I don't think that a four dimensional view of time is necessary for resolving concerns around the Christian resurrection and how memories/psychology could be maintained.

There are plenty of views that Christians hold, but one of the most popular views (I would guess among the laity, professional philosophers, and possibly church leaders) is substance dualism. While memories are clearly stored in the brain to a degree, or at least influenced by the brain, the dualist typically thinks those memories are also located in and available to the non-physical substance (a soul/mind/spirit/etc) that survives the death of the body. Since those memories survive the death of those neurons, they are never lost.

Another view that was perhaps more popular, and is perhaps also gaining popularity again, usually called idealism, is that there is no physical stuff that exists on its own. Instead, God creates other souls/minds/spirits, and God imagines a physical world, and then gives experiences to those souls/minds/spirits as though they were in a physical world, even though no such mind-independent physical world exists. On this kind of view, the memories at the time of death are remembered by God, or exist within the soul/mind/spirit who was experiencing being that human in that imagined world (this second option is much like the dualist view). And so in the resurrection, God merely needs to have that soul/mind/spirit again have an experience as of being in such a physical world with a body that now has those memories restored, or, if those memories are already located in that soul/mind/spirit, then no extra work is required. The memories are either remembered by God, or were and continue to be stored in the soul/mind/spirit.

A third view, perhaps even less common than the preceding two among Christians, is a kind of materialism, where we have no immaterial soul/mind/spirit, and we are just our bodies. On that kind of view, I would assume the story is that God knows how the body was constructed (including the memories encoded in the brain) prior to neurons being destroyed, and is therefore able to rebuild the body in the resurrection as it needs to be to ensure the right kind of psychological continuity. These kinds of miracles would be trivial for God as described by Christians.

Pretty sure the Bible talks a bit about God existing outside of time (he sees past, present, and future all at once or some such), so I always figured the model was "God exists outside of our universe much like a programmer who exists outside of his simulation, but can step forwards and backwards through time independently of the passage of time in the program itself". Something like that, anyway.

You might be right about such a verse, but I'm not sure off the top of my head. I can assure you though that you can find Christian proponents of both A-theory and B-theory of time. This is an active area of disagreement, particularly among philosophers (although it's true that a lot of question are under active disagreement among philosophers!). Example discussion, which I'm not up to date on myself: https://iep.utm.edu/god-time/

It is a popular notion that God exists outside of time but this is a modern idea with very sketchy biblical support. Certainly there is nothing in the Bible that directly says anything like this.

Traditionally people point to 2 Peter 3:8 and Hebrews 13:8 as implying this idea.

There are a few other passages that seem to hint at it as well.

I'd describe it as a model of God that fits well with the Bible but which the Bible itself does not explicitly present.

Why would you try to use science to explain an article of faith? This isn't to knock a belief, it's more that I think you're overthinking it.

There are plenty of us of faith who like to overthink things. Amongst philosophers of religion, those who professionally spend a lot of time overthinking things, you'll find an abundance of theists. While many of the questions they consider are not scientific in nature (just like, for example, questions about mathematics are not typically scientific questions), beliefs should still be compatible with the known facts.

So, bring it on :)

Okay, if the creator is good, why is there misery?

Good without evil is positive without negative, left without right, up without down, hot without cold. And like all those other pairs, good and evil are relative, as are happiness and misery.

It's for this reason that absolute avoidance of "sin" is misguided, even assuming we could reliably identify it. We were always meant to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; it was there for a reason, and the alternative would've been a rather stagnant and meaningless existence - certainly devoid of suffering, but also of joy.

> Good without evil is positive without negative, left without right, up without down, hot without cold. And like all those other pairs, good and evil are relative, as are happiness and misery.

This resonates with what I've read about the gnostic understanding of the creation. The demiurge (the God of this world) created this world to have a ratio of 2/3 light and 1/3 darkness. Suffering and conflict is produced to create tension and perpetuate the system.

http://www.trickedbythelight.com/tbtl/nde-transcript.html

Here's one perspective to consider.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...

To me that seems like an incomplete explanation that ignores the hard part of the problem it’s trying to satisfy.

It’s easy to explain the suffering that can happen during one’s life as part of a wider experience which ultimately ends up being good, when the examples are adults with a range of experience and agency over their situation.

It’s less easy to explain why a good god has created an existence where a young child who doesn’t yet have agency over their existence contracts and dies of smallpox. Or is brutally raped and murdered. Or…

What’s the point of that exactly?

I think overall the challenge of the problem of evil for LDS is different from that of the Christian tradition. Christians believe there is just one God who created the physical universe, and created the life within it (either directly or by setting up laws that would lead to the inevitable outcome of life), and in a very real sense foreordained all that suffering and pain knowing that it would come.

The LDS church, on the other hand, teaches that "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be". I'm not familiar enough with LDS teaching, but if their god was once like us, then that means that this god did not create life, given that this god was a living thing before having the power to create life (and is this the same for that god's god? And the god of that god? And so on?). That suggests to me that this god is not the creator of physical reality (contrary to what Christians think), and not the original creator of life, and therefore is not as obviously responsible for a physical reality full of suffering as is God for Christians. The LDS god did not set up the original rules, and so can't be as responsible for them. That being said, the god of the LDS does seem to be very powerful, so that would give rise to some forms of the problem of evil.

These are just some poorly informed thoughts, and there's a lot I don't know about the LDS church.

When I was a believer, I always thought the best answer to this is that suffering is brief & temporary when considered against eternal paradise.

Looking deeper, suffering is also necessary to allow for the gift of immortality to be a choice, and to be 'fair'-- those who cannot resist the desire to cause misery for others must be given the chance to demonstrate for everyone else why they should not be granted immortality. If God just snuffed them out at the first sign of trouble everyone would start to wonder if God was really being just. [Oh, I also didn't believe in eternal hell, just a final judgment where the 'bad guys' are all destroyed so the rest of us can actually start enjoying life without any more misery.]

You will find thousands of other quite different responses to this question because it is the most common question asked about God.

I don't really believe any of that stuff any more, but the beliefs I described brought me comfort for a long time in a dark place and I still think they make more sense than any other irrational, unprovable belief system I've looked into.

Ha, you like to ask the hard ones, and I have to head out right now :) Short version: for every view of the world, there's things it explains well, and things that are a challenge for it. Some theistic views I think as a whole do a great job of providing a solid worldview. However, problems of evil -- why is there natural evil, moral evil, misery, etc -- these are one of the areas that are probably the biggest challenge for theists that believe in a good God. Needless to say, there's a massive amount of words written about this topic. The short answer is: there is no logical problem of evil -- one where this kind of thing is logically incompatible with the existence of God. i.e., there's no proof that shows that a good God cannot have a reason for allowing evil/suffering/misery/etc. But it still presents an emotional challenge, and it does seem like they're an uncomfortable pair, even if not logically incompatible.

I have my own views on how to explain this, but it would take a fair bit to explain.

OK, here's my amateur take. Most misery is man-made. On the personal scale: envy, unrequited love etc. Also on the macro scale: wars, global warming etc. Perhaps if you create entities with free will they will unavoidably though ignorance or malice do some evil to a lesser to greater extent and therefore cause misery.

Bereavement is unavoidable but many religions promise an afterlife.

Child bone cancer and like are difficult to explain away. Perhaps we would have a cure for cancer if we didn't spend so much effort developing weapons and better advertising algorithms, but that is besides the point. I have heard Muslims believe that Allah will not inflict suffering on someone beyond what they can handle.

God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

> I have heard Muslims believe that Allah will not inflict suffering on someone beyond what they can handle.

I find this a particularly inhumane way of thinking. Try saying that to someone suffering "oh, you can handle it", it's beyond cruel, yikes. Makes it sound like it's some type of blessing, like the little 3-yr old is meant to die of bone cancer because of some greater God's plan. I don't know, it's just sounds so wrong to me to think like that. Even life on earth is some sort of school for the afterlife, I don't think there is a lesson to be learned by dying of cancer as a young child.

> God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

Yes please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?

>> God if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

> please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?

No, I doubt it would be like that, not like what a junkie experiences when they inject heroin in a vein. There would be some sort of meaning to it.

> God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?

What would be the point of not doing that?

It's not really about individual suffering -- god could have created a universe in which suffering did not exist as a possibility or a concept. But it does so exist. Therefore God either intended it to be so, and condones or accepts or requires suffering, or God has limits that mean it had no choice but to create the universe this way, or there is no God.

Yes, if God exists, is the creator, is all powerful, is good, is sane, then suffering must be of ultimate benefit, or an unavoidable consequence of for example free will. That said lot of suffering is man made.

> Perhaps if you create entities with free will they will unavoidably though ignorance or malice do some evil to a lesser to greater extent and therefore cause misery.

Well, to be sure, you have to nudge a bit and create such circumstances to make sure there will be misery and wars. For starters start several opposing religious factions, all willing to do god's bidding and do horrible things in his name. Don't discourage it, leave your words in ancient manuscripts open to interpretation.

I've always imagined that everything about who we are is backed up to the original cloud. (You could say, the real cloud.)

And, in the resurrection, we will be 3D printed back into existence.

I feel like any technologies we come up with could have superior analogues by the person able to come up with the laws of physics in the first place.

But restoration directly from the past is an interesting idea!

"the original cloud" is the heaven universe I think, but please be sure to put on your tin foil hat, here some ideas that are a bit out there :)

> Our reality is a constantly changing bubble. Within that bubble, both our future histories, as well as our past histories (!) are subject to change. This bubble of reality is an environment, set up by soul, to create experiences by which the consciousness can be exposed to.

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/the-passage-of-time-is-a...

> Consciousness is created in Heaven, and needs to experience reincarnation to evolve.

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/the-origin-of-consciousn...

> “time” is just our consciousness moving in and out of different world-lines. Each world-line is our momentary reality. During that “in between period”, our consciousness is in “wave form”, and we are in what is commonly referred to as “Heaven”.

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/journey-of-souls-full-te...

> You could say, the real cloud.

Okay I laughed, and I’m not ashamed to admit it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death ?

Yeah, exactly. How did you come about this?

Not sure; it's not in my notes. I want to say an HN comment, but I don't recognize any of the few that include the link.

--

Edit: The browser history still exists, although I cannot disprove that it was created Last Thursday; 'twas the comment near the bottom of this thread that intrigued me with its sole content, that link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755748

If you care about the question more than from a purely curiosity standpoint, there is a difference tween “flesh” and “body” in (at least some) of Christianity. The “Lord of Spirits” (an orthodox podcast) has done an in-depth discussion on both the body of God and the bodies of humans, angels and demons. Just as an example, when Adam and Eve was expelled from the garden they were covered in “garments of flesh/skin” depending on the translation.

I do not want to start a discussion on Christianity, just to point to that there is a more subtle understanding in the church whether or not you believe in it.

Body could be 'subtle' astral/etheric matter. Flesh is strictly physical biological matter.

I'm pretty sure it's said in the Bible that heavenly bodies will be different (perfect) and memories will be wiped.

As one who has read the Protestant Bible all the way through probably more than five times, I don't recall any statement that memories will be wiped.

At the end of Revelation there is a declaration that ~"there will be no more crying, or tears, or death, or pain, for the former things have passed away," and some interpret that to mean humans will not remember anything from life in the old universe.

It's an interpretation, though, not something the text outright says.

During my life as a Biblical literalist, I saw it as simply saying that a world with hardship and suffering was no more, and that our memories of those times would be recontextualized.

Perhaps Isaiah 65:17 "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."

Ah, that certainly could fit the bill.

Thanks.

JP Moreland has written at length on this topic (see his book "The Soul" and many interviews/talks he's done).

In short, he distinguishes between the brain and the mind (consciousness, memories, etc). While the brain may be required for an embodied creature to use their mind, they are not the same thing.

In short, he distinguishes between the heart and circulation (pulse, o2 transport, etc). While the heart may be required for an embodied creature to use their circulatory system, they are not the same thing.

If a bomb vaporized your brain you would cease to be an embodied creature and you wouldn't have a mind anymore. You can test this theory yourself but only once.

> If a bomb vaporized your brain you would cease to be an embodied creature and you wouldn't have a mind anymore. You can test this theory yourself but only once.

You actually can't test this theory at all, if it's correct.

On destruction of your body, if the mind does not continue, you cannot observe its discontinuance. Thus, you cannot test the theory.

If the theory is false, then you could presumably falsify it by this technique.