Time and Eternity

KEVIN HARRIS: I hope everyone is enjoying this series of podcasts as much as we are, Bill. We are exploring the background of five of your books. Up next: the infinitely popular, Time and Eternity. Tell us about the book and your decision to write it.

DR. CRAIG: This is a popularization of my work on divine eternity and God’s relationship to time. The question here is: How does God relate to time? Is God timeless, as usually assumed? That is to say, does he completely transcend time? Or is God everlasting throughout time? Is God omnitemporal? And I argue that the Bible doesn't decide this philosophical question, and therefore it falls squarely in the lap of the philosophical, not biblical, theologian. In this book I explore arguments for and against divine timelessness and try to craft a theory of divine eternity. I worked for 11 years straight on this project as my major research interest. It's been said that the question of time is the most difficult philosophical question, second only to the question of God! So when you try to put God and time together you've got a subject that could exhaust a lifetime of study. I think that Time and Eternity may very well be my best book. It reflects an enormous wealth of scholarship, and yet it presents it in a very popular, easy-to-understand way, complete with pictures and diagrams to assist the reader. The book is beautifully put together by Crossway Publishers. I think they did a first-rate job with the book. So this is a book that I am very proud of.

KEVIN HARRIS: When we read your work, so much of it tends to funnel into the kalam or has come out of your study of the kalam argument. Does this book connect some the dots that were uncovered by the kalam argument?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It really does, and that was unexpected to me. The kalam cosmological argument argues against the infinitude of the past. So if these are good arguments, that means that time must have had a beginning. But obviously God never began to exist. So how does God relate to time? Moreover, it seems to me that there are good reasons to think that God is in time right now. God's causal relation to the world and God's knowledge of tensed facts like “Joe Biden is now the president of the United States” require that God be in time. So if God is in time, and time had a beginning, and God did not have a beginning, in some difficult-to-articulate way, God must exist beyond time. So I craft this very strange model of divine eternity according to which God is timeless sans creation (that is to say, without the world) but in time subsequent to creation. That is to say, he is temporal since the moment of the creation of the world.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've dedicated this book to J. P. Moreland, your colleague and friend. Why the dedication to J. P.?

DR. CRAIG: J. P. is a wonderful Christian colleague who brought me to Talbot School of Theology back in the early 1990s when I began to teach there. We have since collaborated together on books like Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. He is a wonderful brother and comrade in the Lord, a fellow soldier. So I wanted to honor J. P. by dedicating this book to him.

KEVIN HARRIS: This book has received some impressive reviews from people like Wolfhart Pannenberg and Quentin Smith. Especially Quentin Smith, who passed away a couple of years ago. He writes,

William Lane Craig is one of the leading philosophers of religion and one of the leading philosophers of time. In this book, he combines the expertise in these areas to produce an original, erudite, and accessible theory of time and God that will be of great interest to both the general public and scholars. It is a rewarding experience to read through this brilliant and well-researched book by one of the most learned and creative thinkers of our era.

Wow! You got to love that, Bill. And you had a lot of interaction with Quentin Smith.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Quentin and I became friends fairly early on because he began publishing works on the beginning of the universe and even though he was an atheist or an agnostic he argued vigorously that the universe and time had an absolute beginning and came into existence from nothing. So I called him on the phone and we began to collaborate and converse and eventually debated and produced a book together called Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. And although Quentin remained a non-believer to the end, he was always respectful and a good friend and someone that I could really converse with.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've received multiple questions about time over the years. Listeners have become familiar with the A Theory and the B Theory. I don't know how quickly you can refresh us on those, but if you could just refresh us on the two theories, and secondly address whether there is a B Theory version of the kalam.

DR. CRAIG: What I discovered in my work on divine eternity was that the question of how God relates to time (which was the central question I was asking) depends on what view of time you adopt. The so-called A Theory of time (or tensed theory of time) says that past, present, and future are objective properties of the world, and that temporal becoming is real and objective. Things really do come into being and pass away. By contrast, on the B Theory (or tenseless theory of time), the difference between past, present, and future is merely perspectival. It's rather like the difference between “here” and “there.” There is no objective “here” and “there.” It's just the perspective of the speaker. Similarly, past, present, and future are just relative to one's perspective. In fact, all events in time are equally real. The events in time are stretched out like a line and all of the events have the same ontological status. Therefore, temporal becoming is purely a subjective feature of human consciousness. Things do not really come to be and pass away. It's just our conscious experience of things in time that is changing. Now, this distinction becomes absolutely crucial to God's relationship to time because on an A Theory of time I do not think you can make sense of God being timeless. As an omniscient being God must know tensed facts like “It is now 2024.” “It will be 2025.” God must know those facts, and in order to know those facts he must have a temporal location. He must be in time. Moreover, God is causally related to events in time. He is not now causing the parting of the Red Sea. He did that in the past. But now he's doing other things in the universe. So in virtue of his knowledge of tensed facts and his causal relations with a temporal world, God must be temporal. Therefore, if there are tensed facts and temporal becoming, I do not think God can be timeless. But if the B theory of time is true, if all events in time are stretched out like a line and temporal becoming is illusory, then God can easily be conceived as timeless. He just doesn't exist on the line! He exists off the timeline so to speak. He's transcendent, and he causes all events in time to occur when they do timelessly. So if you want to have a doctrine of timelessness, it seems to me you have to adopt a B theory of time. Then the huge question arises – which theory of time is true? The A Theory or the B Theory? So I wrote two whole books on this subject trying to adjudicate the debate between these two competing theories of time and the impact of that for divine eternity. Now, you ask whether there is a B Theory version of the kalam cosmological argument. As I present it, the kalam cosmological argument presupposes an A Theory of time. It presupposes that temporal becoming is real, and that's especially clear in the second version against the infinitude of the past – that an infinite past cannot be formed by successive addition, by adding one event after another. So my version of the argument is predicated firmly upon an A Theory of time. My friend and colleague Andrew Lok, however, has in his work on the kalam cosmological argument attempted to defend a version of the cosmological argument that is not predicated on an A Theory of time but is consistent with a B Theory of time. I say all the more power. If Andrew can do it, that's great. It just expands the appeal of the argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: It seems like there are a lot of rather exotic theories of time bouncing around these days. What's your impression of the current state of the philosophy of time?

DR. CRAIG: It's interesting you should use the word “bouncing” because this is one of the exotic views of time. On a certain view of time, spacetime has the shape of an hourglass, and we're living in the upper lobe of the hourglass. But the lower lobe of the hourglass is time running in the opposite direction so that there is a reversal of the arrow of time when you hit the neck of the hourglass. In the upper lobe, time is running upwards, but in the lower lobe time is running downward so to speak (if I can use that illustration). I think this is one of the most bizarre views of time that is out there today, and yet people like Sean Carroll have presupposed, or rather argued for, cosmological models that assume this reversal of time’s arrow at some point in the past. My overall impression of the philosophy of time is that it has been dominated far too much by what is called Quine's naturalized epistemology. W. V. O. Quine was one of the most prominent naturalist philosophers of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the collapse of verificationism and positivism, Quine had to admit that metaphysics was a legitimate philosophical project. But, he said, it has to be naturalized. That is to say, legitimate metaphysics is exclusively an extension of the natural sciences, and there is no legitimate metaphysics that challenges or calls into question or even explores the presuppositions of the natural scientists. You begin with natural science and then do your philosophizing or metaphysics from there. As a result, I think the current philosophy of time has been far, far too much dominated by time as it plays a role in physics. In physics, there are any number of different conceptions of physical time. I think, in fact, none of these is time itself which is a non-physical reality. I think these physical times are in fact merely measures of time that we finite creatures use in the attempt to provide some measure of time. But with regard to time itself (what I would call absolute time), there I agree with Newton. I think that time itself is a measure of the duration of God since the moment of creation, and that absolute metaphysical time is successfully or unsuccessfully measured by our different attempts at crafting physical times.

KEVIN HARRIS: So is there a difference between time and spacetime or is that just semantics?

DR. CRAIG: That is a huge difference. Yes. On the view that time is a reality in and of itself, you can have spatial objects that endure through time. They exist from one moment to the next. But if time is united with space in a four-dimensional geometrical object called spacetime then in fact you are in a B Theory of time. Then all moments of time are equally real. You have this four-dimensional geometrical manifold, and it just exists tenseless. Time is just an internal dimension of this four-dimensional object. That is a huge, huge difference between time and this notion called spacetime. I think that spacetime is just a heuristic device. It's not real. It is merely a way of diagrammatically displaying the relations that a thing has to space and time by constructing a matrix in which one dimension is space and another dimension is time.

KEVIN HARRIS: The book was published in 2001. Any special memories of writing it and what you and Jan were up to during that time?

DR. CRAIG: By that time we had returned from our seven years in Belgium where I was working at the University of Louvain. We were now located in Atlanta, and I was doing my research on God and time here in Atlanta using Emory University and its library resources. So we were already by that time safely ensconced here in beautiful Atlanta and enjoying life in the South.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we conclude today, are you writing a chapter on God and time in your systematic philosophical theology? And tell us about what you're writing.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, most certainly.  Volume 2A is on the coherence of theism. This will include chapters on divine attributes like aseity, eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, goodness, and so forth. A key part of that will be the chapter on divine eternity and God’s relationship to time.^[1]