Pop-Cultured Catholic #19: Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and God’s Transcendence of Time

For the next three posts in this series, I will be diving into “Interstellar”, “The Imitation Game”, and then “Samurai Jack”. These posts will respectively suggest another way to imagine time through God’s eyes, another way to view the Problem of Evil, and then a way to combine both into one analysis.

When Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction epic, “Interstellar”, released in 2014, it made for a very memorable theater experience. I have not seen the film again, since my time in the theaters ten years ago. But I remember finding it very beautifully produced and acted, with one scene near the climax particularly provoking some thoughts in my mind. That scene will be the subject of my post.

The film’s plot is set in a dystopian future Earth, which is facing worldwide famines due to crop blights, dust storms, pollution, and depleted resources. Mysteriously, a wormhole has opened near the planet Saturn, creating a passage which can take astronauts far out to another galaxy, in search of new habitable planets to colonize. Matthew McConaughey plays the protagonist, Joseph Cooper, who is a former-astronaut-turned-farmer enlisted to rejoin NASA and take part in this mission to save human civilization. One of Cooper’s main crew members is Dr. Amelia Brand, played by Anne Hathaway. While Cooper’s crew spends decades aboard the spacecraft Endurance to explore the three planetary candidates and rendezvous with earlier expeditions, his daughter named Murph (stays behind and grows up to assist Amelia’s father, Professor John Brand. Professor John Brand hopes to find the solution to a gravity equation, which is apparently needed to construct spacecraft suitable for a mass exodus from Earth.

One other subplot in the film involves cryptic messages mysteriously appearing in the room of Cooper’s daughter, which she refers to as her “ghost”. The first messages leave dust patterns, which Murph can translate into geographic coordinates leading her to Professor Brand’s secret NASA facility. Right before Cooper leaves on the mission, Murph interprets another message from the “ghost”, which makes her frantic. She desperately tells Cooper that she received a message for him to stay. But her father is not swayed and goes on the mission, leaving her his wristwatch.

As years pass, the situation becomes a desperate countdown, with two of the three planets turning out to be unsuitable for colonization, Cooper’s crew losing lives and resources, conditions on Earth getting worse, plus Cooper and Murph aging at different rates over the decades. The first planet investigated by an explorer named Miller turned out to be too prone to worldwide floods, supersized tidal waves, and time dilation anomalies. Having only enough resources left to guarantee one more planet’s exploration, Cooper’s surviving crew venture to the planet, where its explorer Mann is still alive and broadcasting. Lured in by Mann’s promising messages, they drop down, only to learn that Mann falsified his reports to not be left stranded. This results in a fight, where Mann tries to kill Cooper’s crew and hijack their vessel to escape. Mann’s attempt fails but leaves their craft even more damaged and depleted. Back on Earth, Murph learns from Professor John Brand on his deathbed that the solution to his gravity equation is still missing a vital component. The data needed for that missing piece can only be collected, if one of Cooper’s crew ventures inescapably close to the nearby black hole, Gargantua. All the while, Cooper watches broadcasted messages and sees Murph aging faster than him, along with Earth’s conditions becoming more dire. In a desperate bid, Cooper and Dr. Amelia Brand plan to use the gravitational field of Gargantua to slingshot their ship towards the third “Edmunds’ planet”, while Cooper detaches from the ship to lighten its weight and allow himself to enter the black hole.

The climax involves Cooper drifting into the black hole, before an unexpected miracle happens, which ties back to the earlier “ghost” subplot. Cooper suddenly sees himself flying through an advanced construct built like a tesseract, the theoretical 4D equivalent to a 3D cube or 2D square. As he struggles to make sense of his surroundings, he hears messages that unspecified beings residing in the “fifth dimension” have fashioned this place for him, where time is represented as the fourth physical dimension made perceptible in a 3D layout. I do not recall the film revealing whether “they” are an alien race, supernatural beings, or highly advanced future humans, though Cooper speculates the latter. Inside the tesseract’s fabric, Cooper sees countless visions of Murph’s room at differing points in time, all simultaneously. While interacting with the images, Cooper realizes that he can manipulate objects in Murph’s room. Not only that, he realizes that he himself was Murph’s “ghost” all along, transmitting messages from the future, at one point even telling Murph to tell his past self to “stay”.

The plot is resolved when Cooper uses his newfound abilities to manipulate the wristwatch in Murph’s room, finally communicating with her through Morse code and relaying the data he collected from the black hole to an earlier point in time. With Murph now having the necessary data, thanks to her “ghost”, she is able to solve Professor Brand’s equation in time for a full exodus of humanity from Earth to be possible. After Cooper fulfills that purpose, the tesseract folds inward and ejects him through the fabric of space and time… right back to Saturn. Cooper wakes up in a space station orbiting Saturn, where he meets a now elderly Murph on her deathbed. She informs him that the colonization of Edmunds’ planet is successfully underway, and that Dr. Amelia Brand is waiting to meet him on the newly established colony.

Immediately when I saw that scene of Cooper floating inside the tesseract and viewing Murph’s room at infinite points in time, I found myself able to visualize God’s own transcendence of time better than ever before. When I was a kid, I remember my mom and various apologists stating that God transcends time. According to them, this means that God can receive a prayer about a person or event and answer it, even if the outcome of that situation is already in the past. One example could be someone continuing to pray that his test score turns out well, after he already took the test. God knows that a person will pray about that same situation, in the future, and can answer such prayers at the present time. I have heard a similar reason traditionally stated for how the grace of God could cleanse Mary of Original Sin, through the Immaculate Conception, even though Christ does not start pouring out his grace on the cross for mankind until many years after Mary’s conception. God was able to use the future promise of salvation through Christ’s passion, in order to already begin cleansing someone in the past leading up to it. I imagine such an angle could also help further flesh out a reconciliation, between Genesis’ six-"day" Creation narrative and our universe’s age in the billions of years. That image of Cooper drifting amongst countless visions of Murph’s room, each at different times, helped me to visualize how God might “see” everything in such scenarios. Not to mention how ethereal Hans Zimmer’s “S.T.A.Y.” soundtrack accompanying the scene is.

That scene in “Interstellar” has also helped me better visualize the often proposed solution to the apparent paradox, between God’s omniscience and humanity’s free will. Often times, when God is stated to know everything that both has happened and will happen, people see this as potentially conflicting with the concept of free will. If someone can already know how the future will play out, would that not mean we are living in a deterministic universe, where everyone’s destiny is already set in stone, with no ability to choose a different course? This calls to mind a common criticism aimed at Calvinism, where God is said to operate by predestination and even one’s future salvation or damnation is independent of their free choice. That would be the case, if God’s ability to know the future is based solely on knowing the initial circumstances, then predicting the outcome based on it, like how us limited humans operate. However, God’s omniscience is rooted in him not only knowing all predictable outcomes, but also knowing all that is perceptible. If people have a capacity for free will and, thus, the specific choices they make in the future are not predictable, then one who is omniscient can still know a person’s future choices, if there is a way to directly perceive them. If God can transcend time and sees all past/present/future events at once, like Cooper in the tesseract, then a person’s future choices out of their own free will would be perceptible to him, even if they are not predictable.

Finally, Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin went further and used such analyses to ponder the question of why an omniscient and loving God would create someone, who would eventually turn out to choose Hell instead of Heaven, when he could choose to not create them in the first place. During his October 14, 2024 podcast on the subject, Jimmy Akin distinguishes between “knowledge of all possible things” and “knowledge of all actual things”, which respectively would reflect “knowledge of simple intelligence” and “knowledge of vision”. If God were to know all the free choices a person will make, without needing said person to be created to make those choices at some point in time, then it would require what some have dubbed “middle knowledge”. According to Akin, whether or not God’s omniscience would include this hypothetical middle knowledge has been debated by various theologians in history. One argument against God having this middle knowledge is that it could be a logical contradiction to have a knowable outcome to a free choice, which is never made at any point in time. The argument goes on to say that God would, therefore, have no way of knowing whether a human or angel would choose salvation or damnation, unless they are created in the first place. While God generally cannot be “surprised” due to him knowing all possibilities, it is argued that he still gambles in a way, whenever he creates someone. The final argument is that such a limitation in God’s knowledge should not be seen as a denial of omniscience. That is, any more than God’s inability to create a square circle, know the structure of a square circle, create/envision a four-sided triangle, make “1 + 1 = 3” true, create a rock too heavy for even him to lift, etc. would be denials of his omnipotence and omniscience. Such terms are often defined by an ability to create/do/know all that can be created/done/known, which implies a limitation to what is internally logical.

That about wraps up my analysis for today. My supplementary links will include clips from the movie, Hans Zimmer’s “S.T.A.Y.” soundtrack, and Jimmy Akin’s commentary which I cited…

1.) "Interstellar Movie - Official Trailer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LqzF5WauAw

2.) "Interstellar Cooper entering into the Black hole 1080p mp4"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbsPgGpfKpU

3.) "Interstellar- tesseract scene"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrVpYwUFewU

4.) "Interstellar | Murph Saves The World (Full Scene) | Paramount Movies"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvns5DaW-ug

5.) "Interstellar - The Watch and Closing Tesseract Full Scene"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMxJnoPOFkg

6.) "Interstellar Climax | Coopr meets his Elderly daughter Murph | Dr.Brand waiting | HD"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcRa20mPEc

7.) "Interstellar Official Soundtrack | S.T.A.Y. – Hans Zimmer | WaterTower"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia3eQ7QD9Z0

8.) "Why Would God Create Someone to Go to Hell? | Jimmy Akin Podcast"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixxH0WzJFbg