←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 4 of 10

Einstein, Relativity, and Time

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal welcomes Einstein's destruction of absolute space and substance but refuses the cost — the 'block universe' in which 'events do not happen; we simply meet them.' He defends the reality of time as the hinge on which God's creativity, human freedom, and the entire Reconstruction turns.

Having examined the nature of matter (Section 2) and tested theories of space and movement against Zeno's paradoxes (Section 3), Iqbal now turns to the most consequential physics of his own century — Einstein's theory of relativity — and immediately encounters the deepest threat to his entire philosophical project. Relativity is a double-edged sword. On one front it delivers exactly what Iqbal needs: it destroys the classical materialist picture of substance as a dead lump occupying a definite point in absolute space. But on another front it threatens to take from him the one thing his metaphysics cannot do without — the reality of time. The section is the record of Iqbal's attempt to accept the gift while refusing the loss, and it is also one of the most sustained displays of philosophical discipline in the entire Reconstruction.

The section advances through four connected moves. First, Iqbal welcomes what relativity destroys. Space is no longer absolute; mass, length, and duration are no longer intrinsic properties but vary with the observer's frame of reference; the universe is finite but boundless and would shrink to a point in the absence of matter. 'Substance' for modern physics is 'not a persistent thing with variable states, but a system of interrelated events' — and in Whitehead's reinterpretation the very notion of 'matter' is replaced by that of 'organism.' Second, Iqbal pauses to prevent two misreadings the moment he sees them coming. He flags Wildon Carr's slide from observer-relativity into Leibnizian idealism — and corrects it via T. P. Nunn, who points out that the 'observer' in Einstein's equations is a physical reference frame, not a mind, and can be replaced by a recording apparatus. He then states his own epistemological restraint with unusual sharpness: 'I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual,' but Einstein's theory 'deals only with the structure of things' and 'throws no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure.' The physics underdetermines the metaphysics, and Iqbal will not pretend otherwise. Third, having taken the gift, he names the price: the block universe. If time is treated as a fourth dimension of space, then the future is 'already given, as indubitably fixed as the past' — and Iqbal's own devastating six-word summary follows: 'Events do not happen; we simply meet them.' This is catastrophic. The creative God of the Qur'an, the dynamic self of khudī, the very vocabulary of action and moral responsibility — all of it depends on time being a medium in which something genuinely new can occur, not a dimension in which everything is already laid out. Fourth, he mounts a defence on two fronts. The first is a boundary claim: the mathematical treatment of time captures only those features of time that are amenable to mathematical treatment, and the abstraction, however legitimate within physics, is not entitled to claim that the extract is the whole. The second is a precise logical strike against Ouspensky — whose Tertium Organum was the most popular spatialised account of time available to Iqbal's audience. Ouspensky's argument, Iqbal shows, is fatally circular: it requires the serial, successive character of time at step one to identify the fourth dimension as the dimension of succession, and then declares that very serial character to be a perceptual illusion at step two, kicking away the ladder he has just climbed. 'If this characteristic is in reality an illusion, how can it fulfil Ouspensky's requirements of an original dimension?'

The reader who has followed the Reconstruction through three sections may wonder why Iqbal devotes so much energy to a single problem in the philosophy of physics. The answer is that everything else in the book depends on it. The reality of time is not a side issue — it is the hinge on which the entire project turns. A creative God whose activity 'brings about a new creation' (35:16) is unintelligible in a block universe; there is no room in a completed four-dimensional structure for an author or for an act of creation. Khudī — the sovereign self constituted by its choices, actions, and creative responses to its situation — becomes incoherent if the future is already given, because there are no genuine choices to make. Ijtihād, the independent rational effort that the entire Reconstruction demands of the Muslim community, loses its point if the future is fixed, because effort cannot alter what is already laid out. Every argument Iqbal makes about God, selfhood, freedom, and civilisational renewal presupposes that time is real, that the future is genuinely open, and that creative action makes a difference. The section is also a quiet masterclass in how to engage modern science as a religious thinker without either capitulation or fanaticism. Iqbal uses Einstein against materialism but refuses to be carried into idealism by the same wave; he declares his own conviction that reality is spiritual but refuses to claim that physics has proved it; and his arrest of Ouspensky is by precise logical analysis, not by an appeal to revelation. This is what intellectual honesty looks like in a philosopher who has both faith and a working knowledge of his century's physics.

For the Tadreej project, this section delivers two interlocking lessons. The first concerns epistemic sophistication. The capacity Iqbal models here — recognising that a method may be sovereign within its proper domain and yet illegitimate when treated as exhaustive of all knowledge — is exactly what the Seven Capacities framework calls Epistemic Confidence. The Pakistani student trained to treat scientific knowledge as the paradigm of all knowledge will either reject science in the name of faith or reject faith in the name of science; Iqbal demands both at once, and that demand requires the philosophical capacity to distinguish the success of a method from the totalising claim that the method is the only method. The second concerns the civilisational stakes of fatalism. The most pervasive form of fatalism in the contemporary Muslim world is not a philosophical position but a cultural habit — the tendency to treat the future as already decreed (muqaddar), rendering human effort irrelevant and translating piety into passivity. Iqbal's engagement with the deepest physics of his time is not an academic exercise. It is an attempt to demonstrate that the reality of time and the efficacy of human action are philosophically defensible at the highest level of intellectual rigour — that fatalism is not only spiritually deadening but intellectually unjustified, and that the Muslim who resigns themselves to a 'fixed future' is making not only a moral surrender but a metaphysical mistake.

Original text

With Einstein space is real, but relative to the observer. He rejects the Newtonian concept of an absolute space. The object observed is variable; it is relative to the observer; its mass, shape, and size change as the observer's position and speed change. Movement and rest, too, are relative to the observer. There is, therefore, no such thing as a self-subsistent materiality of classical physics. It is, however, necessary here to guard against a misunderstanding. The use of the word ‘observer’ in this connexion has misled Wildon Carr into the view that the theory of Relativity inevitably leads to Monadistic Idealism. It is true that according to the theory the shapes, sizes, and durations of phenomena are not absolute. But as Professor Nunn points out, the space-time frame does not depend on the observer's mind; it depends on the point of the material universe to which his body is attached. In fact, the ‘observer’ can be easily replaced by a recording apparatus.

Personally, I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual: but in order to avoid a widespread misunderstanding it is necessary to point out that Einstein's theory, which, as a scientific theory, deals only with the structure of things, throws no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure. The philosophical value of the theory is twofold. First, it destroys, not the objectivity of Nature, but the view of substance as simple location in space — a view which led to materialism in Classical Physics. ‘Substance’ for modern Relativity-Physics is not a persistent thing with variable states, but a system of interrelated events. In Whitehead's presentation of the theory the notion of ‘matter’ is entirely replaced by the notion of ‘organism’. Secondly, the theory makes space dependent on matter. The universe, according to Einstein, is not a kind of island in an infinite space; it is finite but boundless; beyond it there is no empty space. In the absence of matter the universe would shrink to a point.

Looking, however, at the theory from the standpoint that I have taken in these lectures, Einstein's Relativity presents one great difficulty, i.e. the unreality of time. A theory which takes time to be a kind of fourth dimension of space must, it seems, regard the future as something already given, as indubitably fixed as the past. Time as a free creative movement has no meaning for the theory. It does not pass. Events do not happen; we simply meet them. It must not, however, be forgotten that the theory neglects certain characteristics of time as experienced by us; and it is not possible to say that the nature of time is exhausted by the characteristics which the theory does note in the interests of a systematic account of those aspects of Nature which can be mathematically treated.

Nor is it possible for us laymen to understand what the real nature of Einstein's time is. It is obvious that Einstein's time is not Bergson's pure duration. Nor can we regard it as serial time. Serial time is the essence of causality as defined by Kant. The cause and its effect are mutually so related that the former is chronologically prior to the latter, so that if the former is not, the latter cannot be. If mathematical time is serial time, then on the basis of the theory it is possible, by a careful choice of the velocities of the observer and the system in which a given set of events is happening, to make the effect precede its cause.

It appears to me that time regarded as a fourth dimension of space really ceases to be time. A modern Russian writer, Ouspensky, in his book called Tertium Organum, conceives the fourth dimension to be the movement of a three-dimensional figure in a direction not contained in itself. Just as the movement of the point, the line and the surface in a direction not contained in them gives us the ordinary three dimensions of space, in the same way the movement of the three-dimensional figure in a direction not contained in itself must give us the fourth dimension of space. And since time is the distance separating events in order of succession and binding them in different wholes, it is obviously a distance lying in a direction not contained in the three-dimensional space. As a new dimension this distance, separating events in the order of succession, is incommensurable with the dimensions of three-dimensional space, as a year is incommensurable with St. Petersburg. It is perpendicular to all directions of three-dimensional space, and is not parallel to any of them.

Elsewhere in the same book Ouspensky describes our time-sense as a misty space-sense and argues, on the basis of our psychic constitution, that to one-, two- or three-dimensional beings the higher dimension must always appear as succession in time. This obviously means that what appears to us three-dimensional beings as time is in reality an imperfectly sensed space-dimension which in its own nature does not differ from the perfectly sensed dimensions of Euclidean space. In other words, time is not a genuine creative movement; and that what we call future events are not fresh happenings, but things already given and located in an unknown space. Yet in his search for a fresh direction, other than the three Euclidean dimensions, Ouspensky needs a real serial time, i.e. a distance separating events in the order of succession. Thus time which was needed and consequently viewed as succession for the purposes of one stage of the argument is quietly divested, at a later stage, of its serial character and reduced to what does not differ in anything from the other lines and dimensions of space. It is because of the serial character of time that Ouspensky was able to regard it as a genuinely new direction in space. If this characteristic is in reality an illusion, how can it fulfil Ouspensky's requirements of an original dimension?

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5. Life, Consciousness, and Mechanism

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