My oldest son sent me a slide. It was part of something he'd been working through — a philosophical framework about the relationship between time, space, and matter. Clean, logical, structured. His mind works that way.
The slide argued that time is codependent on matter and energy, not on space. That without change there is no time, and without matter and energy there is no change. Therefore time only exists where matter and energy exist. Space without matter is timeless. Time without matter is impossible.
I read it. And then I got stuck. We laughed about that on the phone.
Not on what the slide said. On what it implied if you pushed it one step further.
Was it because I'm 70? Learned about this stuff in the way of absolutes in the 1960s and 70s? And 80s when I graduated university after the USAF? Did I just need time to assimilate it all?
What If You Stopped Time Everywhere?
The slide stops at a logical but comfortable place. I couldn't.
If time requires matter and energy, and space is essentially a container for matter and energy — what happens to the container if you freeze everything inside it? Not locally. Not in one corner of the universe. Everywhere. Completely.
Space isn't what most people think it is.
We picture it as an empty stage, pre-existing, waiting for matter to show up and perform. But that's not what general relativity describes. Space — spacetime — is dynamic. It curves and bends and responds to matter and energy. It is in some fundamental sense defined by matter and energy, not separate from them.
So if you freeze time everywhere, you don't get an empty universe. You get an undefined one. The relationships that constitute space dissolve. The container doesn't empty. It ceases to be a container at all.
Space doesn't go dark. It goes undefined.
The Restart Problem
Here's where it gets truly unresolvable.
If time stops completely and space collapses with it — can it restart? Not like in movies or sci fi, but really.
No. And not for a complicated reason. For a devastatingly simple one.
Restarting requires a before and an after. That's time. To restart time you need time to already be running. You cannot bootstrap sequence from a state of perfect frozen stillness. There is no edge to grab. No outside mechanism still ticking. No unpause button that exists anywhere, because "anywhere" no longer exists either.
A universe with time stopped everywhere is not a universe on pause. It is indistinguishable from a universe that never existed. Not darkness. Not cold. Not silence. The complete and permanent absence of the category of anything happening.
That is the most honest description of true nothingness I've been able to arrive at.
Could Time Exist Without Space?
Before we get to God, there's one more turn.
If you freeze time and space collapses — could time still exist somehow, outside of space? Untethered from the container it apparently requires?
Maybe. If time is fundamentally about sequence — about A preceding B — then it doesn't strictly require a where for that sequence to occur. Some physicists, Lee Smolin among them, have argued that time is the most primitive thing in the universe. More primitive than space. That space itself emerges from relationships between things over time.
If that's true, time without space isn't impossible.
It's just incomprehensible to minds built inside space. Pure sequence. Pure before-and-after with no here-and-there. Causality running in a void that isn't even a void because void implies extension.
I can't quite visualize it. But I've stopped confusing my inability to visualize something with its impossibility.
Now Consider God
If God exists — and I'm not arguing either way here — then God exists somewhere in relation to time. Either within it, alongside it, above it, or as its creator.
Genesis says God created time.
But Genesis was written by people doing something deeply human and deeply necessary — building a frame for existence to replace far worse frames. The void is terrifying.
"In the beginning God created" is a psychologically brilliant answer to that terror. It says there is an author. Therefore meaning. Therefore your life is not an accident in a cold indifferent dark.
That's not nothing. It held civilizations together for millennia.
But it was never built to survive the question we're asking now. And the sadness in that construct is that it was a placeholder for the lack of something, that turned out to be -- Science. Once science arrived on the stage, religion should have bowed out. But it did not. Instead, religion (or those who support it and the power and wealth they maintained FROM it) murdered people to maintain and retain its existence, far beyond, even unto today, its need to exist.
If time stops everywhere — if the terminal condition I described above occurs — God stops. Not sleeps. Not waits. Stops, in every meaningful sense. And if time cannot restart, God cannot restart. The same logic that traps everything else traps God too.
Which means one of two things:
God is time itself.
Not a being who created time or lives within time, but the process — change, sequence, causality — that is the divine.
Spinoza circled this.
Process theology circles it.
Most mystics across most traditions have sensed it without quite having the vocabulary. If this is true, God doesn't stop when time stops. God is the stopping. God is the running. God is the before and after, not a thing that exists between them.
Or God is subject to time like everything else, which means time is the more primitive thing. Time doesn't need God. God needs time. And Genesis, whatever its beauty and utility, has the causality exactly backward.
Neither option is comfortable. The first makes God so abstract as to be unrecognizable to most believers. The second subordinates the divine to a process that has no author and no purpose.
But perhaps "God" is just anthropomorphized constructs to begin with.
Where That Leaves Us
Here is what I think the honest position is, arrived at through a conversation that started with a slide on a phone screen:
If time is the most primitive thing in existence — more fundamental than space, than matter, than energy, than any being however vast — then existence itself is stranger and more vertiginous than any creation story can hold.
Genesis isn't wrong because it's stupid. It's insufficient because it's human. It was built from fear, not from physics. For comfort, not for rigor. And there is no shame in that. Humans needed it. At the time.
But if you follow the logic without the safety net — no author, no frame, no reassuring beginning — you end up somewhere that most creation stories can't follow you.
Time may be the only thing that was never created.
Which means it may be the only thing that was always, in whatever sense "always" can mean when time itself is what you're talking about, simply there.
Not God. Not nothing. Just the irreducible fact of sequence itself, from which everything — space, matter, energy, life, thought, this sentence — eventually and improbably emerged.
That's either the most terrifying thing imaginable.
Or the most interesting.
I know which one my son would say. I think I know which one I'd say too.
This wasn't meant to be a perfect consideration here, but a consideration nonetheless, to evoke thought.
Something religion refused to do for millennia.
And we now have the freedom to...
JZ Murdock writes here at murdockinations.com and Substack.com.
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