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#742 God, Time, and Creation

July 25, 2021
Q

There have been a lot of raised eyebrows about your view on God and time. . . . This is an objection that people like Paul Helm have raised. It goes a little something like this. What exactly is the relationship between God’s timeless phase and God’s temporal phase? In particular, how is a timeless God causally responsible for the existence of the temporal universe? Typically philosophers say that causes are temporally prior to their effects. Well that can’t be what is going on here. A timeless God cannot be temporally before anything, let alone temporally before an effect. Simultaneous causation doesn’t seem to help either because simultaneity is a temporal relation. A timeless God cannot be simultaneous with any temporal thing. So what is going on here? What is the relationship between God’s timeless phase and God’s temporal phase?

Ryan

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Dr. craig’s response


A

Intuitively, it’s possible for God to exist changelessly alone without the universe and so to be timeless. Because He is a free agent, however, He can freely cause an event to occur, the creation of the universe. That moment is not only the first moment of time at which the universe exists, but also the first moment of time at which God exists. But there’s this huge difference between them. The universe came into being at the first moment of its existence; but God did not. God did not begin to exist at that point; He merely began to be temporal. So although He was not chronologically prior to the beginning of the universe, He was somehow ontologically prior to the beginning of the universe.  We can say that God is causally prior to the beginning of the universe in the sense that without God’s existence sans the universe, the universe could not have come into being. God is the timeless being who causes the universe to begin to exist.

There’s an analogy in contemporary cosmology. The initial cosmological singularity from which the big bang emerges in the standard model is not a point in time and space. Rather it is the boundary of time and space, through which one cannot pass. If you go back in time, you eventually hit that boundary point beyond which you cannot go. That point is topologically prior to every spacetime point. Similarly divine eternity is the boundary of time. If you go back in time, eventually you will hit the beginning of time at the boundary of divine eternity.

What’s at issue here are two different views of causation. Roughly, according to the medieval notion of efficient causation, a causal agent C brings about an effect E by performing an action A (and unless A is permanent, we may add “at a time t”). In my statement of the kalām cosmological argument, I presupposed this medieval notion. In fact, in my formulation of the argument, the cause and the effect are substances: God is the cause of the universe. By contrast if we employ a modern notion of event causation, then we have to reformulate the causal premiss of the argument: If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning. In that case, the cause of that event is not God but the event of God’s creating the universe. By way of analogy, in the medieval sense my parents are the cause of me, but in the modern sense, the uniting of their sperm and egg is the cause of my beginning to exist.

So when we talk about a timeless cause of the universe, we’re talking in the medieval sense. The cause of the universe is God, Who is timeless sans the universe. But in the modern sense the cause of the universe’s beginning to exist is God’s creating the universe, which is simultaneous with the universe’s beginning. These two senses are compatible and are just different ways of looking at the matter.

- William Lane Craig