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#24 Creation and Time

October 01, 2007
Q

In Lee Strobel’s interview with you in his book The Case for a Creator (Chapter 5, in the subsection 'Pathway of Mathematics') you stated,

Time and space are creations of God that began at the Big Bang. If you go back beyond the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity. By that, I mean eternity in the sense of timelessness. God, the eternal, is timeless in his being. God did not endure through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation; that would be absurd. God transcends time. He’s beyond time. Once God creates the universe, he could enter time, but that’s a different topic altogether.

Also, in your book Reasonable Faith (p. 117) you wrote,

For example, a man sitting from eternity could will to stand up; thus, a temporal effect arises from an eternally existing agent. Similarly, a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have willed to bring the world into being at that moment. In this way, God could exist changelessly and eternally but choose to create the world in time. By “choose” one need not mean that the Creator changes His mind but the He freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning.

This is all hard for me to comprehend.

1) I am having trouble comprehending the difference between a Creator who endured through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation and a timeless Creator who, a finite time ago, willed to bring the world into being at that moment? Could you elaborate please?

2) Doesn’t speaking of before “the moment of creation” imply that there was time before creation? Please explain.

3) I don’t understand how “a man sitting from eternity could will to stand up”? Again, wouldn’t that imply that endured through a period of time before standing up? Similarly, if “a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have willed to bring the world into being at that moment” wouldn’t that imply that the Creator endured through a period of time before bringing the world into being?

4) I don’t understand how anyone could do anything if there was no time?

5) I am having trouble comprehending ‘By “choose” one need not mean that the Creator changes His mind but the He freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning’? Do you mean that by “choose” all that is meant is “intend”? That God always wanted to create a world with a beginning and never changed his mind about this? If so, why wasn’t the world created from an infinite time ago? I know this sentence is precisely meant to answer this problem (why the world wasn’t created an infinite time ago), but I am still having trouble understanding how this sentence answers this problem?

Sincerely,

Paul

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Dr. craig’s response


A

These are difficult issues to understand, Paul! Next to God Himself, I know of no subject so baffling, so mind-expanding, as the concept of time. Try to put God and time together and you’ve got something that you could spend a lifetime studying! I hope that your puzzlement is due simply to the difficulty of the subject rather than to any incoherence on my part.

Before I consider your several questions, allow me to state succinctly my understanding of God’s relationship to time. I argue that God, existing changelessly alone without the universe, is timeless. Time comes into existence at creation and so has a beginning and is finite in the past. God, in virtue of His real relation to the temporal world, becomes temporal at the moment of creation. So God exists timelessly without creation and temporally since the moment of creation.

1) If I am right, then there is no moment prior to creation. Rather time begins at creation. This is the classical Christian view, as defended, for example, by Augustine. On this view, it is logically incoherent to ask, “What was God doing prior to creation?” because “prior to creation” implies a moment before creation, which the view denies. So the question is asking, “What happened at a moment of time before the first moment of time?”, which makes no sense. It’s like asking, “What is the name of that bachelor’s wife?”

Now some theists have disagreed with the classical view. Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, for example, believed that time is infinite in the past and never had a beginning. For Newton absolute time just is God’s duration. Because God has always existed, time goes back and back and never had a beginning. So on Newton’s view, it makes perfect sense to ask, “What was God doing prior to creation?” In fact, the philosopher G. W. Leibniz, who held to the Augustinian view, tormented Newton’s follower Samuel Clarke in their celebrated correspondence with the question, “Why (on Newton’s view) didn’t God create the world sooner?” This question is very difficult to answer from a Newtonian point of view (see my discussion in Time and Eternity [Crossway, 2001]).

Whichever view you take, I think you can see that there’s a huge difference between holding that God exists timelessly without creation and holding that He has endured through an infinite past time prior to the moment of creation. For a lively and interesting discussion of the alternatives see the book God and Time (Inter-Varsity, 2001), featuring an exchange between me, Alan Padgett, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Paul Helm on such questions.

2) Yes, speaking of a moment “before” the moment of creation does imply time before time, which is incoherent on the Augustinian view I defend. But notice that I don’t use that word in your quotation from my interview with Lee. In my early work, I thought people would understand, once I explained my view, that the expression “before creation” is just a harmless façon de parler (manner of speaking), not to be taken literally. But in light of the confusion engendered by the phrase, I have since been very careful to avoid it, speaking rather of God’s existing without (or sans) creation or existing beyond, though not before, the Big Bang. One nice way of expressing God’s priority to creation is to say that God is causally but not temporally prior to the beginning of the universe.

3) Obviously a man sitting “from eternity” doesn’t exist timelessly. But my thought experiment is meant to illustrate a point about freedom of the will. A person can exist changelessly and then freely execute a certain intention because free will doesn’t require any antecedent determining conditions. The very nature of free will is the absence of causal determinants. So a free choice has the appearance of a purely spontaneous event. The man can simply freely will to stand up. Thus, you can get a temporal effect from a changeless cause, if that cause is a free agent. Now in God’s case, God exists changelessly without the universe. Creation is a freely willed act of God that, when it occurs, brings time into being along with the universe. Thus, to say that “a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have willed to bring the world into being at that moment” does not imply that there was time prior to that moment.

4) What timelessness entails is that one doesn’t do anything different, that is, that one does not change. Timelessness implies an unchanging state of being. Now some activities don’t require change and time. For example, knowing something doesn’t require change or time. God can know all truths in that timeless state without any change. Similarly, one can have unchanging intentions. So long as one’s intentions don’t change they can be timelessly held. That’s why I said that God can exist without the universe with a timeless intention to create a world with a beginning. One can love someone else without change. Here we have insight into the nature of the love relationship between the three persons of the Trinity in that timeless state without creation. There exists a perfect, changeless state of mutual of knowledge, will, and love between the persons of the Trinity without the creation. (The wonder of creation is that God would bother to create a world of creatures and invite them to freely enter the joy of that fellowship as adopted children!)

5) Yes, by “choose” I mean that God has a free intention of His will. Its timelessness does not negate that this is, indeed, a choice. For one can conceive of possible worlds in which God has a quite different intention, namely, to refrain from creating a world at all. Initially, I thought that this was all that was needed to explain the origin of the world; but reflecting on agent causation leads me to think that in addition to that timeless intention there must also be an exercise of causal power on God’s part. That act is simultaneous with the moment of creation - indeed, it just is the act of creating - and brings God into time. If you ask, “But why didn’t God execute His intention sooner?”, you’ve fallen back into the Newtonian view of thinking of God as existing temporally prior to creation. On the Augustinian view, the question is unintelligible.

- William Lane Craig