Beyond The Cosmos

I read Beyond The Cosmos, The Transdimensionality of God, by Hugh Ross in 2026. It was originally published in 1996. The third edition was published in 2010 and again in 2017, but he forgot to update our knowledge of the Higgs boson. He likes to use the words transdimensional, extradimensional, superdimensional, and supradimensional quite a lot without ever defining them.

I have my own hypothesis using a second dimension of time to reconcile a literal interpretation of Genesis with mainstream geology and cosmology. I imagined billions of years happening in our time while God experienced six days sideways. I never took it that seriously because it fails to explain why God would bother making a point to tell us about this sideways timeline without explaining that he was doing so. Hugh’s theories are all like this. He often takes some counterintuitive interpretations of scripture in order to seem paradoxical, ignores the much more mundane explanations, creates a dimension-based explanation, and then makes a bunch of unsupported assumptions to further support the theory. The book is better than the previous two of his I reviewed, but still pretty bad.

He cites verses that taken literally suggest certain events happened before time. Rather than accept that they must have happened in the instant of creation or merely before the creation of Earth or the universe as we know it, he concludes that this is the Bible telling us that there must be more than one dimension to time. He goes further, claiming that the only way for God to be uncreated is if there are at least two dimensions to time. Why? Why can’t he have existed for eternity past? Why can’t God be the first uncaused cause existing in the first moment of time? Then he goes further, imagining a curved surface with a curved timeline imbedded in it, myriad other timelines perpendicular to it that end up intersecting at a single focus. If God resides at this focus, he could send influence into his future at every point in our timeline. Such interventions would appear to us as miracles without cause. This seems quite plausible, but is there any evidence? Ross provides none.

Many of God’s actions require no extradimensionality to work, but Ross prefers the dimensions hypothesis. How did Jesus pass through walls to suddenly appear among his disciples? Did he phase through it, alter his matter, or step “around” it in a fourth spatial dimension?

How can a thousand years be like a day and how can God listen to billions of simultaneous prayers? Does he have a big brain and the experience of eons, or is it that he resides on a perpendicular timeline that experiences all of eternity from our perspective in a single instant? Doesn’t it make more sense for it to be the other way around, such that he has eternity to plan the best possible answer to prayer and deliver it to us immediately? Maybe it’s both.

How did Jesus pay the penalty for every sin committed by every person past and future in only a few hours on the cross? Especially since the penalty was eternity in Hell? Did he employ infinite data compression, count the same pain for everyone since justice has no conservation principle, or did he open up a new timeline for everyone that has ever lived and live them all at once?

Then there are the several explanations offered in which no attempt is made to tie them in to dimensions. In response to the ongoing debate between Calvinists and Arminians, he suggests that every time we make a choice, the outcome is the result of the sum of three wills – God’s, Satan’s, and ours. Every time we side with God, his will gets stronger, leading to a feedback loop. It is the same with Satan. Our will varies with strength, allowing us to swing back and forth (with applied effort). However, if we consistently side with one over the other, eventually we will reach a threshold after which we are permanently stuck on one side or the other. I have many problems with this model, but they are beyond the scope of this review.

When it comes to the debate between annihilation and eternal conscious torment, he sides firmly with ECT, but he adds the twist that torment is really just restraint and that Hell is not freedom from God, but that God continually intervenes to keep trapped souls safe from the evil actions of other souls trapped there. Dimensions are never mentioned, except to assert that Heaven and Hell are not part of our universe.

Then there is all the wild speculation and conclusion he engages in. He concludes there is no gravity in the world to come because the size of New Jerusalem would collapse otherwise. How does he know it isn’t hollow or supported by local antigravity? Or that the new world has lower gravity? Or that the whole thing isn’t purely symbolic? He also concludes that New Earth must be bigger than current Earth by the same factor that New Jerusalem is from the old Jerusalem. Why?

The chapter on the trinity is the most troubling, of course, since the trinity might be the most absurd idea humans have ever come up with. He rejects modalism. He rejects the “identities” model some people use, since, as humans, we cannot relate to ourselves as three distinct persons with each of our titles (such as father, son, and grandson). He rejects the body/soul/spirit model some people use, since these cannot interact with each other as full persons either. He further claims that while a soul can live without a body (debatable), a body cannot live without a soul. I guess he has never heard of plants, which elsewhere in the book he claims have bodies without souls. He rejects the “sun” model some people use, since heat and light are not distinct entities from the sun, but flow out from it. He rejects the “cake” model some people use, divided into slices and layers and ingredients, since he claims the layers and ingredients cease to exist once the cake is sliced and eaten. I think he has overstretched the analogy, since no one eats God in the same way we eat a cake (transubstantiation included). He rejects the air/light/heat model, because he claims that heat is a subset of light (It’s not), and air has different properties. Of course it has different properties! If the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had identical properties, we wouldn’t have different names for them and they would be considered the exact same thing! Sheesh! He then goes on to claim that all these models fail because they only use four dimensions (three spatial dimensions plus time). Are we sure the others can’t be thought of that way? He then goes on to explain the persons of the trinity as different fingers of the same hand, using only three dimensions in his explanation. This is partialism!

While a few of these ideas are interesting and plausible, they are written and packaged in such a way that I want to throw up. This might be Hugh’s most promising book, but it’s still a terrible book.