Apologetically, the mindset of scientific naturalism is one of the hardest nuts to crack. Many people today—like the Agent Scully in the early episodes of The X-Files—are caught up in a worldview so determined to explain everything in terms of natural scientific processes that it leaves no room for the supernatural. Adherents to this view profess to find concepts like heaven, miracles, and revelation unintelligible.
It’s a pity, then, that more people don’t know about a little book written just over a hundred years ago. This book has the potential to crack the mindset of scientific naturalism and—in a moment of revelation—make intelligible all kinds of religious concepts that naturalists find difficult to grasp.
The Book
In the late 1800s, Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926) produced a short book titled Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Though Abbott was a scholar of several disciplines—including mathematics, theology, and Shakespeare—Flatland is his most popular work. It is a mathematical allegory that is still in print and also widely available on the Internet.
Flatland is an imaginative exercise to help the reader explore the idea of multi-dimensional geometries. In particular, it is intended to help him imagine the relationship between our own universe—which we experience in the three physical dimensions of height, width, and length—and realms with more physical dimensions.
Abbott induces his readers to think about the possibilities of interacting with higher physical dimensions through his story of an encounter between a two-dimensional being and a three-dimensional being. This keeps the main story within the realm of the comprehendible (our minds being structured to work comfortably with a maximum of three physical dimensions) while allowing the reader to wonder about possible encounters with higher-dimensional beings.
(After Abbott, Einsteinian physics proposed time as a dimension paralleling height, width, and length, but we experience it in a different manner than the other three, and so it may be classified as a temporal rather than a physical dimension. More recently, string theory has proposed the existence in our universe of a number of physical dimensions, but these are thought to operate primarily on the subatomic level, leaving us to consciously experience only the conventional three.)
The Story
Abbott’s novel is an autobiographical tale told by the character A Square, whose is named after his geometrical shape. He introduces us to Flatland, a world with width and length but no height (technically, with an imperceptible amount of height). All its inhabitants are figures that could be drawn on a two-dimensional surface—line segments, triangles, squares, circles, et cetera.
For the benefit of the three-dimensional reader, the narrator explains the nature of life in Flatland and Flatland’s history. In the course of his account, many ideas, mores, and customs of Victorian England are satirized (in particular, attitudes regarding women, the upper class, and the lower class). A Square then describes his own experiences, beginning with a dream he had of a lower, one-dimensional realm known as Lineland. After this mind-expanding dream, he receives a visitation from an inhabitant of a higher, three-dimensional realm—Spaceland or Space.
The individual he encounters is a sphere, who proves his existence to A Square by a variety of means. The sphere plunges his three-dimensional body through the plane of Flatland, resulting in the appearance of a point that grows into a circle and then shrinks away again into a point before disappearing. The sphere speaks to A Square as a disembodied voice while not within the plane of Flatland. He tells A Square of things he learned while aloft in Spaceland and is able to look down inside closed structures in Flatland, plucking an item from inside a locked cupboard and touching A Square inside his “stomach.”
In the course of events, the sphere explains to A Square that he has come to preach the Gospel of the Three Dimensions, which he is allowed to preach only once every thousand years as a “millennial Revelation” and of which he hopes A Square will be a worthy apostle.
Finally, when all else fails, the sphere carries the narrator up outside of the plane of Flatland into the third dimension, “initiating” him into “the Mysteries of Three Dimensions.” Initially, once A Square perceives the sphere’s three-dimensional nature (based on the circular shape of his own land’s priests but more magnificent yet), he is inclined to worship him. He is inclined also to regard the third-dimensional perspective (omnividence) he has acquired as a divine attribute, but the sphere explains that even the pickpockets and cutthroats of his own world have this.
In the course of his journey in Space, A Square learns that the authorities of his world, led by the circular priests, are aware of millennial outbreaks of individuals claiming to have had “revelations from another World” based on “manifestations” of beings claiming to be from the third dimension. These authorities are prepared to suppress “the heresy of the Third Dimension.” A Square also learns that there is evidence that the inhabitants of Space have also been visited by beings of an even higher realm, though they have not attributed these beings’ origin to a Fourth Dimension.
In his enthusiasm for what he has learned and in his desire to “evangelize the world,” A Square makes incautious remarks that get him arrested and thrown in prison. The novel ends with his suffering a “martyrdom . . . for the cause of Truth” by his imprisonment.
The Apologetics
Flatland is an allegory touching on multiple areas including mathematics, geometry, (potentially) physics, and also theology. Indeed, it is suffused with religious themes, some of which are noted above. The work’s multiplicity of layers—together with its popularity among non-religious persons whose point of view is oriented toward the sciences—makes Flatland a worthy subject for apologists.
By the contemplation of an additional physical dimension, Flatland offers a plausible secular account of a variety of phenomena that would normally be classified as miraculous and thus looked upon with scorn by a secular mindset.
In fact, numerous miracles of the Bible could be explained within the narrative framework provided by Abbott. One would be having knowledge unobtainable through conventional means, as when Jesus knows what Nathanael was doing though he was not conventionally present (John 1:48). Another would be moving objects from one location to another without their passing through the intervening distance, as when Jesus disappears from a sealed tomb (Matt 28:2–6) or when he appears among the disciples though they are behind closed doors (John 20:19, 26).
Further applications of the book’s methodology are also possible. For example, waters could be made to part (Ex. 14:22) if they were shunted into and out of the fourth dimension. Loaves and fishes could be multiplied (Matt. 14:15–21) if they had a slight fourth-dimensional thickness and were sliced along their forth-dimensional axis. A man might be made to ascend and then disappear (Acts 1:9) if he were carried upwards by a fourth-dimensional power and then moved into the fourth dimension. And an object could be made present in many locations (as with the Eucharist) if third-dimensional space were warped so that many third-dimensional locations converged on a single fourth-dimensional location.
Using the allegory of Flatland, the apologist is equipped with a powerful tool to make intelligible to the secular mind many specific miracles of the Bible and the general phenomena of apostles and prophets being contacted by a higher realm (heaven) to preach a message that the inhabitants of our world have held in disfavor.
The Warnings
An apologist using Flatland should be warned about a couple of things.
First, Flatland should be used with caution because some of the views described in it (especially with regard to women) are remarkably “politically incorrect” by modern standards, and this may prove a barrier to some readers. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that Flatland is a work of satire and that its remarks regarding various groups—the upper class, the lower class, and women—are to be understood as spoofs of Victorian views, not as declarations of fundamental truth. This is especially true in a book as iconoclastic as this one regarding the nature of the world.
Second, and much more important, while heaven is a higher realm than we occupy, it cannot be understood only as a fourth physical dimension, with its inhabitant (God, angels, souls) as physical beings moving in a different kind of space.
In general, applications of Flatland work best on “scientific” individuals who hold the supernatural in contempt. The specific explanations made possible by the existence of another dimension are much more speculative. Indeed, they are not always the best explanation. (For instance, Scripture attributes the parting of the Red Sea to a wind that pushed back the waters [Ex. 14:21], and physics indicate this could have happened at a wind-strength that still would have allowed humans to traverse the distance). Nevertheless, they remain possible ways in which in which the various miraculous effects could be accomplished. The apologist can say, “If I can conceive of it happening one way based on a science-fiction novel such as Flatland, then God knows at least this way and probably more besides.”