Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” This is the dominate materialist position. They only believe in what they can touch, taste, feel, etc., and can’t possibly envision more. A physicist, on the other hand, would know better. They would know that what we can see, and feel is, to borrow a phrase from Albert Einstein, merely a stubborn illusion. We are bound by three spatial dimensions. We can detect some things with the aid of scientific instruments but beyond that, we can’t perceive anything more.
What we can perceive by our five senses is very limited and only a small fraction of all that exists. Take sight, for example. We identify objects by their shapes and colors. However, what we perceive as color is merely light waves bouncing off objects, entering our eyes, and then being interpreted as colors by our brains via electrical signals. So, not only do colors not physically exist, but we can only see a mere 0.0035% of the entire light spectrum. If we could somehow see the world apart from our limited human perspective, it would look very different.
Then there is the sense of touch. We think that what we can touch is solid. But if you were to place your hand against a wall, it wouldn’t actually touch. What you feel is the electrometric fields at play between the atoms in your hand and the atoms in the wall, much like two magnets repelling each other. Additionally, atoms are mostly empty. They have a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons that are orbited by electrons. If you had an atom the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be like a marble in the center with the electron cloud occupying the rest of the space. An object may appear solid, but it's not. If you removed all the empty space in an atom, for instance, our bodies would be reduced to less than the size of a pinhead.
What all this means is there’s much more to reality than we can perceive with our senses. In reality, we can’t detect even 99.9% of the world around us. The problem most have is that they have difficulty envisioning anything beyond our limited human perception. This is not understandable. We live in a world with three spatial dimensions (length, width, height) and one dimension of time. This reality is all we’ve ever known and it’s difficult to comprehend anything beyond that. But what if there are more dimensions beyond what we are capable of perceiving?
The concept of extra dimensions is not fantasy but science. For string theory to work, there has to be 10 or 11 dimensions depending on the model. One theory is that those dimensions are so small that they are impossible for us to perceive or access. But there is an alternate theory by physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum that we can't access them because our entire universe is "stuck" on a three-dimensional membrane floating in higher-dimensional space. If that is the case, some of those dimensions are large, even infinite.
In simple terms, a dimension is an independent direction. That sounds trivial at first until you realize the more dimensions you have access to, the more complexity you can have and the more things you can do. It's difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize what more dimensions would look like. But we can get an idea of how big a difference just one dimension makes by subtracting one from our own: height.
Imagine a flat two-dimensional world composed of only width and length. Complex life as we know it couldn’t exist. But let’s suppose from a moment complex 2D life could exist. An author in the ninetieth century did just that. English theologian and priest Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a satirical novella named Flatland in 1884. It was intended to be an entertaining commentary on society and on the limits of human understanding. But it has also led to some profound thought experiments. Flatland is a two-dimensional world (length and width) inhabited by geometric figures called Flatlanders. Flatlanders can only perceive the limited 2-D world around them and can't conceive of anything beyond that.
If you were to move a three-dimensional sphere through flatland, from their perspective it would look like a single point that grows larger into a circle and then decreases to a single point and disappears completely. You could move your hand a mere nanometer above Flatland, and unless it intersected directly with their 2-D world, they would never be able to perceive the hand no matter how close it came. From a 3-D vantage you could see everything that was going on in Flatland at once without the Flatlanders ever being aware of it. You could move objects around in Flatland from one location to the other, and from the Flatlanders' perspective, it would look like those objects suddenly disappeared and reappeared somewhere else. This thought experiment demonstrates that once you start adding dimension, suddenly the impossible becomes possible.
Flatland gives us an understanding of what a being living in higher dimensions might be capable of. Just as a 3-D being would be able to see everything going on in a 2-D world, a 4-D plus being would be capable of seeing inside bodies or any closed object without ever having to open them. And just as a 3-D being could simply walk over a 2-D barrier, a 4-D plus being could do the same to our three dimensions and it would appear they were walking through objects from our point of view.
From a biblical perspective, extra dimensionality could go a long ways in explaining the unexplainable. Such things as angels, demons, Jesus walking on water and walking through doors, and other supernatural phenomena. are impossible to explain from our limited three-dimensional vantage. But it’s only difficult to understand because we live in a three-dimensional time bubble, as it were. We are incapable of perceiving anything beyond our three spatial dimensions. Heaven could literally be all around us, but unless it intersected with our dimension, we could never be able to perceive it. Nothing is quite as it seems. Even at the quantum level, things behave in odd ways that defy the laws of physics, such as a particle existing in multiple locations at the same time. The implication is that the world we live in is just a shadow of a much larger reality. that means that reality is far bigger and wilder than we can possibly imagine.
What we can perceive by our five senses is very limited and only a small fraction of all that exists. Take sight, for example. We identify objects by their shapes and colors. However, what we perceive as color is merely light waves bouncing off objects, entering our eyes, and then being interpreted as colors by our brains via electrical signals. So, not only do colors not physically exist, but we can only see a mere 0.0035% of the entire light spectrum. If we could somehow see the world apart from our limited human perspective, it would look very different.
Then there is the sense of touch. We think that what we can touch is solid. But if you were to place your hand against a wall, it wouldn’t actually touch. What you feel is the electrometric fields at play between the atoms in your hand and the atoms in the wall, much like two magnets repelling each other. Additionally, atoms are mostly empty. They have a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons that are orbited by electrons. If you had an atom the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be like a marble in the center with the electron cloud occupying the rest of the space. An object may appear solid, but it's not. If you removed all the empty space in an atom, for instance, our bodies would be reduced to less than the size of a pinhead.
What all this means is there’s much more to reality than we can perceive with our senses. In reality, we can’t detect even 99.9% of the world around us. The problem most have is that they have difficulty envisioning anything beyond our limited human perception. This is not understandable. We live in a world with three spatial dimensions (length, width, height) and one dimension of time. This reality is all we’ve ever known and it’s difficult to comprehend anything beyond that. But what if there are more dimensions beyond what we are capable of perceiving?
The concept of extra dimensions is not fantasy but science. For string theory to work, there has to be 10 or 11 dimensions depending on the model. One theory is that those dimensions are so small that they are impossible for us to perceive or access. But there is an alternate theory by physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum that we can't access them because our entire universe is "stuck" on a three-dimensional membrane floating in higher-dimensional space. If that is the case, some of those dimensions are large, even infinite.
In simple terms, a dimension is an independent direction. That sounds trivial at first until you realize the more dimensions you have access to, the more complexity you can have and the more things you can do. It's difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize what more dimensions would look like. But we can get an idea of how big a difference just one dimension makes by subtracting one from our own: height.
Imagine a flat two-dimensional world composed of only width and length. Complex life as we know it couldn’t exist. But let’s suppose from a moment complex 2D life could exist. An author in the ninetieth century did just that. English theologian and priest Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a satirical novella named Flatland in 1884. It was intended to be an entertaining commentary on society and on the limits of human understanding. But it has also led to some profound thought experiments. Flatland is a two-dimensional world (length and width) inhabited by geometric figures called Flatlanders. Flatlanders can only perceive the limited 2-D world around them and can't conceive of anything beyond that.
If you were to move a three-dimensional sphere through flatland, from their perspective it would look like a single point that grows larger into a circle and then decreases to a single point and disappears completely. You could move your hand a mere nanometer above Flatland, and unless it intersected directly with their 2-D world, they would never be able to perceive the hand no matter how close it came. From a 3-D vantage you could see everything that was going on in Flatland at once without the Flatlanders ever being aware of it. You could move objects around in Flatland from one location to the other, and from the Flatlanders' perspective, it would look like those objects suddenly disappeared and reappeared somewhere else. This thought experiment demonstrates that once you start adding dimension, suddenly the impossible becomes possible.
Flatland gives us an understanding of what a being living in higher dimensions might be capable of. Just as a 3-D being would be able to see everything going on in a 2-D world, a 4-D plus being would be capable of seeing inside bodies or any closed object without ever having to open them. And just as a 3-D being could simply walk over a 2-D barrier, a 4-D plus being could do the same to our three dimensions and it would appear they were walking through objects from our point of view.
From a biblical perspective, extra dimensionality could go a long ways in explaining the unexplainable. Such things as angels, demons, Jesus walking on water and walking through doors, and other supernatural phenomena. are impossible to explain from our limited three-dimensional vantage. But it’s only difficult to understand because we live in a three-dimensional time bubble, as it were. We are incapable of perceiving anything beyond our three spatial dimensions. Heaven could literally be all around us, but unless it intersected with our dimension, we could never be able to perceive it. Nothing is quite as it seems. Even at the quantum level, things behave in odd ways that defy the laws of physics, such as a particle existing in multiple locations at the same time. The implication is that the world we live in is just a shadow of a much larger reality. that means that reality is far bigger and wilder than we can possibly imagine.
