In Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar," astronaut Cooper descends to a planet near a black hole where time dilation is extreme. One hour on the planet equals seven years on Earth. When he returns to his ship after a brief visit, decades have passed. His children have grown old while he's aged only hours.
This isn't fantasy—it's physics. Einstein's theory of relativity predicts that time passes differently in different gravitational fields. Near a black hole's event horizon, time nearly stops relative to distant observers.
The scene devastated me emotionally. Cooper watches decades of recorded messages from his children, seeing them grow from kids to middle age in minutes of his subjective experience. Time itself becomes the barrier separating him from those he loves.
And it raised theological questions: If time is relative, what does it mean for God to be timeless?
The Physics of Time Dilation
Special relativity shows that time is relative to motion. Travel near light speed, and time slows for you relative to stationary observers. The famous twin paradox illustrates this: one twin travels at relativistic speed while the other stays home. When the traveler returns, they've aged less than their twin.
General relativity adds gravity to the picture. Strong gravitational fields slow time. GPS satellites must correct for this—time runs slightly faster in orbit than on Earth's surface because gravity is weaker. Without these corrections, GPS would be wildly inaccurate.
Near a black hole, time dilation becomes extreme. At the event horizon, time stops completely from an external observer's perspective. Someone falling into a black hole would never appear to cross the horizon to outside observers—they'd be frozen in time forever, though from their own perspective they'd cross and continue falling.
Autistic Time Perception
My autistic time perception already feels non-standard. I can hyperfocus for hours that feel like minutes, or experience minutes of sensory overload that feel like hours. My sense of time passing doesn't track clock time reliably.
This causes practical problems—I miss appointments, misjudge how long tasks take, struggle with time management. But it's also taught me that subjective time experience varies significantly even within normal human neurology.
If my autistic brain experiences time differently than neurotypical brains, and if relativity shows that physical time itself is relative to motion and gravity, what does "real" time even mean?
God Outside Time
Classical theology describes God as timeless—not existing for a very long time, but existing outside time altogether. God doesn't experience past, present, and future sequentially. From God's eternal perspective, all moments are equally present.
This has always been philosophically puzzling. How can a timeless being act in time? How can God respond to prayers if He doesn't experience temporal sequence? If God knows the future, is it really undetermined?
But relativity provides a new angle. If time is relative to reference frames, then perhaps God's timelessness isn't about existing nowhere-in-time but about existing in a reference frame where all temporal moments are accessible.
The Block Universe
One interpretation of relativity is the "block universe"—the idea that past, present, and future all exist equally. The flow of time is an illusion of consciousness. All moments in spacetime exist in a four-dimensional block.
From outside this block—from a perspective not confined to any particular temporal reference frame—all moments would be simultaneously accessible. Past and future wouldn't be separate; they'd be different directions in spacetime, like north and south.
This resembles the classical doctrine of divine timelessness. God doesn't experience temporal flow because God's perspective encompasses all of spacetime at once. What we experience as future, God experiences as present—not because God predicts it, but because God exists outside the temporal sequence altogether. This remains true whether the created timeline spans billions of years (the secular view) or thousands of years (the biblical young-earth view). God's eternality transcends whatever timespan He chose for creation.
The Cost of Perspective
"Interstellar" powerfully depicts the cost of different temporal reference frames. Cooper's brief hours cost his children decades. His perspective and theirs diverge catastrophically.
This raises a painful question: if God's perspective is eternal while ours is temporal, can God truly understand our experience? If God doesn't experience time's flow—doesn't wait, doesn't anticipate, doesn't remember in the way we do—can God genuinely empathize with temporal beings?
The Christian answer is the Incarnation. God entered time. Jesus experienced temporal existence—childhood, growth, waiting, anticipation, memory, aging. God didn't just observe time from outside; God lived it from inside.
Relative Simultaneity
Relativity denies absolute simultaneity. Events that are simultaneous in one reference frame aren't simultaneous in another. "Now" depends on your motion and gravitational context.
This complicates divine omniscience. If God knows "everything happening now," what counts as "now"? There's no universal present moment—only reference-frame-dependent simultaneity.
Perhaps God's knowledge isn't of "the present" but of all spacetime—past, present, and future from every possible reference frame. Not knowing what's happening "now" (which has no absolute meaning), but knowing all events in their full spacetime context.
Prayer and Timelessness
If God is timeless, how does prayer work? I pray now; God responds later. But if God experiences all moments simultaneously, does my "now" prayer and God's "later" response exist in the same eternal present from God's perspective?
This gets confusing quickly. But relativity offers an analogy: different reference frames can disagree about temporal order while both being valid. From my frame, I pray then God responds. From God's eternal frame, both moments are equally present. Neither perspective is more real—they're different valid frames on the same events.
Prayer isn't me sending a signal to a distant God who eventually receives and processes it. It's me engaging with a God whose eternal perspective includes my temporal moment and all its temporal consequences.
Suffering and Eternity
"Interstellar's" most wrenching element is loss across temporal perspectives. Cooper loses his children's childhoods. They lose their father for decades. Different reference frames create unbridgeable separation.
This resonates with suffering. Intense suffering feels eternal—moments extend subjectively into what feels like eternity. We cry out to God, "How long, O Lord?"
But if God's perspective is eternal, does our suffering feel differently to God? Does temporal extension that feels infinite to us appear as a brief moment from God's eternal viewpoint?
I don't think this means God dismisses our suffering. The Incarnation proves God takes our temporal experience seriously enough to enter it. Jesus wept. Jesus suffered. Jesus experienced time's agonizing slowness in Gethsemane: "Could you not watch with me one hour?"
God's eternal perspective doesn't minimize our temporal suffering—it contextualizes it. What feels unbearable in the moment exists within a larger frame where redemption, restoration, and resurrection are already accomplished.
The Tesseract Scene
"Interstellar's" climax places Cooper inside a tesseract—a four-dimensional construct where time becomes a spatial dimension. He can see all moments in his daughter's bedroom simultaneously, can reach back to communicate across time.
This visualizes what eternal perspective might involve: experiencing time as a dimension you can navigate rather than a flow you're swept along by. All moments accessible, past and future both visible, the whole temporal structure laid out simultaneously.
It's speculative physics and speculative theology. But it illustrates how a perspective outside time might relate to moments within time—not by experiencing them sequentially but by experiencing them all at once while still being able to interact with specific moments.
Practical Implications
Understanding divine timelessness through relativity changes how I pray, suffer, and hope.
Prayer becomes not sending messages to a distant future-God but engaging with a God whose eternal perspective already encompasses my future while remaining present in my now.
Suffering becomes more bearable knowing it exists within a larger frame—not minimized, but contextualized within redemptive purposes that span all time.
Hope becomes more certain because the future I hope for exists in God's eternal present. Resurrection isn't just predicted; from God's perspective, it's already accomplished.
The Limits of Analogy
Of course, all analogies limp. God isn't literally a reference frame near a black hole. Divine timelessness isn't exactly like relativistic time dilation. Theology isn't physics.
But relativity shows that time is stranger than we intuited. It's not an absolute cosmic flow but a relative feature of spacetime itself. If created time is this complex and flexible, perhaps divine eternity is less paradoxical than it seems.
Conclusion
"Interstellar" explores the heartbreak of temporal dislocation—how different time frames create unbridgeable separation. Cooper and his daughter exist in the same universe but can't share the same time.
God's timelessness is different. God isn't separated from our temporal frame; God encompasses it. All our moments exist in God's eternal present—not as distant memories or predictions, but as fully present realities.
This is mysterious. But relativity shows that time itself is mysterious—relative, flexible, reference-frame-dependent. If physical time works this way, perhaps divine eternity is less incoherent than classical philosophy suggested.
I still experience time sequentially. I still wait, hope, remember, anticipate. My autistic brain still processes time unpredictably.
But I worship a God who holds all my moments—past, present, and future—in eternal presence. A God who entered time in Christ to experience it from inside while never ceasing to encompass it from outside. A God whose eternal perspective doesn't diminish my temporal suffering but promises to resolve it in resurrection.
One day, perhaps, I'll see from God's perspective—see how all my temporal moments fit into the eternal pattern, understand how suffering and joy both belong to the story, comprehend how God was present in all of it.
Until then, I live in my reference frame, experiencing time's flow, trusting that it exists within God's eternal frame where redemption is already accomplished and all things are being made new.
The physics is mind-bending. The theology is mysterious. But together they point to a reality stranger and more hopeful than either could capture alone.