Abstract
Secular philosophers may find it odd or at least rather quaint to lodge theological objections against a particular theory of time. But Christian philosophers, such as the author, take such objections with utmost seriousness. A view which is philosophically coherent but theologically untenable cannot be true. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, to reflect on the theological implications of one’s theory of time with a view to assessing its adequacy.1
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Oddly, few have done this. But see Richard Gale, “A Reply to Paul Helm,” Religious Studies 29 (1993): 258, who blasts the B-Theory of time as “part and parcel of a bifurcationist view of man and nature that is at odds with theism.”
It was so understood by the vast majority of early Church Fathers (e.g.,Tatian Oratio ad graecos 5.3; cf. 4.1ff, 12.1; Theophilus Ad Autolycum 1.4; 2.4, 10, 13; lrenaeus Adversus haeresis 3.10.3) and was finally promulgated as official Church teaching at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).
John Polkinghorne, critical notice of Cosmos as Creation,ed. Ted Peters, Expository Times 101 (1990): 317. According to Polkinghorne, “To speak of God as Creator is not to attempt an answer to the question Who lit the blue touch paper of the Big Bang? To talk in that way belongs to deism and not to Christian theology” (John Polkinghorne, “Cosmology and Creation,” address at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, undated photocopy). “There is general agreement that the Big Bang is nothing special from a theological point of view…. The idea of creatio ex nihilo asserts the total dependence of the universe upon the sustaining will of its Creator” (Polkinghorne, critical notice of Cosmos as Creation,p. 317). Whether the Big Bang represents the moment of creation is, however, irrelevant to the conceptual content of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. The biblical doctrine, like Deism, affirms a temporal beginning of the universe; moreover, Deists did not in fact deny God’s conservation of the world in being, but rather His supernatural action in the world.
Polkinghorne, “Cosmology and Creation.” So also Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth (Ganden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959); Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 384; Arthur Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 78–79. This watered-down doctrine of creation is the legacy of the father of modern theology, F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2d ed., ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1928), sec. 36–41. While acknowledging that the biblical conception of creation involves a temporal beginning (sec. 36.2), Schleiermacher held that this component of the doctrine could be safely suppressed in favor of the absolute dependence of the creation on God (sec. 41). See remarks by Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion ( New York: Schocken Books, 1970 ), pp. 107–110.
George S. Hendry, “Eclipse of Creation,” Theology Today 28 (1972): 420. So also Paul Copan, “Is Creatio ex nihilo a Post-biblical Invention?” Trinity Journal 17 (1996): 77–93.
For more on this distinction, see William Lane Craig, “Creation and Conservation Once More,” Religious Studies 34 (1998): 177–188.
Perhaps the B-theorist might hold that the beginning of the universe does not involve the origin of spacetime itself, but merely of all matter/energy and that God exists in an infinite, tenseless time prior to creating the material universe. Such a doctrine exempts time itself from being created ex nihilo,a compromise of the traditional doctrine, and faces other difficulties as well, as I explain in my God, Time, and Eternity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).
Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity, Cornell Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 290–291, 310; cf. p. 322, where he affirms that God is eternally incarnate in Christ. Cf also p. 239, where he affirms that in eternity events are “frozen” in an array of B-series positions. See also Yates’s chapter on timeless creation in John C. Yates, The Timelessness of God (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990 ), pp. 131–163.
Consideration of creatio ex nihilo raises a nest of intriguing and difficult questions: Did God exist in time before the creation of the universe? Does creatio ex nihilo imply the creation of time itself? Can God’s priority to time be understood in some way other than chronological? I address these questions in my God, Time, and Eternity. For now it is enough to realize that the biblical writers’ expressions about God’s existing and planning “before” creation clearly mean to affirm that in some sense God was alone and then brought the world into being out of nothing.
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Craig, W.L. (2000). Creatio ex Nihilo. In: The Tenseless Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 294. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3473-8_10
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