Craig, William Lane. Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity.

Copan, Paul

Philosophical Studies Series 84. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. xi + 279 pp. Cloth, $92.00--Philosopher William Lane Craig of the Talbot School of Theology has published three other Kluwer books on time and eternity and God's relationship to them. In this book, Craig draws some important strands together regarding the concept of God and relativity theory. He notes the striking "paucity of integrative literature" in this regard: "I am convinced that this lack is largely due to the fact that theologians and philosophers of religion do not understand Einstein's theories and so are reduced to merely parroting what they read in scientific popularizations," resulting in "a superficial and uncritical interaction" (p. ix).

What many theologians and philosophers of religion fail to realize is how strongly verificationism has influenced the philosophy of time and space in the past century. The demise of positivism and the revival of philosophy of religion and metaphysics call for a reexamination of relativity theory and its metaphysical foundations. There is a need for "an accessible, largely non-mathematical and philosophically informed introduction to relativity theory focusing on the concepts of time contained therein" (p. ix).

Craig lays out some of the historical background to special relativity (chapter 1), discussing Newton, Galileo, Lorentz, and then Einstein (who completely relativized--a "daring metaphysical revision" of--classical physics, as he eliminated any privileged reference frame or absolute simultaneity). Chapter 2 examines Einstein's special theory in greater detail, noting its operationalism or arbitrary conventionalism, rooted in his metaphysical assumptions rather than strictly observational data.

Bringing in the "Twin Paradox" and other such paradoxes, chapter 3 deals with time dilation (moving clocks run slow when measured by clocks at rest) and length contraction. Many authors fail to realize that for Einstein, space and time are defined in terms of the measurements themselves: "The measurements are the reality" (p. 64). He redefines reality according to what the measurements say. A very brief chapter 4 (on the empirical confirmation of special relativity) notes how the experimental data support the Lorentz transformations--"the physically correct way of transforming the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of an event from one inertial frame to another" (p. 68).

Chapter 5 examines two interpretations of special relativity--the relativity interpretation (with, among other things, its pluralistic ontology) and the spacetime interpretation (a unified, independent reality in which a classical 3 + 1 dimensional ontology is retained, making room for tense and temporal becoming); Craig opts for the latter in which observers merely make different measurements using different coordinate systems. He rejects the former, in which reality literally "falls apart," as "fantastic and explanatorily impoverished" (p. 102). They are ultimately two different metaphysical visions of reality.

In chapter 6, Craig reviews the Newtonian/classical conception of time (both absolute and relative--or measured--time), revealing how Newton's theism informed his understanding of time and how contemporary physics sans positivism leaves Newton relatively unscathed. Chapters 7 and 8 lay out the very obvious positivism behind Einstein's formulation of relativity theory and his inevitable, but arbitrary, elimination of absolute time. Craig roundly criticizes Einstein's "defective epistemological foundations" which led him to do so; Craig puts forward a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of relativity theory (chapter 9), which is empirically equivalent to and more explanatorily fruitful than the Einsteinian interpretation. In point of fact, Lorentz's disagreement with Einstein regarding relativity theory was essentially epistemological in nature. Reflecting Newton's theologically informed "absolute time," chapter 10 brings together relativity theory and the concept of God. Allegedly, with Einstein's rejection of the aether (which offered a certain referential objectivity), classical physics--with its absolute time--was "finished." But absolute time was hardly done away with. Since the Big Bang singularity, we have a certain homogeneous, finite cosmic time (not merely a local, perspectival time); thus universality is restored. This cosmic time is a measure of God's time. Also, one can simply offer aether equivalents, which establish a preferred reference frame: the cosmological fluid (the "gas" of fundamental particles), which is like an aether; the microwave background radiation, which fills all of space; the quantum mechanical vacuum. All the more does God's existence (his omnipresence--that is, his being aware of and causally active at every point in space) reveal that an objective, privileged status is possible--despite the relative measurements of human observers.

Thus Craig shows that the claims declaring that relativity theory destroyed the classical conception of time are empty. In his excellent, integrative work, Craig has superbly brought together a tensed (A-) theory of time, divine temporality, and neo-Lorentzian relativity.

Paul Copan, Trinity International University.