#1010 God and the Moment of Creation
September 21, 2026I’m an undergraduate philosophy student, and I have a question about your theory that God is in time with creation and timeless sans creation. While this view seems to be internally coherent, I’m struggling to identify a strong motivation to accept this position.
It seems the common objections to divine timelessness are that God cannot be both timeless and personal or that God cannot act and create without time.
However, your position nullifies these objections. In “Divine Timelessness and Personhood,” you conclude that “the objection to divine timelessness that a personal being or God cannot be timeless must be deemed unsuccessful.” In your work refining Alan Padgett’s theory of God and time, and in your work referencing Nelson Pike, I could be mistaken, but it seems you accept the objection that there can be no timeless divine action with temporal effects.
However, the formula ‘temporal with creation, timeless sans creation’ seems to require that God’s timeless state somehow gives rise to a temporal effect: the existence of creation and, consequently, divine temporality. If you are willing to accept that God timelessly created time—or created at all without time—then it would seem to be small potatoes for God to act timelessly within the time that he created. If God can timelessly will an act whose effect is the beginning of time and God’s subsequent temporality, why deny that God may timelessly will or perform other acts which have temporal effects?
If the objection is merely that we lack a satisfactory account of how timeless divine action could have temporal effects or relations, it would seem that this merely establishes an explanatory challenge rather than a defeater. We have a hard time making sense of God’s timeless relations to the world—such as the incarnation—but this poses no explicit or implicit logical contradiction to divine timelessness. The orthodox answer to the incarnation is that the Son is timeless in his divine nature and temporal in his human nature. I’m not convinced your conception of the incarnation necessarily excludes this account, and may even strengthen it. So, this would be at least a possible reply to the so-called “Absolute Paradox.” In the absence of a defeater, the reality of divine timelessness remains at least possible.
So what is the motivation to accept your theory?
Thank you,
Isaac
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
What great questions, Isaac! You have admirably and accurately articulated my views on God, time, and creation. Yes, I have argued that given a tensed theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality, “there can be no timeless divine action with temporal effects.”
I have addressed the question you raise concerning God’s causal relation to the beginning of time in the following three articles, which I would commend to you:
“No Trouble: A Reply to Wielenberg.” Theologica 5/1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v4i3.58143.
“A Reply to Wielenberg on a Timeless First Cause.” Theologica 5/1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v5i1.60693.
“God, Time, and Creation.” Philosophia Christi 23/2 (2021): 359-65.
The long and the short of it is that we may think of God’s causing universe in the medieval sense of an agent cause or in the modern sense of an event cause. In the medieval sense the cause of the universe exists timelessly sans the universe. But in the modern sense, God’s causing the universe is simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being at the first moment of time. It is not enough for the agent cause to exist timelessly with a timeless will that a universe with a beginning exist. Rather that will must be conjoined with an exercise of causal power in order for the universe to come into being. That exercise of causal power is simultaneous with the universe’s creation at the first moment of time. So in neither sense do we have a timeless divine action with temporal effects.
I think my reply defeats any alleged defeater of my view. But that is not really your concern. For you state, “If the objection is merely that we lack a satisfactory account of how timeless divine action could have temporal effects or relations, it would seem that this merely establishes an explanatory challenge rather than a defeater.” What you are asking, then, is what is the motivation to accept my theory?
The answer is that there are various persuasive arguments against the impossibility of an infinite temporal regress of events, and the attempt to avoid a beginning of time by postulating a metrically amorphous time prior to creation looks to me suspiciously like a state of timelessness. So it seems to me that we have to say that God is timeless sans creation and, given what we have already said about the incompatibility of a tensed theory of time with divine timelessness, in time subsequent to creation. For these arguments see my Systematic Philosophical Theology, vol. III: On Creation (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2026).
- William Lane Craig