We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

CosmicDanceFrtCvr

Roger Olson’s Review of The Cosmic Dance

Today we wanted to share a review of The Cosmic Dance by esteemed theologian Roger Olson. You can check out an excerpt below or you can read the whole review here. You can place an order for The Cosmic Dance here.

The Cosmic Dance is Greg’s (and friends’) attempt to present the case that the best contemporary science supports viewing time as an “arrow” such that an omnipresent being (such as the God of traditional Christianity) would not “already be” in the future or “still be” in the past but would experience the future as not yet and the past as no longer available. In other words, the book argues, using numerous quotations from and references to modern and contemporary physics, that relativity theory, as understood through post-Einsteinian physics, supports an “open view” of the universe and the future in which real novelty and spontaneity characterize events within an overall interconnected whole of reality.

When I read a book I often try to find a key paragraph that sums up its main “big idea” or single most important thesis. Here is my candidate for that in The Cosmic Dance: “In this book we’ve argued that Quantum Theory, Chaos-Complexity Theory and Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics suggest that a fully deterministic description of the world is impossible, and that time and novelty are more than mere illusions. We’ve argued that even Relativity Theory gives a role to time that is very different from space. This all suggests that reality moves from a settled past into a partly open future.” (184) …

I can heartily recommend this book for the pictures if nothing else! Seriously, however, if you are interested in reading a case made from science that time is “for real” and not illusory, and that although time and space are, indeed, inter-related that does not mean an omnipresent being must somehow already be “in the future,” buy the book.

Related Reading

How do you respond to 1 Timothy 4:1–3?

“…in the later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods…” New Testament authors considered themselves to be living “in the later times” (e.g. Acts 2:17;…

To What Extent is the Future Open to Real Possibilities?

We frequently get questions about the extent to which the future is composed of actual possibilities rather than settled or determined. Here’s what Greg has to say in response to these questions: 1. We can be confident the future is settled, to the extent that the Bible depicts the future as settled. This, of course,…

Re-Thinking Divine Sovereignty

Many people in the church have been taught that divine sovereignty is synonymous with unilateral control. Some have even argued that if God is not in control of everything, then something must be in control of him. Still others have proposed that if God is not sovereign over all, then he has no sovereignty at…

God’s Love and Your Freedom

The most distinctive aspect of the revelation of God in Christ is Jesus’ demonstration that God relies on love to defeat his enemies and to accomplish his purposes. More than anything else, it was the perfect love of God revealed in the incarnation, ministry, and self-sacrificial death of Jesus that in principle defeated evil and…

Free Will: Is it a coherent concept?

Greg is going to be spending the next several blogs talking about the idea of free will. In this first reflection, he discusses whether it is coherent to speak of a decision that is not determined or exhaustively caused.

Revelation 13:8 refers to “everyone whose names have not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life.” How does that square with open theism?

Three possibilities exist in terms of reconciling Revelation 13:8 with open theism. 1) First, the “from the foundation of the world” clause can attach to either “everyone whose names have not been written” or to “the lamb that was slain.” For example, the TNIV translates this passage “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the…