All of this suggests a particular way of thinking about time itself.
Time Is Possibility Becoming History
We usually picture time as a line, or a river, carrying us forward. In this model, time can also be seen as something more specific: time is possibility becoming history.
At any moment, a vast field of possible futures lies open. As agents choose, possibilities resolve into actual events, and those events become history, fixed and permanent. The future is the field of what can still be. The past is what has become. The present is where the becoming happens.
Philosophers of time have a name for something close to this. Since J. M. E. McTaggart’s 1908 paper “The Unreality of Time,” debate has divided between the A-theory, on which there is a real, moving present and a real difference between past and future, and the B-theory, on which all times are equally real and “now” is just a perspective, like “here.” Within the A-family, the growing block view, associated with C. D. Broad in the 1920s, holds that the past and present are real and fixed while the future is not yet real; reality grows as time passes. This book’s model is close to a growing-block picture with one addition: the future, though not yet actual, is fully known to God as possibility.
God and Time
For God, the full field of possibility is known completely, every possible history from beginning to end. For us, living inside time, history becomes actual one choice at a time.
This gives God a relationship to time that is neither trapped within it nor indifferent to it. He is not guessing about what might come, because He knows every possibility. But He is also not simply looking at a finished story, because which story becomes actual really does depend on the choices of His children.
Restoration scripture speaks of God’s relationship to time in strong terms. Alma says that “all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men.”Alma 40:8; compare 2 Peter 3:8. Another revelation describes God’s dwelling as a place where “all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.”Doctrine and Covenants 130:7. Many readers take such passages in the Boethian sense, as God seeing the one actual history all at once. This model reads them as compatible with a different claim: that all possible histories, past, present, and future, are continually before Him. Which reading is correct is a real question, and the model should not pretend the texts settle it in its favor.
One Coherent Whole
The most important consequence is that history, once complete, is a single coherent whole. Its parts belong together. That is why earlier events can participate in answers to later needs.
The buffalo’s long life on the plains and Ephraim Hanks’s prayer in the snow are separated in time, but they belong to one history, and that history is one in which the prayer is answered. Nephi’s small plates and Martin Harris’s lost pages are separated by more than two thousand years, but they belong to one history, and that history is one in which the record comes forth.
From inside time, it can look as though the answer came before the question. From the standpoint of the whole, question and answer simply belong to the same structure.
Causation That Is Not Only Forward
This does not mean that later events reach back and push earlier ones around. The buffalo was not driven across the plains by a prayer it could not hear. It means that the relationship between events in a providential history does not have to run only through ordinary forward-moving cause and effect. The whole history is shaped by conditions God established on the whole, and so its parts can fit each other across time.
A puzzle worth facing. If the future is not yet actual, how can conditions “on the whole” shape what happens now? The answer in this model runs entirely through God’s knowledge. He does not need the future to exist in order to know every way it could go. His providence can therefore arrange earlier provisions, such as Nephi’s plates, that hold across every branch that satisfies His purposes. Nothing travels backward in time. What looks like backward influence is forward provision made by Someone who sees every branch.
The next chapter carries this idea to its most important application: the Atonement of Jesus Christ.