Before speculating on how the Creator might view his own creation, let us consider how man looks at creation. Science today has swept the board, both in the discipline of its thought, and in the mechanical devices which fill our lives. In thought, it has recovered the cosmic attitude, which Christendom has not had since the Middle Ages. In comparison with this, the parochial attitudes of past generations are not worth bothering with, except as part of our general education; empire, glory, and the rest. Science is not the whole truth; but this priceless service to mankind, of recovering a cosmic attitude, is not to be lightly thrown away. Let us then look at the cosmos through the eyes of science.
Science today views the cosmos as a whole, and does so in two principal ways; through the astronomical world of seemingly infinite distances, and the evolutionary world of seemingly infinite time. Pascal was only aware of the contrast between the incredibly large distances in the heavens and the incredibly small distances of ultimate particles; and the contrast terrified him in its immensity. Chemistry had hardly begun in his day; but the debate whether matter consisted of atoms, or was infinitely divisible, had been going on for a long time. But now zoology and palaeontology between them have discovered the abyss of time; that is to say how incredibly slowly the evolutionary forces of geology, of biology, of even the development of mammals, work. These changes have occupied at least hundreds of millions of years, in contrast to the idea prevailing in Pascal’s day that it was a matter of thousands of years only.
A generation passed, and Newton brought reason and order to the movements of the heavenly bodies, in what is sometimes said to be the greatest act of scientific inspiration ever made. Newton regarded space and time as absolutes, and considered the laws of motion governing bodies of significant mass in the space-time continuum. The velocity of light was not known accurately; and it must have seemed sensible in the solar system to think in terms of simultaneous events. He then applied his laws of motion to the paths of planets discovered by Copernicus, and the geometrical laws of those paths as revealed by Kepler, and produced his theory of gravity. He produced order, out of seeming chaos; although he himself had considerable doubts about force acting at a distance. But now that both the velocity of light and the huge galactic distances are known, it is meaningless to talk of simultaneous events in this context. When you have to admit that two events may appear in the order A-B to an observer on one side of them, and in the order B-A to an observer on the other side, because on an astronomical scale light takes years to travel, it is prudent to abandon absolute time.