Abstract
In our discussion of the personalist objection to divine timelessness, we deliberately restricted ourselves to a consideration of that state of affairs—which according to Christian theology is metaphysically possible—of God’s existing alone sans creation, and we saw no reason to think that in such a state God could not be both timeless and personal. We had to resist the natural impulse to press the question of God’s timelessness with regard to a state of affairs of the co-existence of God and a temporal world. But now we want to address that question squarely.
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References
This is the failing of Pike’s argument, inspired by Schleiermacher, that timelessness is incompatible with omnipotence (Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion [New York: Schocken Books, 1970], p. 110; cf. p. 173). A timeless God has the ability to create a temporal world, even if, were He to do so, He would be temporal. Pike gratuitously assumes that God’s (a)temporal status is an essential rather than contingent attribute.
Pike, God and Timelessness, p. 110; Pike’s influence is evident on Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), p. 13; Grace M. Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body, with a Foreword by John MacQuarrie (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1984), p. 50.
Alan Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), pp. 21–22.
This claim will need qualification if quantum indeterminacy is ontic. For then the causal conditions of some quantum event, say, the decay of an elementary particle, might be present at t and be sufficient for the occurrence of the event in the sense that no other conditions are necessary and yet the event not occur at t because the conditions do not deterministically produce the effect. But given sufficient time and some finite probability of the event’s occurrence, the event will eventually happen. In such a case, we must either say that the cause is not zero time related to the effect or else that the passage of time is part of the causal conditions of the effect in each particular case, so that the passage of time is causally efficacious or else that the event in question is simply uncaused. This qualification does not affect Padgett’s point about divine intentions being zero time related to their effects, however, since there cannot be any duration between God’s timeless volitions and their temporal effects. Even in the case of a temporal deity, divine causation is significantly disanalogous to indeterministic quantum causal conditions. God’s volitions are deterministic of their effects, not indeterministic, since He is omnipotent. Even if they were not, the indeterministic quantum causal conditions have to be continuously present in order for the effect to eventually occur, so that God could not cease to will an effect before it appears. In that case, we would either include the passage of time as part of the causal conditions, so that the cause is zero time related to the effect after all, or, if we want God’s volitions to be the total cause, include the duration as part of the effect willed by God, so that God’s causation is simultaneous with the effect. In any case, deterministic interpretations of quantum theory are viable (e.g., Brody’s interpretation of quantum theory as applying to ensembles of particles (Thomas Brody, The Philosophy behind Physics, ed. L. de la Pena and P. E. Hodgson [Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993]).
Padgett does not spell out the situation this clearly, but this is what he means, on the pain of positing locations of B and C in absolute space and time. The past lightcone is a spacetime structure at a spacetime point comprised of all events which can causally influence the event at that point. For a discussion see my Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), chap. 5.
Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time, pp. 72–73. By an “episode,” Padgett means a phase of a temporal entity’s duration. Ibid., pp. 63–66, 73.
William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge, Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 154.
For this reason there is no substance to Leftow’s attempt to circumvent the present argument by maintaining that whether or not time exists, the proposition expressed by “God exists” is timelessly true (Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity,Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion [Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991], p. 52). Leftow ignores the issue of whether God can exist timelessly and be really related to the world. His appeal to the timeless existence of numbers (pp. 40–48) is vitiated precisely by the fact that numbers, unlike God, have no causal relation to the universe. Moreover, advocates of timeless truth hold that there are timelessly true propositions about temporal entities, so that the timeless truth of God exists does not imply that God exists timelessly.
Michael-Thomas Liske, “Kann Gott reale Beziehungen zu den Geschöpfen haben?” Theologie and Philosophie 68 (1993): 224. According to Liske, the reason Thomas resisted recognizing God’s real relation to the world is that “Obviously he feared that the mere temporal obtaining of a relation from God, if it is real, requires that God Himself must be temporal” (Ibid., p. 218).
Thomas Aquinas Summa contra gentiles 2. 35. 3–5. Liske unfortunately conflates the question of God’s undergoing relational change in creating with the question of His intrinsically changing in creating when he writes, “According to Thomas relational statements which either primarily signify or merely connote an actual relation of God to creatures first hold of God from that point of time at which there are creatures (S.t. la. 13. 7 ad 1). It is natural to suppose that these relations therefore first begin to hold from a certain point of time because the absolute reality which grounds them, God’s creatorial activity, first then begins to work.... Since creatures... are first brought into being by God’s activity, it seems impossible that God is already changelessly exercising His creatorial activity, but that the relation to creatures first comes to be at a certain point of time.... But should we suppose that God actualizes His creatorial activity temporally? But now this surely implies a change in Him” (Liske, “Reale Beziehungen,” pp. 224–225).
Focusing on the question of whether the act of creating involves intrinsic change in God’s will or activity to the neglect of Thomas’s position on God’s real relation to the world are Davis, Logic and the Nature of God, pp. 12–13, and Edward R. Wierenga, The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes,Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 198. Because he softens Aquinas’s doctrine of no real divine relations to the world to mean merely that God immutably causes the world, Yates is also forced to recur to this theme, yet without explaining how God’s timelessness could be preserved in the face of His real relations with a changing, temporal world (John C. Yates, The Timelessness of God [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990], pp. 142, 159–160). Incredibly, Harris thinks that “Aquinas chose to ignore the whole problem” (James F. Harris, “God, Etemality, and the View from Nowhere,” in Logic, God,and Metaphysics, Studies in Philosophy and Religion 15 [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992], p. 74)! Similarly oblivious to Aquinas’s solution is Richard R. LaCroix, “Aquinas on God’s Omnipresence and Timelessness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 42 (1982): 391–399.
Aquinas Summa contra gentiles 2. 32–38.
Ibid., 2. 35. 3. Cf. 2. 35. 5: “the effect of God’s will was not delayed, although having been always willed, the effect was not itself always existent....the creature began to exist at that time which God appointed from all eternity.”
Aristotle Categories 4. 1625–2’4. Moreover, others of the categories listed involved relations, specifically time and place. Certain relations, too, might not be confined to a certain category or predicament but characterize all of them and so are called transcendental relations.
Thomas Aquinas De veritate 4. 5. Cf. Summa theologiae la. 13. 7; Summa contra gentiles 2. 11–14; De potentia Dei 3. 3.
Aquinas Summa contra gentiles 2. 12. 5. Precisely the same solution is offered by Aquinas to the question of how the timeless, immutable God can become incarnate in Jesus Christ (idem Summa theologiae 3ae. 2. 7).
Aquinas De potentia Dei 3. 3. Cf his comment, “Consequently creation is really nothing but a relation of the creature to the Creator together with a beginning of existence.”
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 16–17. Hill points out that in this discussion the concepts of divine causality, knowledge, and love are entirely analogical (William J. Hill, “Does the World Make a Difference to God?” Thomist 38 [1974]: 155). It seems to me, however, that it is the causal relation between God and creatures which most clearly requires divine temporality. For a lucid critique of Hartshorne’s extravagant inferences from the reality of divine relations to the world, see Merold Westphal, “Temporality and Finitism in Hartshome’s Theism,” Review of Metaphysics 19 (1966): 550–564. Westphal shows that God’s knowing and willing a contingent world do not entail that God is subject to change and dependence; nevertheless, he admits that they do entail that God is in some sense contingent (Ibid., p. 551), and this suffices to refute the view that God has no real relation to the world. Westphal states that according to Aquinas God possesses in addition to eternal and necessary properties eternal and contingent ones, these latter involving His relation to the world. He comments, “There is no difficulty in harmonizing this with Thomas’s assertion of the divine simplicity and his denial of divine accidents, for we can and should take these latter to be restricted to God in himself (God abstract and unrelated), whereas the contingent and multiple properties of relation belong to the divine being in relation (God concrete)” (Ibid., p. 563). In denying that God is really related to creatures, opines Westphal, Thomas is only saying that God is related to creatures in such a way as to render invalid any inference of dependence in him (Ibid., p. 564). But this is manifestly untrue, since relations are accidents and God, being simple, has no accidents. The doctrine of divine simplicity permits no such distinction within God as God abstract and God concrete, except as a conceptual distinction only. As the pure act of being, God has no such relations as Westphal imagines, these being extrinsic denominations with no ontological correlates. For a discussion of the Auseinandersetzung between Hartshorne and Westphal, see Gene Reeves and Delwin Brown, “The Development of Process Philosophy,” in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought,ed. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. 45.
Peter Geach, “God’s Relation to the World,” Sophia 8/2 (1969): 4, rep. in Peter Geach, Logic Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 321; cf. idem, “Causality and Creation,” Sophia 1 (1962): 1–8.
See remarks of C. J. F. Williams, “Is God Really Related to His Creatures?” Sophia 8/3 (1969): 1–10. Williams’s view that sentences like “God created the world” are not relational at all only serves to reinforce the point that God must be different in worlds in which He does not create, since He then lacks an intrinsic property He has in the actual world. The relation of co-existence also remains to be accounted for.
William J. Hill explains, “For God to become a cause is quite simply for an effect to begin to be.... The realness of the transaction lies entirely on the side of the effect, serving as the basis for extrinsically denominating God as really causing. Thus for God to really cause is for the effect to really come to be” (Hill, “World Make a Difference to God,” pp. 156–157). What is not intelligible is why on this account the denomination of God as cause is only extrinsic, were this view not imposed a priori by divine simplicity.
Hence, I find myself constrained to agree with Schubert Ogden when he writes, “Recognizing that the God of Holy Scripture is undeniably a God who is related to his creatures, theologians have generally allowed that relational concepts may be predicated of deity, provided that they are understood analogically instead of literally. The difficulty, however, is that, on conventional metaphysical premisses, to say that God is not literally related to the world could only mean that he is literally not related to it; and so the classical analogia entis, like traditional theism in general, has been continually caught in incoherence and self-contradiction” (Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], p. 151).
Ogden errs in contrasting analogical use of terms to literal use; the contrast to analogical use is univocal use and to literal use metaphorical use. Still he is correct that on Thomistic metaphysics God’s being Creator, Lord, etc. are only extrinsic denominations because God is not related to the world.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “God Everlasting,” in God and the Good, ed. C. Orlebeke and L. Smedes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 186–187; Quentin Smith, Language and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 204–214; cf. Roderick M. Chisholm and Dean W. Zimmerman, “Theology and Tense,” Noirs 31 (1997): 264. For a critique of such arguments, see Charles J. Kelly, “Why God Is Not Really Related to the World,” Philosophy Research Archives 14 (1988–89): 476. See also Hugh J. McCann, “The God beyond Time,” in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Louis Pojman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 237, who, however, fails to justify his denying that extrinsic, but real, change would be temporalizing.
We thereby circumvent the issues raised by John Yates in his interesting discussion of timeless causation and creation (Yates, Timelessness of God, chap. 5; cf. McCann, “God beyond Time,” pp. 238239). Basically Yates argues that causation involves no transition from potency to act in the cause, so that changeless causing is possible. I should go further and say that causation need not involve any temporal transition from potency to act in the effect as well, so that both cause and effect could be timeless. Thus we may agree with McCann that causation is not inherently temporal or atemporal. But McCann fails to explain why God’s willing or causing new effects would not be changes in Him, even though the results of His creative activity are not. When it comes to timeless creation of a temporal world, McCann and Yates at best show that God’s act of creating need not be an intrinsic change in Him, but only an extrinsic change. They fail to show that an extrinsic change in God would not suffice to temporalize God. Yates’s point that creation takes no time only shows that creating lacks temporal extension, not temporal location. What Yates (like McCann) needs is a robust doctrine of no real relation of God to the world, but he waffles on this (Ibid., p. 183). Similarly Liske feels driven to posit real relations of God to the world but claims that the beginning or ceasing to be of a real relation need not temporalize its subject. He says that fatherhood, for example, is a real relation based on intrinsic properties of a man but that this relation can cease to exist when the man’s only child dies (Liske, “Reale Beziehungen,” pp. 223–224). But at best this example only shows that God could acquire or lose real relations without any intrinsic change on His part, which I am conceding for the sake of argument.
W. Norris Clarke, “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” in God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham University Press, 1973), p. 55. Cf. William J. Hill, “Does God Know the Future? Aquinas and Some Modems,” Theological Studies 36 (1975): 14.
“In this sphere of intentionality, God determines Himself to be the sort of God He is by choosing to create this existing universe rather than any of an infinite number of other worlds possible to Him. This makes no difference to God’s nature, not to His activity of loving and knowing, but it obviously makes a difference regarding what He knows and loves. Had God chosen not to create or to create a different cosmos than the one we have, He would in this sense be a different God than He in fact is.”
See also William E. Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability in God,” International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983): 273–275, who claims that the content of God’s knowledge could be different from what it is, but that the content of God’s omniscience is not identical to His essence; similarly, not the content of what God wills, but God’s willing power or activity is His essence.
Clarke, “New Look at Immutability,” p. 56.
W. Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God (Winston-Salem, N. Car.: Wake Forest University, 1979), p. 90, summarizing his earlier article. In this second piece, Clarke appears prepared to jettison the doctrine of God’s having no real relation to the world, but this is appearance only, since the older doctrine he still holds to be true; it is just that the meaning of “real relation” has changed. We shall see that it is Clarke who changes the meaning of ‘real relation“ so as to make the traditional doctrine more credible; but in doing so he undercuts not only the classic doctrine, but the core Thomistic conception of God.
Clarke, Philosophical Approach to God, p. 90.
Clarke, “New Look at Immutability,” p. 65. So also Hill, who writes, “God becomes what He was not—not in Himself but in the world and in history. It is not simply the case that what is other than God changes, but rather that God changes—not in Himself but in the other and by way of the other. God changes not absolutely but relationally, i.e., in terms of those dispositions of knowing and loving that He chooses to adopt toward a universe of creatures that in a finite and temporal way determine themselves” (Hill, “God Know the Future,” p. 15).
I take it that Hill means that God undergoes no intrinsic change in His activities, but that as a consequence of extrinsic change in Him due to His relations with temporal creatures God is temporal. Being temporal will entail intrinsic change in God, in that He has a changing present, but that change is explanatorily posterior to the extrinsic change that brings Him into time.
Clarke, Philosophical Approach to God, p. 94; cf. p. 96.
A point made by Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 39–40. Plantinga errs, however, in equating contingently possessed properties with accidental properties. See also John Lamont, “Aquinas on Divine Simplicity,” Monist 8 (1977): 521–538, who explains that for Aquinas there is in God no distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale.
As Hartshorne protested, “It simply cannot be that everything in God is necessary, including his knowledge that this world exists, unless the world is in the same sense necessary and there is no contingency whatever” (Hartshorne, Divine Relativity,p. 14). Cf. Ogden, Reality of God, p. 17.
William P. Alston, “Hartshorne and Aquinas: A Via Media,” in Existence and Actuality, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Franklin I. Gamwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 83–84.
One cannot save the situation by distinguishing with Mann God’s power or activity of willing and knowing from what He wills and knows, for power and activity are not identical. Everyone agrees that God has the same power across worlds, but this is not to say that God has the same activity across worlds, since activity involves the exercising of some power. In worlds in which God does not create, He retains the power to create and love creatures, but in such a world He is not exercising that power. Hence, God’s activity of creating and sustaining the universe is not identical with the power to do so, and His activity of loving creatures is not identical with his disposition to love them should He create them. Thus, in worlds in which God refrains from creating, He is clearly different than He is in the actual world. Hence, God is not simple.
This is especially clear in Aquinas’s exposition in Summa contra gentiles 2. 12. 2, where he argues that relations which refer to God’s effects cannot exist in Him as accidents, since He is simple, nor can they (like God’s action) be identical with His essence because as relational terms they would make God’s very being relative to something else; “Therefore, such relations do not really exist in God.” See also A. J. Kelly, “God: How Near a Relation?” Thomist 34 (1970): 216, who affirms that “classical theism, and Thomism in particular, sees no possibility at all in there being any other relation between God and the world than that of reason alone. The pitch of the argument lies in the absolute Is-ness of God, the sheerly existent One. God cannot be said to acquire a new real relationship to anyone or anything without truly denying the ontic absoluteness of the divinity.”
Clarke, Philosophical Approach to God, p. 101. Of course, if Clarke’s claim were true, then there is no bar to real relations accruing to the partless God. Cf. Wright’s claim that God has only a relation of reason to creatures because “He gains nothing from them by causing them, no increase in goodness, perfection, or reality” (John H. Wright, “Divine Knowledge and Human Freedom,” Theological Studies 38 [1977]: 456) and Westphal’s interpretation than in denying God a real relation to creatures, Thomas is only saying that God is related to them in such a way as to render invalid any inference of dependence on them (Westphal, “Temporality and Finitism,” p. 564). Such watered-down reinterpretations of Aquinas’s position are a dagger in the heart of Thomism because they contradict God’s simplicity, in that He has real relations and so is not being itself subsisting.
Peter Geach, God and the Soul, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1969), pp. 71–72. The Cambridge criterion for change was: a thing x has changed if we have “F(x) at time t” true and then “F(x) at time ti” false. On this account Socrates would change by becoming shorter than Theaetetus.
Geach, “God’s Relation to the World,” pp. 322–323; see also idem, God and the Soul, chap. 6. Cf. Yates’s claim that the denial of a relation in God means only that God is not changed by creation and that in creation only a “Cambridge change” is involved (Yates, Timelessness of God, pp. 183, 141). Although Geach thinks thus to have solved the problem of God’s causal relation to the world, he does admit to “severe difficulties” with respect to God’s knowledge and will. For in this case there is no real change in the object; so how can the objects of God’s knowledge and will be really related to Him and how can He fail to be really related to them? Geach attempts to solve this problem by construing God’s knowledge as practical, rather than observational, and so, like His will, unchangeable. But even if successful, this move only shows God’s knowledge and will to be changeless, not unrelated really to the world. Au contraire, the knowledge and will by which God governs the world would have to be related to the world, it seems, in order to be efficacious.
See Liske, “Reale Beziehungen,” pp. 211–212. James F. Ross adopts Geach’s terminology in characterizing changes and relations, but he recognizes that calling a relation merely a “Cambridge relation” from the viewpoint of a certain thing does not imply that the things are so related only in thought, but not in reality; it only implies that from the viewpoint of a given relatum that relatum did not change as a condition of that relation’s holding (James F. Ross, “Creation,” Journal of Philosophy 77 [1980]: 625). Nonetheless, Ross misleads in stating that a relation is real from the standpoint of a given relatum just in case that relatum ‘s undergoing a real change is either logically necessary or was logically sufficient for that relation’s obtaining. There is no reason to think that “real” relations could not obtain between two timeless, immutable entities, e.g., the logical equivalence of two tenseless propositions. Thus, when Ross asserts, “The relation ‘x creates y’ is real from the standpoint of the creatures that begin to be, instead of not being at all, but is merely a Cambridge relation from the standpoint of the Creator (whose creation is a constant force)” (Ibid., p. 626), he falsely opposes “real relation” to “Cambridge relation.” Not only does the beginning to be of creatures fail to satisfy his (mistaken) definition of “real relation” (since beginning to exist is not a change), but there are no grounds for contrasting a real relation with a Cambridge relation anyway, since the latter may be just as much a part of objective reality as the former, even though one relatum did not change.
The confusion of impassibility with immutability also besets Richard Creel’s treatment of these problems in Richard E. Creel, Divine impassibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For example, Creel admits that God’s knowledge is conditioned by whatever world is actual, but he denies that this implies passibility in God because passibility is vulnerability to change induced by something distinct from that in which the change takes place (Ibid., p. 82). This is a wholly different conception of what it is to be impassible than as he defined it on p. 11: imperviousness to causal influence from external factors or incapacity to be affected by an outside force (N.B.: even these disjuncts are not equivalent!) There is no reason to think that “being causally influenced” entails “being vulnerable to change” or, better that “being conditioned” entails “being vulnerable to change.” If God’s knowledge consists wholly of tenselessly true beliefs about the world, then it could be immutable and yet passible in that it is conditioned by which world is actual. Similarly, if, as Creel suggests, what God wills is tenseless and time-indexed, then it can be immutable (Ibid., p. 19); but, pace Creel, it is still conditioned in the sense that God wills an event e at t 2 in the actual world, but not in W*, because in the actual world some earlier event e’ occurs at t,, whereas e’ does not occur at t, in W*. Thus, Creel is wrong when he asserts that “a passible being could not be immutable” (Ibid., p. 11).
Hill, “World Make a Difference to God,” p. 157. Cf. Liske, “Reale Beziehungen,” p. 227, who trembles on the verge of admitting that the world makes a counterfactual difference to God but pulls back because he believes that this would sacrifice God’s absoluteness and make God a part of the universe—a pity he did not know Westphal, “Temporality and Finitism,” pp. 550–564.
Hill, “World Make a Difference to God,” p. 157.
Linda T. Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 88. By “knowing state” Zagzebski evidently means cognitive state, since she affirms that God’s knowledge does vary across worlds; i.e., the same divine cognitive state is God’s knowing p in one world and His knowing not -p in another. According to Zagzebski, “the single state of knowing his own essence that constitutes God’s epistemic state in all possible worlds has the accidental property of secondarily knowing one set of contingent truths in one world and another set of contingent truths in another world” (Ibid., p. 89). Dependent as it is on the doctrine of divine simplicity, Thomas Flint dismisses this position as “less than promising” (Thomas P. Flint, critical notice of The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, by Linda Zagbebski, Faith and Philosophy 11 [19941: 484); indeed, it seems to me that Zagzebski’s position is self-contradictory. For as a simple being God cannot have the envisioned property, much less have it accidentally,since ex hypothesi God is the same across possible worlds.
One of the few consistent Thomists is thus Charles J. Kelly, “Why God Is Not Really Related to the World,” p. 472; cf. idem, “The Logic of Eternal Knowledge from the Standpoint of the Aristotelian Syllogistic,” Modern Schoolman 66 (1988): 29–54. But Kelly is content merely to examine the logic of statements ostensibly predicating real relations of God and to re-state accurately Aquinas’s position that nothing can be predicated of God other than an activity which belongs exclusively and necessarily to Him, so that all such relations really lodge in creatures. But Kelly does nothing to render this position credible. He does claim that propositions which are equivalent in the active and passive voices retain the same logical subject; so if “was created by God” expresses a real relation in the world, then “created the world” cannot express a real relation in God (idem, “Why God Is Not Really Related,” p. 464). But this assertion is obviously false in the case of causal relations. In “John hit the ball” and “The ball was hit by John,” there is no reason to take the logical subject as being the same or to infer that even if it were, only one term is really related to the other. For some discussion of Kelly’s analysis of statements predicating real relations of God, see James E. Taylor, “Kelly on the Logic of Eternal Knowledge,” Modern Schoolman 67 (1990): 141–147; Charles J. Kelly, “On the Logic of Eternal Knowledge: A Rejoinder,” Modern Schoolman 68 (1991): 163–169.
W. Norris Clarke, “Causality and Time,” in Experience,Existence, and the Good (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 146; cf. idem, “New Look at Immutability,” p. 51.
Wright, “Divine Knowledge and Human Freedom,” p. 457. Wright gives a half-hearted attempt to justify the denial of real relations in God by insisting that creatures are not the ultimate term of the relation; since they are relative to God, God regards them as such, so that He is the ultimate term of the relation. But this defense is meritless: the relation of sustaining which God has to the universe is asymmetric and so terminates in creatures; another relation links them back to God. In the end Wright accepts real relations in God, only insisting that these do not affect the divine perfection (Ibid., pp. 460461). Aquinas’s solution becomes especially fantastic when we recall that he also employs it to explain the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity as Jesus of Nazareth, for it is incredible to imagine that God in worlds in which He does not become incarnate is precisely the same as in worlds in which He does.
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 434–440.
Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time, p. 67: “Stump and Kretzmann have chosen the wrong word. The word ‘duration’ means an interval of time, namely, that interval of time through which something endures. The notion of an atemporal duration is, therefore, a contradiction in terms;” so also Davis, Logic and the Nature of God, p. 19; Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 48; Katherin A. Rogers, “Eternity Has No Duration,” Religious Studies 30 (1994): 7. For more on the concept of endurance, see my The Tenseless Theory of Time: a Critical Examination, Synthèse Library (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), chap. 9.
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): 464–465.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity,” pp. 444–445; idem, “Atemporal Duration: a Reply to Fitzgerald,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 216, 218.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Atemporal Duration,” p. 218.
So Leftow, Time and Eternity, pp. 125–127.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” pp. 465–466.
Paul Fitzgerald, “Stump and Kretzmann on Time and Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 260–269.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” p. 46; cf. idem, “Atemporal Duration,” p. 215: “Nothing that is incompatible with divine simplicity can count as E-duration;” cf. pp. 218–219. 69 The best analogy for Stump-Kretzmann eternity which I can think of would be a series of points having a light-like separation in Minkowski space-time. The metric of such a manifold requires that the interval, or space-time separation, between any two points lying along the path of a light ray in vacuo be zero. This is the case even for events which occur millions of years apart and light years away from each other: their space-time separation is zero. Lucas and Hodgson comment, “Topology is concerned with ‘nearness’, points and sets of points that are close together, that is those where the distance between them tends toward zero. In an ordinary space the distance between two points can be zero only if the two points are coincident, but in Minkowski space two points on the path of a light ray are not, according to our criterion, separated, even though they are, according to intuitive reckoning, a great distance apart. Hence whereas in an ordinary space two points are near only if the distance between them is tending toward zero, which can happen only when they are themselves actually coincident, in Minkowski space two points can be counted as being topologically near to each other without approximating in the least to be coincident” (J. R. Lucas and P. E. Hodgson, Spacetime and Electromagnetism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], pp. 34–35).
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” pp. 466–468; idem, “Atemporal Duration,” pp. 215–216.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” pp. 468–469; idem, “Atemporal Duration,” pp. 218–219.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” p. 469.
See G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 201: “Acceptance of the ideas of spatial and temporal atomicity in physics does not, of course, preclude us from applying mathematical concepts of space and time involving numerical continuity in our calculations, but the infinite divisibility associated with these concepts will then be purely mathematical and will not correspond to anything physical.” Also relevant in this connection is Philip L. Quinn, “On the Mereology of Boethian Eternity,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1992): 57.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Atemporal Duration,” p. 218; cf. idem, “Prophecy, Past Truth, and Eternity,” in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Jas. Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives 5 (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeway Publishing, 1991), p. 396: “The existence of an absolutely perfect being must be an indivisibly persistent present actuality.”
Stump and Kretzmann, “Atemporal Duration,” p. 218.
Curiously, however, ET-Simultaneity may not survive in this re-interpretation, since in two-dimensional time simultaneity becomes relativized to a dimension, as explained by Murray MacBeath, “Time’s Square,” in The Philosophy of Time, ed. R. Le Poidevin and M. MacBeath, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 196.
Leftow, Time and Eternity,p. 128.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” p. 471.
Ibid., pp. 470–473. Unfortunately, the analogy is misconstructed due to a misuse of indexical expressions. In the one-dimensional world, the creatures are supposed to recognize an absolute here, which is the location of the creature which occupies the mid-point of the line segment which is their world. The aim of this analogy is clearly to construct a spatial tense on the analogy of “now.” But the attempt misfires; for creatures elsewhere on the line segment the specified point cannot be truly regarded as here, but as there. It can only be truly regarded as here for the creature who occupies it. The customary view of spatial indexicals is that none of the points on the line is objectively here or there,these being person-dependent expressions of spatially tenseless facts. Objective spatial tenses would require us to say that in the postulated one-dimensional world there really are objective, person-independent facts like The end point is here or The mid-point is up ahead. But it does not require the absurdity that only one point in space qualifies as being here. That would be like saying that only one point in time ever qualifies as now, when in fact objective tense requires merely that any time the expression “now” is correctly used the time of usage be objectively present. In general, Stump and Kretzmann seem to have been misled by the world “absolute” with which they preface “here” and “present.” The upshot is that when the 3-D person says to the I-D creature “We’re all here together,” the 1-D creature will recognize that the expression “here” has a different referent than when he uses it, just as he recognizes that each of his fellow creatures would refer to his own place on the line segment as “here.” It is also significant to note that the 3-D person does in fact share the same single dimension with the 1-D creatures; he fails to be on the line only in virtue of being off it in the second and third dimensions, and co-ordinates can be assigned to him in that one shared dimension. Similarly, a hyper-temporal being causally connected to our temporal world have to share our temporal dimension at minimally one point where the dimensions intersect.
This would seem to be the hyper-time at which God acts causally to create time and the universe. Since this point of intersection is shared by time and hyper-time and could be at any time, it follows that God may have created the world in, say, 1898—or maybe He has not yet created the world! From God’s perspective such mid-time creation would not involve backward causation, since God in hyper-time acts to create the whole time-line at one hyper-instant, but for us temporal creatures His action would seem to involve backward causation, since it also occurs at a moment of ordinary time. These sorts of difficulty might well cause one to doubt the metaphysical possibility of higher temporal dimensions, in contrast to higher spatial dimensions.
See William P. Alston, “Aquinas on Theological Predication: A Look Backward and a Look Forward,” in Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 145–178.
For an analysis of permanence, see Quentin Smith, “A New Typology of Temporal and Atemporal Permanence,” Noels 23 (1989): 307–330, and Leftow, Time and Eternity, pp. 132–133. I should add merely that Leftow conflates instants (which are durationless) with moments (which have arbitrarily short non-zero duration). Etemity is not like a single moment which is both a first and last moment; rather it is like an instant and so has no first or last finite period of existence.
For discussion of token-reflexive truth conditions of tensed sentences, see my The Tensed Theory of Time: a Critical Examination, Synthèse Library (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), chap. 3.
Not only does real seem to be the univocal element common to the eternal present and the temporal present, but, as we shall see, Stump and Kretzmann revise their definition of ET-simultaneity in such a way as to make it tenseless. Their use of the word “present” is confusing and, I fear, inconsistent. They even speak of spatial locations as being present to a non-spatial God.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity,” p. 441.
Stump and Kretzmann, “Atemporal Duration,” p. 219.
As noted by Herbert J. Nelson, “Time(s), Eternity, and Duration,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 22 (1987): 12.
See their revised version of the illustration in Stump and Kretzmann, ‘Eternity, Awareness, and Action,“ p. 475. They still fail to appreciate, however, the radical disanalogy between tensed time and space. For in response to Lewis’s objection that in order to be ontologically (as opposed to merely epistemically) present or real to an atemporal God, a thing would have to be atemporal itself (Delmas Lewis, ”Eternity, Time, and Timelessness,“ Faith and Philosophy 5 [1988]: 72–86), Stump and Kretzmann retort that if spatial locations can be present to God without God’s being spatial, then temporal moments can be present to God without God’s being temporal (Stump and Kretzmann, ”Eternity, Awareness, and Action,“ p. 476). This response is based upon a clear conflation of time (which is tensed) with space (which is tenseless).
Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity,” pp. 442–443. They should have said “relativity,” I think.
Davis, Logic and the Nature of God, p. 20; Delmas Lewis, “Eternity Again: A Reply to Stump and Kretzmann,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 15 (1984): 74–76; Helm, Eternal God,pp. 32–33; William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge, pp. 164–166; Yates, Timelessness of God, pp. 128130; Leftow, Time and Eternity,pp. 170–172. Unfortunately, many of these critics, misunderstanding the role of hypothetical observers in Relativity Theory, think that Stump and Kretzmann require that a temporal person somehow actually observe God as eternally present, which is impossible. But Stump and Kretzmann are clear that for them an observer is anything with respect to which a reference frame is determined (Ibid., p. 438; idem, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” p. 474). Actually Stump and Kretzmann concede too much, for all that is required in Relativity Theory are hypothetical observers.
So also Leftow, Time and Eternity,p. 174. Helm’s harsh verdict seems justified: “The ‘solution’ to the problem is found simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity. ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it.... For the problem is, how can something which is an event in time be wholly present ‘to an eternal entity’? The answer given is that it is ET-wholly present. But this answer is wholly obscure” (Helm, Eternal God, p. 33).
Stump and Kretzmann want to say that God sustains relations of ET-simultaneity with all events only insofar as each has the property of temporal presentness (as opposed to pastness or futurity). But that is not what (ii. b) stipulates. The grammatical rules governing indexicals require that “the temporal present” in (ii. b) refer to now. Oddly, (iii. b) lacks any reference toy or B’s having the property of presentness or being in the present. They could be past events, if the definition is read tenselessly. Thus, an event could be ET-simultaneous with God, not as present, but as past, which is incoherent.
Leftow, Time and Eternity, p. 173.
This occasions difficulty for Leftow’s theory, for he affirms that while God is eternally Lord in the eternal “reference frame”, nevertheless in time He is not Lord except at the appropriate time (Brian Leftow, “Aquinas on Time and Eternity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64 [1990]: 396). That is to say that God’s extrinsic properties do change in the temporal “reference frame” and, hence, God is temporal with respect to the temporal frame—and that even if relative to the eternal frame God is changeless. Thus, Leftow seems obliged to affirm with Aquinas that relative to the temporal frame, at least, God sustains no real relation to the world. The only way to prevent his solution from collapsing into the no real relations doctrine would therefore seem to be to deny the symmetry of the analogy to the simultaneity relation in Relativity Theory.
Brian Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” Philosophy 8 (1991: 162; cf. idem, Time and ty ty,“ Faith and Philoso) Eternity, pp. 222–223.
A. Einstein to H. A. Lorentz, June 17, 1916, item 16–453 in the Mudd Library, Princeton University, cited in Ludwik Kostro, “Einstein’s New Conception of the Ether,” proceedings of “Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory,” conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Sept. 16–19, 1988, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.
A. Einstein, Äther und Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag, 1920), pp. 7–9.
A. Einstein to H. A. Lorentz, Nov. 15, 1919; item 16–494 in Mudd Library, Princeton University, cited in Kostro “Einstein’s New Conception.”
Leftow, Time and Eternity, p. 225.
In Time and Eternity, p. 224, Leftow ascribes to the critic of the Zero Thesis the general claim “if x has spatial relations x has a spatial location,” which Leftow regards as false, based on the counterexample of the spatial relation is not located in. This general claim does not, pace Leftow, underlie the critic’s misgivings. Rather the critic maintains that in order for a distance metric to be defined with respect to two entities (such that the distance between them can be, say, zero), those entities must have locations in a shared space on which the metric is defined. This contention is unremarkable. Moreover, Leftow’s counter-example, with respect to a spaceless being, is not a spatial relation, but once again a category negation. In a sort of last-ditch defense of the Zero Thesis, Leftow asserts, “The Zero Thesis lets one give literal meaning to the claim that a spaceless God is omnipresent. If one denies the Zero Thesis, is literal omnipresence at all possible for a spaceless God?” (Ibid., p. 228). This pièce de resistance fails because the Zero Thesis itself fails to provide any literal content to divine omnipresence over and above the traditional understanding of God’s being causally active and aware of everything happening at any point in space. What the Zero Thesis implies is really divine omni-absence (if the traditional understanding inadequately captures omnipresence), for it implies that God does not exist at any point in space but is at best continuous with it.
As admitted by Graham Oddie and Roy W. Perrett, “Simultaneity and God’s Timelessness,” Sophia 31 (1992): 127, who, unlike Leftow, do not offer any theoretical justification for taking all events as simultaneous in relation God.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 163; idem, Time and Eternity, p. 226.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 163; cf. idem, Time and Eternity,pp. 226–227.
See A. N. Prior, “Changes in Events and Changes in Things,” in Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 1–14.
See Sydney Shoemaker, “Time without Change,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 363–381; cf. W.-H. Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, International Library of Philosophy (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1980), chaps. 4, 10.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 163; cf. idem, Time and Eternity,p. 227.
Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 253–271. Plantinga specifically blasts verificationism as a philosophical fashion which Christian thinkers ought to have rejected tout court.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 164; idem, Time and Eternity,p. 227.
Leftow, “Aquinas on Time and Eternity,” p. 399.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 164; idem, Time and Eternity, p. 228.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 170. Cf. his definition: “...R is an eternal reference-frame if within R, the relations earlier, and later, can hold only between locations in the atemporal analogues of a B-series...” (Ibid., pp. 171–172). Cf. idem, Time and Eternity pp. 239–240. An A-series is, in McTaggart’s terminology, the temporal series of events as ordered by past, present and future. The B-series, according to McTaggart, is the temporal series of events as ordered by earlier than, simultaneous with and later than. The former series is therefore a tensed time (an A-Theory of time) and the latter a tenseless time (a B-Theory of Time). For discussion see my Tensed Theory of Time chap. 6.
Leftow, Time and Eternity p. 237.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 179; cf. idem, Time and Eternity p. 239; idem, “Aquinas on Time and Eternity,” p. 393. Leftow also tries to defend his view by construing temporality as a modal notion: a being is temporal if it can be located in a series of earlier and later events. Here I must side with Stump and Kretzmann against Leftow. As we have seen, God could exist timelessly alone and yet be capable of entering into temporal relations if He wished to do so. That mere capability does not remove His atemporality.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 165; cf. idem, Time and Eternity p. 232.
Ibid. Unfortunately, the way Leftow supports this conclusion is by means of a defective illustration from SR of the relativity of simultaneity. (Idem, Time and Eternity pp. 232–233). All Leftow’s illustration shows is that his event C is simultaneous with H in R, but simultaneous with G in R*, not that C is actual in R before C is actual in R*. One could with equal justification say that C becomes actual at the same time in R and R* and that G and H occur earlier in R* than in R! In fact none of these comparisons is licit without designating a third reference frame.
See Lawrence Sklar, “Time, Reality and Relativity,” in Reduction, Time and Reality ed. R. Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 138; see also my discussion in my Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity chap. 5.
Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” p. 167; idem, Time and Eternity p. 234.
Suspicions that Leftow’s theory really presupposes a tenseless theory of time are accentuated by his remarks on God’s knowledge of what is happening now: “That in God’s frame of reference all events occur simultaneously does not entail that God does not know all the facts about simultaneity which obtain in temporal reference frames. God’s being located in just the eternal frame of reference does not put a limit on what he knows. From any reference frame one can extrapolate what judgments of simultaneity would be correct in other reference frames. Presumably, then, an eternal God can have this knowledge in His own way. So... for every temporal now, God knows what is happening now (i.e., simultaneous with that now)...” (Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity.” p. 168; cf. idem, Time and Eternity p. 235.) Notice the conflation of the indexical tensed determination “now” and the non-indexical tenseless relation “simultaneous with.” God could know the appropriate simultaneity classes relative to every reference frame and still not have any idea which class of events is occurring now with respect to any frame. This can be clearly seen by reflecting on the fact that appropriate lines of simultaneity can be drawn on a Minkowski diagram through any point on the inertial trajectory of a hypothetical observer connected to that frame. Leftow’s theory of divine eternity will not result in an attenuation of divine omniscience only if he holds, with the tenseless time theorist, that there are no objective tensed facts and therefore divine knowledge of simultaneity relations is sufficient to grasp all that there is to be known with respect to the facts about what is happening now.
Brian Leftow, “Time, Actuality and Omniscience,” Religious Studies 26 (1990): 303–321. “The claim that actuality is a function of a relation may seem bizarre, but if time is tensed and the special theory of relativity is true, this claim follows....one can hold...that events really occur sequentially in time and also all at once for God without it thereby being the case that they really do all occur at once” (Ibid., pp. 318, 320).
For a discussion of Relativity Theory and its interpretation, see my Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity.
As Denbigh puts it, “The B-series is as if the Deity could timelessly witness all events, laid out in order along the time coordinate, as we can witness objects laid out in space” (K. G. Denbigh, An Inventive Universe [London: Hutchinson, 1975], pp. 30–31). Cf. Keith Seddon, Time: a Philosophical Treatment (London: Croon Helm, 1987), p. 135.
Einstein asserts, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence. This rigid four-dimensional space of the special theory of relativity is to some extent a four-dimensional analogue of H. A. Lorentz’s rigid three-dimensional aether” (A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (New York: Crown, 1961], pp. 150–151).
Objections to timeless causation are not impressive. For example, Le Poidevin’s conclusion that causality entails time over-reaches his argument, which, even if sound, would only show that a temporal cause is chronologically prior to its effect (Robin Le Poidevin, Change, Cause and Contradiction: A Defense of the Tenseless Theory of Time Macmillan Studies in Contemporary Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1991], pp. 88–94).
See William Lane Craig, “Was Thomas Aquinas a B-Theorist of Time?” New Scholasticism 59 (1985): 475–483; idem, “St. Anselm on Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency,” Laval théologique et philosophique 42 (1986): 93–104. See also Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time pp. 56–81.
Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time pp.61–76.
See, for example, Zagzebski, Freedom and Foreknowledge pp. 175–178, who vainly struggles to preserve the A-series while inconsistently affirming four-dimensionalism, the perspectival nature of tensed facts, and God’s perceiving things as present in the fourth dimension (while not transcending space-time)! See also L. Nathan Oaklander, “Time and Foreknowledge: A Critique of Zagzebski,” Religious Studies 31 (1995): 101–103.
Helm was preceded by A. C. Ewing, who held that for God time exists as a B-series apprehended in one specious present. Ewing appealed to the argument from “Time’s Tooth” to justify his view: “It seems plain that a perfect being would not experience the world-process as an A series in the way we do. For he would then be incomplete in a way which is quite incompatible with perfection. He would never be more than a minute fraction of his total being, and each such minute fraction would be lost for ever as it was succeeded by the next.” By knowing the B-series, God is capable of responding to prayer at appropriate times and feeling sympathy when misfortune befalls us (A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality Muirhead Library of Philosophy [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973], pp. 281–283). Other atemporalists advocating a tenseless theory of time as a basis for understanding divine timelessness include Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics ed. James Hastings, s.v. “Eternity,” by J. S. MacKenzie, p. 404 and J. L. Tomkinson, “Divine Sempitemity and Atemporality,” Religious Studies 18 (1982): 187; Seddon, Time p. 135. See also the discussion by Yates, Timelessness of God pp. 67–95, who rejects the tenseless theory, but recognizes how considerably easier it makes the reconciliation of eternity and time.
Paul Helm, “Eternal Creation: The Doctrine of the Two Standpoints,” in The Doctrine of Creation ed. Colin Gunton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), p. 42.
Helm, Eternal God pp. 27, 26. Cf. Paul Helm, “Gale on God,” Religious Studies 29 (1993): 247. So also McCann, “God beyond Time,” p. 239, who holds that God “in a single, unchanging, timeless act” creates “the entire universe... through all of its history.”
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Craig, W.L. (2001). Timelessness and Divine Action. In: God, Time, and Eternity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1715-1_3
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