Does God Learn?

Kevin Harris: Well, Bill, I think you shocked the internet. At least that's the title of a video from Braxton Hunter, Johnathan Pritchett, and Tim Stratton^[1], three friends of Reasonable Faith and self-professed Craig-Heads. They discussed aspects of your work on God and time. This is going to be a good follow-up to our last podcast. Apparently, some people on social media were upset about a short video that you posted on God's relationship to time. That video that you did, Bill, is in this first clip. Let's see what all the fuss is about. Here's clip number one.

Dr. Craig: One might think that if God is omniscient, then he can't learn anything new because to be omniscient is to know all truth. It's to know all the facts there are. But, in fact, an omniscient being can learn things that are new if he is in time. If God is in time, then at any particular moment of time he knows all the truths that there are at that moment. But if truth changes over time, then God's knowledge will change over time as well. To illustrate, say at a certain moment God knows that Bill Craig is now eating lunch, but in a few moments he will no longer know that because Bill Craig is not eating lunch at that moment. He will now know “Bill Craig is resuming his study.” He'll come to know, instead of “Bill Craig is now eating lunch,” he will say “Bill Craig was then eating lunch.” So if God is in time, even though he knows all the truths that there are at any moment, because truths change over time, God will learn new truths, new facts, as time elapses.

Braxton Hunter: Here's what I think I know Craig is saying. Craig has this view that God is timeless sans creation. That is, without creation God is timeless. You don't want to say before creation because then you're making the existence sans creation a temporal existence, a time-based existence. You just want to say sans creation – sans the universe – God is timeless.

Kevin Harris: What about that, Bill? And why is sans a better term than, say, “without?”

Dr. Craig: It's not a better term than “without,” and sometimes I will use the word “without” instead. God is timeless without creation. But I learned the word sans my junior year in high school in a Shakespeare class where in Shakespeare's disquisition on the ages of man he refers to old age as sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So the point that Braxton is making is that sans is a better term than the word “before.”

Kevin Harris: They elaborate further and bring in the universe in this next clip. Here's clip number two.

Braxton Hunter: But from the moment on Craig's view, from the moment that God created, he cannot help but be aware that for the humans he created it is 12:07 on a Friday, whatever the date is. He can't help but be aware once he creates . . .

Tim Stratton: In the central time zone.

Braxton Hunter: Yeah, in different time zones – for his creatures. In that sense he's in time. Now it's hard to grapple with if you're new to hearing it because to say that God is in time you almost think you're saying he's in the universe. It's not so much that as it is he exists sans the universe, but he's aware of the passing of time.

Kevin Harris: Is there a distinction between God being in time and God being in the universe?

Dr. Craig: Oh, yes, indeed. In fact, I would say that time is not in the universe, but rather the universe is in time, and time can exist without the universe. For example, we can think of God counting down to creation: “three, two, one, let there be light!” And the universe would come into being. Clearly, that sequence of mental events sets up a temporal series of one event after another, even prior to his creation of the universe and the physical time that is in the universe.

Kevin Harris: Next up they discuss propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge. Check out clip number three.

Braxton Hunter: To put this as simply as I can, there are two ways you can know something. There is propositional knowledge and there's experiential knowledge. Propositional knowledge is your awareness of the truth value of propositions. If I say “Tim Stratton is a man with long hair,” I've made a propositional statement that is false. The truth value of that is false. If I say “Tim is bald and very attractive,” that's a subjective claim, but I think it's objectively true that Tim is attractive. [laughter]

If I say “10 years from now on a Thursday on this day at this time X is going to happen,” if we think that has a truth value—and not all Christians do; open theists don't think it does—but if we think it has a truth value, that it is either true or false, God knows whether it's true or false. God really doesn't ever learn anything in terms of new information or new propositions. But on the experiential side of things, once God is experiencing the passing of time, he has the experience of knowing “now it's 12:09; before it was 12:07.” Right now I know God could say, “I know it's 12:09,” but at 12:08 he could not say, “I know it's 12:09.” That's something he didn't know: that it's now 12:09, because it is not now 12:09.

Kevin Harris: What about those two distinctions of knowledge, Bill?

Dr. Craig: I don't think that Braxton is correct on this. There certainly is a difference between propositional and nonpropositional knowledge. For example, if Braxton had said, “I know Tim Stratton,” that would not be propositional knowledge. But all of his examples of tensed truths I would say are not examples of nonpropositional knowledge. What this all depends on is whether you think the tense of a sentence is part of the propositional content of that sentence. Is there a different fact stated between the sentence “Columbus will discover America” and the sentence “Columbus discovered America”? I think that there is a difference. These are different facts. There are tensed facts, and therefore at different times God knows different facts, different propositions.

Kevin Harris: Tim develops things further in this next clip. Once the timeless God creates something, what does that mean with regard to God's relationship to time? Clip number four.

Tim Stratton: I don't want to speak for Dr. Craig, so I might make some mistakes here, and if he sees it he can correct me. But Braxton, when you said that God is timeless sans creation, I think Dr. Craig came up with that, and I think it really describes nicely what's going on there. And I would agree with Dr. Craig that once God creates, he is eternally in time. Some people say, “You mean he's trapped in time?” Yeah, there's nothing he can do to go back to a timeless state. To show this, I say, “Does an omnipotent God have the power to annihilate or erase from creation everything he's ever created, so it's just the triune God existing alone without anything else? Does an omnipotent God have the power to erase all of creation?”

Braxton Hunter: As if it never happened, right? Not just eliminate it.

Tim Stratton: Just wait. You're getting ahead of me here. I say, “Does God have the power to erase everything from creation?” The answer is yes. Then I say, “Does God have the power to create again for the first time?” And the answer is clearly no. That's something logically impossible. If God created again, it would always be true—a fact of the matter—that God did create, then he erased, and then he created again. So there is a dynamic sense of time, even if it's not the kind of time we experience in the central time zone, there is a dynamic sense of time where some kind of moments are passing. Once God creates time, or at least dynamic time, God could never enter a truly timeless state again. I think Dr. Craig once said, “Once the temporal cat is out of the bag, it's impossible to get him back in,” or something like that.

Kevin Harris: Once that bell has been rung, it cannot be unrung. Bill?

Dr. Craig: Right. I think this is well argued by Tim. And I would just add the note that because it's logically impossible in this scenario for God to create again for the first time, that this is not any kind of infringement on his omnipotence because omnipotence does not entail the ability to do logical impossibilities.

Kevin Harris: Next up, the Craig conundrum and the Craig kerfuffle. Clip number five.

Braxton Hunter: I feel like we've kind of already answered the Craig conundrum.

Johnathan Pritchett: I wanted to read this comment real quick: “My favorite part about this current kerfuffle is William Lane Craig has held this view the whole time to my knowledge.” Yes, I don't recall a time where Dr. Craig has ever thought differently than timeless sans creation and then in time (as an A-theorist) once he brings creation into being. Now, Tim, you and I had a professor at Biola, Dr. John Bloom. Do you remember him? He taught the scientific apologetics course. He has a doctorate in physics and a doctorate in archaeology, which was a weird combination, but he's one of the coolest guys. He actually floated the idea in our class—because they were asking him questions about this A-theory, B-theory, and all of that. He’s like, “No, no, no, it's probably God had some sort of metatime as a property of his being.” There are people that do have that sort of idea.

Kevin Harris: He talks about Biola there and some of your colleagues, Bill, and the concept of metatime. Is this the same as what you've called undifferentiated time?

Dr. Craig: I don't know frankly what John Bloom meant. Normally, to talk about metatime would be to talk about a sort of hypertime above time; that is to say, a higher time dimension in which God exists. Hugh Ross has suggested such a thing, and I've argued that it's ultimately unhelpful. It just kicks the problem upstairs and doesn't really help us to solve any of these conundrums.

Kevin Harris: Next up, the guys discuss the ideas of the Cambridge group, and Tim shares a memory. Clip number six.

Braxton Hunter: There is a group—I can't remember who's in the group—but there are primarily three guys in the philosophy of religion who formed what has been referred to as the Cambridge group. They were saying time isn't really even a thing; it's just how we conventionally track the passing of moments. Others have said this before, but the Cambridge group, as a group of Christian theists, were trying to work on this. Craig's view has always been, “Wait a minute, there's some metaphysical reality we're tracking.” Yeah, we came up with a segment of time that we call the second, the minute, the hour. Right? We came up with that. That's conventional. But we are measuring a length of something that actually exists. That is, I take it to be, Craig's view. Maybe I'm wrong on that. You can fix me.

Tim Stratton: I'll tell you this – it’s a fun story too. In that first class there were about 50 of us. You can imagine me—I’d been studying Craig's work, he was like a rock star to me. Now I finally get to meet him and actually take his class. All the students – all 50 of us – were in his classroom, and then he finally walks in. I was like, “Oh man, it's Dr. William Lane Craig.” We all had to do a quick introduction. He wanted to hear us all say our names and where we're from. About a half hour into the conversation he's teaching about time, and I'll never forget my first question. I raised my hand and he's like, “Yes, Tim, you have a question.” I was like, “He knows my name.” How did he know my name? I introduced myself once, and a half hour later he calls me by name. “What is a moment?” That was the question I asked. I think you're right—we're measuring this something.

Kevin Harris: All right, Bill, I have to know. Do you have a seating chart? Is that why you knew Tim's name?

Dr. Craig: No. I try to memorize my students' names.

Kevin Harris: Very good. They talked about time being more than a mental construct, and the question he asked you, Bill—what is a moment?

Dr. Craig: Tim Stratton is so nice, and I appreciate his kind remarks. I think Braxton is—I'm sure what he's referring to is what I've called the Oxford school, which includes John Lucas, Richard Swinburne, and Alan Padgett. They believe that prior to the beginning of the universe, God existed in a sort of non-metric time in which there is no objective fact about the comparative lengths of non-nested temporal intervals. This perspective is an option for the proponent of the kalam cosmological argument who doesn't like my view that God is timeless sans creation. He can say instead that God exists in a non-metric time temporally prior to his creation of metric time. But in my work I argue that my view is the more plausible view. As for “moments,” I distinguish between “instants” and “moments.” Instants are points of time of zero duration, but moments are intervals of time of some finite nonzero duration.

Kevin Harris: Johnathan addresses accusations of heresy. Clip number seven.

Johnathan Pritchett: I think it was Justin Peters who said that William Lane Craig's comment was undiluted heresy. I don't know what he said that was heresy. Maybe they didn't like the word “learn”—that God learned something.

Braxton Hunter: Open Theism is heresy to many people.

Johnathan Pritchett: Well, it's not.

Tim Braxton: It’s just wrong.

Johnathan Pritchett: But I don't think Craig meant “learn” as in God didn't know he [Craig] would study again.

Tim Stratton: Right. He didn’t gain new propositional knowledge.

Johnathan Pritchett: Right. God’s knowledge was complete in the sense that he knew Bill Craig would eat lunch and then would resume study. Those are all propositional truths that he had. But he learned, I guess, the difference in the tenses of “he is eating lunch now,” “he is no longer eating lunch.” When he says “learn” I don't think he meant that God is gaining new knowledge. He already knew that Bill Craig would finish lunch.

Tim Stratton: And he knew exactly what he would eat for lunch.

Johnathan Pritchett: Right.

Kevin Harris: Open Theism was thrown in there. Some of our listeners may have to Google that, but is “learn” a problematic term when applied to God's knowledge?

Dr. Craig: Let me explain what Open Theists believe. So-called Open Theists are revisionists who deny that God has knowledge of future-tense contingent propositions. He doesn't know what is going to happen. I have argued vigorously against Open Theism. Since I think there are true future-tense contingent propositions, then God as an omniscient being must know them. Open Theists think God learns things in a radical sense, in that he does not know what the future holds and learns what happens next only once it actually happens. My view is very different. What I'm arguing is that there are tensed propositions. That is to say propositions that change their truth value over time. A proposition like “Columbus will discover America” was true prior to 1492, but thereafter it is false. Since God believes only and all true propositions, his knowledge is therefore constantly changing. That's the sense in which he learns new facts. New facts, that is to say tensed propositions like “Columbus is discovering America”, become true, and so God comes to know those facts. Prior to that moment, he knew a different fact, namely that “Columbus will discover America.” So God does not learn in the sense that implies ignorance of some truth. Because the facts are constantly changing, God's knowledge tracks truth, and therefore it is constantly changing.

Kevin Harris: As we wrap it up, Bill, it must do your heart good to see people discussing your work and all these interesting topics on YouTube. Braxton, Johnathan, and Tim are some good guys. I try to keep up with their channels. Today's podcast may have sparked some interest in God and time, and our listeners and viewers would benefit from your book on the topic: Time and Eternity. Maybe talk about that and any other thoughts that you have.

Dr. Craig: Next to God himself, the subject of time is the most philosophically difficult concept to understand. If you put God and time together, you've got a conundrum that can occupy you for the rest of your life. My most recent contribution on this topic of God and time can be found in my Systematic Philosophical Theology, volume 2A, on the attributes of God, in the chapter entitled “Eternity”.

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