

Relativity and the Moment of Death

There is also a suggestive connection between relativity and our thesis that deserves brief mention. Special relativity predicts that clocks in different reference frames tick at different rates. This is physical time-dilation, and it is well-confirmed. Atomic clocks flown on airplanes run slightly slower than identical clocks left on the ground. The GPS satellites in orbit must correct for this effect continuously.³³

The dying soul's subjective time-dilation is not the same phenomenon. It works in the domain of consciousness, not the domain of physical clocks. But the analogy is worth noting. If physics itself allows clocks to run at different rates depending on their frame, then the idea of variable-rate time is not foreign to nature. A soul whose inner clock runs very differently from the bedside clock is not proposing something unheard of. It is proposing something physics already accepts in a different domain.³⁴

Could the soul's subjective time-dilation have a physical basis in some kind of frame-shifting? The author treats this as a suggestive analogy, not an established mechanism. We are not claiming the dying soul enters a relativistic reference frame. We are noting that the concept of one clock running at a wildly different rate from one more is part of the fabric of modern physics. The soul's experience is a phenomenon of consciousness, and its explanation lies in the philosophy of mind and the metaphysics of the soul (see Appendix I). But physics itself has already made the concept of variable-rate time respectable.

Simultaneity and the Encounter

Relativity also helps us think about one of the encounter's most puzzling features. From the bedside, the dying person's encounter happens in a sigh. From the soul's side, it may last for subjective hours. These two reports seem to clash. But if clock-time simultaneity is frame-dependent, then the question "Is the encounter happening now in clinical time?" has no single, frame-independent answer. From the dying soul's frame, the encounter is unfolding. From the bedside, it is happening in a breath. Both descriptions are correct in their own frames.

The encounter, on our thesis, is in the soul's frame. That is where the meeting with Christ takes place. The bedside clock measures what the bedside clock can measure. The soul lives in its own temporal mode, released from the brain's clock constraints (see Appendix F on divine temporality; Appendix I on psychological time).³⁵

A brief word for the reader who holds the timelessness view of God (see Appendix G). If you combine B-theory with divine timelessness, the encounter's metaphysical description will differ from the one this book prefers. But the experiential reality remains. The soul still has the experience it reports. The theological and pastoral weight of the encounter holds even under a different view of reality.³⁶

A Brief Note on Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics adds one more consideration. The quantum world introduces features that complicate any simple picture of time: non-locality, observer-dependence, and on some readings a role for consciousness itself. The Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) hypothesis proposes that consciousness arises from quantum processes in microtubules within neurons. The author neither endorses nor rejects Orch-OR. But we note this: the relationship between consciousness and physics is more open than twentieth-century contentism assumed. The confident claim that "physics has shown time is an illusion" rests on a picture of physics that physics itself has complicated.³⁷

The “Time Is an Illusion” Framing

Finally, a word about the framing itself. Popular science writing often presents the block universe and B-theory as though they were settled scientific consensus. You will find this claim in bestselling books, magazine articles, and television documentaries. "Science has proven that time is an illusion." It makes for a striking headline.

It is also wrong. Within the philosophy of physics, the debate between A-theory and B-theory is truly open. Serious thinkers defend both sides. Within metaphysics more broadly, A-theory is well-defended and widely held. Within the the study of lived experience of conscious experience, A-theory is the natural reading: we all experience a present moment that passes into the next. The "illusion" framing is a popular oversimplification that conflates one contested reading of the physics with the physics itself.³⁸

Synthesis

The relativity objection is the strongest scientific challenge to the moment-of-death thesis. It deserves the honest engagement we have given it. But it fails. It fails on multiple, independent grounds.

First, the neo-Lorentzian reading of special relativity preserves a real "now" while matching every test result of the standard theory. The block universe is not required by the physics. Second, general relativity in its cosmic setting restores a cosmic time that gives the universe a special present after all. Third, the gap between physical clock-time and the full reality of time means physics cannot settle the question by itself. Fourth, and most important for this book: the gap between physical time and the time of consciousness means the soul's reported experience is a real thing. No theory about the shape of the universe can override it.³⁹

Add to these the growing movement in physics toward time-realism (Smolin, Callender). Add the cost of the block universe in Christian theology (Mullins). Add the self-refuting nature of the verificationism on which the block-universe argument rests. The case is strong. The thesis survives. The dying soul's report of a long, unhurried, deeply personal meeting with Christ is not undone by modern physics. It is, if anything, supported by the direction of current physics and the philosophy of time.

For the broader case for A-theory as the metaphysics of the encounter, see Appendix H. For the philosophical foundation of subjective time-extension, see Appendix I. For the empirical NDE proof of time-dilation, see Appendix J. For the main-text treatment of the subjective and the objective in the dying moment, see Chapter 14. For the foundational case that the encounter requires a God who can act in real time, see Chapter 10.⁴⁰

A Word for the Bedside

When physics seems to say that all moments are just as real, remember something. That is not what the dying person is feeling. The present may be nothing more than a point in a static block, say the theorists. But the dying person is not in a theory. She is in her now, and her now is unfolding. The room may be still. The monitors may be silent. The clock may read a single, unmoving minute. But inside that minute, something enormous is happening.

Whatever the scientists conclude about the geometry of the universe, the moment your loved one is in is the moment she is meeting Christ. The physics of relativity cannot touch that meeting. The soul's time is the soul's time. And in that time, she is being met with a love that no equation can describe and no theory can take away.