The Flatlanders

Because human beings can visualize phenomena only in dimensions that they can experience, in their attempts to describe God, they reach a stumbling block in their thinking.

One reason Christians know that the Bible comes from a supernatural source is that it claims that God is not confined to our human dimensions of length, width, height, and time. It has become widely recognized that, mathematically, there are ten space-time dimensions of the universe. And the Bible not only insists on extra-dimensional capacities for God, but it also specifically describes how He functions in these extra dimensions.

Of all the holy books of the religions of the world, only the Bible unambiguously states that time is finite, that time has a beginning, and that God created time, that God is capable of cause and effect operations before the time dimension of the universe existed, and that God did cause many effects before the time component of our universe existed.

Other holy books besides the Bible allude to extra dimensions, trans-dimensional phenomena, and transcendence, but these allusions are inconsistent. The god and the doctrines these books proclaim always are shaped and limited in some way by the dimensions of length, width, height, and time.

The Bible alone describes God as a personal Creator who can act entirely independent of the cosmos and is not limited to length, width, height, and time. He is the One who brought them into existence.  

The Bible is unique, too, in describing certain attributes of God, such as the Trinity — in which God is depicted simultaneously as singular and plural, three Persons but one essence. Many who oppose Christianity state categorically that Christianity is false since the Trinity is mathematically absurd. And this is true in the context of a god limited in his operations to just the four dimensions of length, width, height, and time. But since God created and controls at least six more dimensions besides the four we humans experience, He must be able to operate in them.

Another attribute which the Bible declares forthrightly about God is that He is very close to each and every one of us. The Bible also states that Jesus Christ, a spirit being, actually comes to live right within a human being when that person accepts Him as Savior and Lord. But it just as definitely states that God is invisible. Evidently, it is impossible for us humans to make physical contact with God. How, then, can God be so close and yet be beyond physical contact? How can Christ live within a human being?

An analogy that might help was developed partly by Edwin Abbott, a nineteenth-century schoolmaster and preacher who published the book - “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” — in 1884. I am going to describe the concept in my own words.

First let’s talk about God living in His four or more dimensions without any created time element. Let’s call these dimensions: “length”, “width”, “height” and “wow”. God has other creatures in this Wow World who are somewhat like Him but are not true offspring. God makes a decision that He wants to have true offspring, true children. He has the power to create them as He wants to. And the way He really wants them is with the ability to choose to enter His Wow World and to love Him as He would love them. God didn’t want robots who blindly had to follow His directions but rather He wanted them to CHOOSE to be His children.

So He created a world of a lesser dimension than His Wow World. He created a three-dimensional universe. Now, of course, these human creatures which had the potential to be WOW people didn’t and couldn’t understand the Wow World. They only had a concept of length, width and height.

But here’s where it gets good. God placed within them a desire for an understanding to know how and why they were made and how any world beyond their’s operated. Then God could work with this inbuilt desire to get them to first know Him and then to choose to follow Him. And then, at the right time of their lives, God would bring them into His Wow World to live as children in His Family.

OK. That’s the God story. Now let’s bring the God story down and describe an imaginary human story similarly.

Suppose that Lou Hodapp is god of the three-dimensional universe. And all I have around me are lower creatures like dogs and cats who have a kind of love for me but are not and cannot be my true children. I long for, as God in His Wow World longed for, real children on a level with me.

So I decide to create a world of a lesser dimension than my three-dimensional world. And to do exactly like God did – work with them to choose to be my children.

 Imagine a universe where only two dimensions of space exist rather than three. In such a universe, Flatlanders would be confined to a plane of length and width - similar to a large piece of paper - with no possibility of operating in the dimension of height. A three-dimensional being like me then could approach the plane of the Flatlanders and place my hand just a hundredth of an inch above the two-dimensional bodies of two Flatlanders separated from one another by just one foot. Since I, as a three-dimensional being, am slightly above the plane of the Flatlanders, there is no possibility that the Flatlanders can see me. And yet, I am more than a thousand times closer to each of the Flatlanders than they are to one another.

As with the Flatlanders, so it is with human beings. God is closer to each of us than we ever can be to one another. But because God’s proximity to us takes place in dimensions or realms we cannot tangibly experience, we cannot possibly see Him.

The Bible goes even further. The New Testament states that God, in the Persons of Christ and the Holy Spirit, comes to actually dwell within Christians in a living union. Yes, God actually enters the believing Christian in an unseen eternal union.

Likewise, I, Lou Hodapp, as god of the three-dimensional universe, can enter the believing Flatlander in an unseen union.

Abbott goes on in his book that the only way we could see God is if He were to place a portion of His being into our space-time fabric. This would be analogous to me poking my finger through the plane of the Flatlanders. If one of the Flatlanders were to investigate, he would draw the conclusion that this visitor to their realm is a small circle.

But what if I, as the 3-D god, were to reveal separately to the friend of that Flatlander three of my fingers? The friend then would draw the conclusion that the visitor to their realm was not one small circle but rather three small circles. We could then imagine a theological debate between the two Flatlanders that would end up with the first Flatlander founding the Church of the One Circle while the second Flatlander would establish the church of the Three Circles or the church of the Trinity.

This analogy may appear amusing, but it fairly represents what non-Christians have done with the Trinity of God. Some have accepted God’s singularity but rejected His plurality while others accept His plurality and reject His singularity. Only Christians accept that God is simultaneously singular and plural.

Religions that view the Bible through the limited dimensional concept of humanity inevitably deny portions of God’s transcendence. Judaism accepts almost all the teaching of the Old Testament but rejects the New Testament. Islam and Mormonism “accept” both the Old Testament and New Testament but add other holy books to supersede them. The Jehovah’s Witnesses accept the Old and New Testaments but choose to change several hundred words in both. Other cults such as Christian Science simply ignore “unpleasant” passages in the Old and New Testament.

The common denominator in all the alternatives to Christianity is a denial, at least in part, of God’s transcendence and extra-dimensional attributes.

I have another way of looking at the Spirit World. Leaving out the concept of “time”, I have my own geometric analysis of the fourth dimension:

Dimension #1: An infinite number of separate points become one LINE. Or we might say that many separate small lines make up one BIG LINE. (Bringing the God story and the Lou Hodapp story down another level of dimension, if I were the god of the Flatlanders and entered this dimension, I would only be conceived as a point of a small line.)

Dimension #2: An infinite number of separate BIG LINES become one PLANE. Or we might say that many separate planes make up on BIG PLANE.

Dimension #3: An infinite number of separate BIG PLANES become one CUBE. Or we might say that many separate cubes (human beings) make up one BIG CUBE (the universe). (If a spirit WOW being entered this dimension, it would only be conceived as a plane or a small cube – that is, either virtually invisible or as a human being.)

Dimension #4: An infinite number of separate BIG CUBES (universes) become one WOW WORLD. Or we might say that many separate Wow People (spirit beings) make up one BIG WOW WORLD (God!)

What can we see in this orderly setup?

1. There are probably many universes.

2. Human beings lose their separateness and become unified in the Wow World. The Church, the Body of Christ, becomes one organism in the Wow World.  

    

Everything loses its separateness and becomes unified ultimately in GOD.

    

Christians must learn to expand their minds by whatever human analogies they can come up with. More than a century ago, Abbott did this with his “Flatlander” example. We today have the benefit of computer graphics and computer mathematics to expand our thinking. Ask the Holy Spirit to make your understanding as complete as humanly possible in this life. Certainly the Flatlander will never completely comprehend the workings of dimensions greater than his. And we human 3-Ders will never completely understand the workings of the Wow World in this life. But this is where faith and trust in the Creator God comes in.