Two Dimensional Time

I recently wrote a technical blog post on another blog about the idea that time is really at least two dimensional.  Traditionally, I've always thought about the passage of time as being something that merely happens, like movement along the single axis of a chart, in one dimension.  I guest-lead our Sunday School class this weekend.  The topic was the simple topic of Biblical Inerrancy.  (We're reading Adam Hamilton's Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White.)

That topic always comes around to ideas about how the Bible has and hasn't changed over the course of history and whether or not that means anything to it's message, accuracy, or truth; and whether or not that means anything to my or our faith.

As a picture person, conceptualizing time in two dimensions rather than one has really helped me wrestle more effectively with questions like this.  In a two dimensional model of time, consider the that a time of perception (perceived time) is a vertical axis and the clock time at which an event is observed to happen (observed time) is an horizontal axis.

My crude ASCII-art rendering of this is below:

     ^
   9 | C.CA..AB.
   8 | A.....AB.
   7 | A.AB.....
   6 | A.AB.....
   5 | A........
     +----------->  Observed Time
       123456789

The way to read this is:

• When we were at time T=5, we believed that A existed from T=1 to end of time.
• When we were at time T=6, we believed that A existed from T=1 to T=3 and then B existed from T=4 to the end of time.
• When we were at time T=7, we still believed the same things.
• When we were at time T=8, we believed that A existed from T=1 to T=7 and then B existed from T=8 to the end of time.
• When we were at time T=9, we believed that C existed from T=1 to T=3 and then A existed from T=4 to T=7 and then B existed from T=8 to T=9.

 The implication here is that not only were all of these scenarios "true" at one point in time, but that there is great insight available in how our perception of time changes over the course of time.