Articles exploring God’s relationship to time with a view toward determining whether divine eternity should be construed timelessly or temporally.
This paper is an unpublished response to Yuri Balashov and Storrs McCall which was presented at a session of the Philosophy of Time Society devoted to...
Read MoreIn the spring of 1922 a remarkable encounter occurred between the world’s most prominent scientist and the world’s leading philosopher of time. Einstein delivered a lecture on Relativity T...
Read More Download PDFPhilosophical theologians have been sharply divided with respect to God's relationship to time. What are the principal arguments which they have offered for divine timelessness and temporality?...
Read More Download PDFA difficulty for a view of divine eternity as timelessness is that if time is tensed, then God, in virtue of His omniscience, must know tensed facts. But tensed facts, such as It is now t, can only be...
Read More Download PDFLeibniz's question to Clarke, "Why Did God Not Create the Word Sooner?" posses a difficult problem for theists holding to a neo-Newtonian view that God is omnitemporal and that time is beginningle...
Read More Download PDFA classic difficulty of the conception of divine eternity as timelessness is that it seems impossible for an atemporal deity to be causally active in the world. Stump and Kretzmann, in their seminal a...
Read More Download PDFHow shall we construe divine eternity and God's relationship to time? The view that God is simply timeless faces two insuperable difficulties: (1) an atemporal deity cannot be causally related to ...
Read More Download PDFBrian Leftow argues that timeless beings are metaphysically superior to temporal beings in view of their truer presence and unity. Leftow's argument that a timeless being has truer presence is bas...
Read More Download PDF
Detractors of the doctrine of divine timelessness argue that
1. God is timeless
and
2. God is personal
are broadly l...
Contemporary analyses of divine eternity often make explicit appeal to to the Special Theory of Relativity in support of the doctrine of divine timelessness. For example, two fundamental tenets of Lef...
Read More Download PDFIs God's eternity to be construed as timeless or temporal? Given that the universe began to exist, a relational view of time suggests that time also began to exist. God's existence "prior to" ...
Read More Download PDFBrian Leftow argues that if God is temporal, He is essentially temporal; and that since He is a necessary being, time therefore exists necessarily, but that since time is in fact contingent, God is th...
Read More Download PDFBrian Leftow argues that a temporal God could not be the creator of time and that therefore God should be conceived as timeless. Leftow's first argument, that there is no time at which a temporal ...
Read More Download PDFA promising argument for divine timelessness is that temporal life is possessed only moment by moment, which is incompatible with the existence of a perfect being. Since the argument is based on the e...
Read More Download PDFIt is shown how the attempt of one theologian to explicate the doctrine of divine eternity is logically inconsistent and his attempts to defend an atemporal understanding of eternity mistaken....
Read More Download PDFPaul Helm's Eternal God is an important defense of the construal of divine eternity as timeless. I show that Helm's construal presupposes a tenseless (or B-Theory) of time without sufficient j...
Read More Download PDFWhether God is timeless or temporal depends on whether an A-Theory or B-Theory of time is correct, where the former posits tensed facts and the latter only tenseless facts. Given the superiority of th...
Read More Download PDF