Aquinas argued that our world works in the same way. Someone or something must have caused the world to exist. The cause is God , the effect is the world. Aquinas argued that this first cause must have no beginning - that is, nothing caused it to exist because the first cause is eternal.
He argued that this first cause is God. Francis Collins tells the story of his conversion from atheism to faith as a young doctor. What is BioLogos? Subscribe Now What is BioLogos? Common Question. Are gaps in scientific knowledge evidence for God? How did life begin? How life came from non-life is still largely a scientific mystery. On what grounds can one claim that the Christian God is the creator? Podcast Episode. Featuring guest Alister McGrath.
He alone has the power of being in and of Himself. We do not think about these things often enough. If we reflect on a being who is eternal, who generates the power for everything else that exists, including ourselves, we should be moved to worship Him. This excerpt is adapted from Truths We Confess by R. In Truths We Confess , now thoroughly revised and available in a single, accessible volume, Dr. Sproul introduces readers to this remarkable confession, explaining its insights and applying them to modern life.
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Renewing Your Mind. Theism is the view that there exists a person who is, in significant ways, unlike every other person. Atheism is the view that such a person does not exist. Any theistic world-view includes some notion of how God is related to this universe. There must be some account of how God relates to events, things, and people within the universe and of how God is related to what we could call the structure of the universe.
That is, how God is related to space and to time. If God is the creator of the universe, the question arises as to whether God created space and time as well. The answers to these questions turn on whether space and time are parts or aspects of the universe or whether they are more fundamental.
Not many theologians or philosophers think that space is more fundamental than the universe. They think that God brought space into being. From Augustine through Aquinas , the major thinkers argued that God was not in time at all.
They thought of God as eternal, in the sense that he is timeless or atemporal. Now, the dominant view among philosophers is that God is temporal. His eternal nature is thought of as being everlasting rather than timeless.
He never came into existence and he will never go out of existence but he exists within time. Proponents of each of these positions attribute eternality to God. The majority position today, at least among philosophers, is that God is everlasting but temporal. That is, God never began to exist, and he will never go out of existence.
God does, however, experience temporal succession. That is, God experiences some events for example, the first century before he experiences other events for example, the twenty-first century. If God is temporal, his existence and his thoughts and actions have temporal location.
He exists at the present moment and he has existed at each past moment and he will exist at each future moment. In August, he was thinking about the heat wave in the mid-west. His dealings, like those of the rest of us, occur at particular times. The claim that God is timeless is a denial of the claim that God is temporal. First, God exists, but does not exist at any temporal location. Rather than holding that God is everlastingly eternal, and, therefore, he exists at each time, this position is that God exists but he does not exist at any time at all.
God is beyond time altogether. It could be said that although God does not exist at any time God exists at eternity. That is, eternity can be seen as a non-temporal location as any point within time is a temporal location. Second, it is thought that God does not experience temporal succession. God does not experience the first century before he experiences the twenty-first. He did not first hear them and then answer them. He heard and answered in one timeless moment — in fact, he did so in the same timeless moment that he hears and answers prayers offered in the twenty-first century.
Rather, God is in some third kind of relation to time. One in-between position is that God is not within our time, but he is within his own time. He is not located at any point in our time line. His time is completely distinct from ours. Our time is constituted by physical time. If God is omnitemporal, his metaphysical time does map in some way onto our physical time. So there is a literal sense in which God knows now that I am typing this sentence now. Another view Craig, a, b is that God became temporal when time was created.
If he changes, then he is, at least in some sense, temporal. Just as it is not quite accurate to talk about what happens before time comes into existence, we should not describe this view as one in which God used to be timeless, but he became temporal. This language would imply that there was a time when God was timeless and then, later, there is another time when he is temporal. On this view, there was not a time when he was timeless. Many philosophers of religion think that the Scriptures do not teach definitively any one view concerning God and time Craig a, b; for a differing view, see Padgett, For example, they teach that God never began to exist and he will never go out of existence.
They also teach that God interacts with the world. He knows what is going on, he reveals himself to people, he acts in such a way that things happen in time. They also teach that God is the Lord of all creation. Everything is subject to him. Philosophers generally take claims such as these as parameters for their thinking because of their concern either to remain within historical, biblical orthodoxy themselves or, at least, to articulate a position about God and time that is consistent with orthodoxy.
Any departure from the broad outlines of orthodoxy, at least for many Christian philosophers of religion, is made as a last resort. These parameters, as has been noted, allow for a plurality of positions about how God is related to time. In addition, we will try to fit our theories together with other issues besides what God himself is like. Some of the most obvious issues include the nature of time, the nature of change and the creation of the universe. Stump and Kretzmann identify four ingredients that they claim are essential to an eternal timeless being.
First, any being that is timeless has life. Second, the life of a timeless thing is not able to be limited. Third, this life involves a special sort of duration. Anything that has life must have duration but the duration of a timeless being is not a temporal duration.
Last, a timeless being possesses its entire life all at once. It is this last element that implies that the timeless being is outside time because a temporal living thing only possesses one moment of its life at a time. The two aspects of divine timelessness that Stump and Kretzmann emphasize are that a timeless being has life and that this life has a duration, though not a temporal duration.
The duration of the life of a timeless being puts the nature of such a being in stark contrast with the nature of abstract objects such as numbers or properties. The picture of God that this view leaves us with is of a being whose life is too full to exist only at one moment at a time. The challenge for a defender of a timeless conception of God is to explain how such a God is related to temporal events.
For example, God is directly conscious of each moment of time. The relation of his timeless cognition and the temporal objects of his cognition cannot be captured by using strictly temporal relations such as simultaneity because temporal simultaneity is a transitive relation. God is timelessly aware of the fall of Rome and, in the same timeless now, he is aware of my spilling my coffee.
The fall of Rome is not, however, occurring at the same time that my coffee spills. If x and y are ET-simultaneous, one is timeless and the other temporal. This fact preserves the non-symmetrical and non-transitive nature of the relation. Unfortunately, there are numerous difficulties with ET-simultaneity. There is clearly an analogy with relativity theory at work here. To put an analogy at the core of a technical definition is pedagogically suspect, at the least. It may be that it masks a deeper philosophical problem.
Furthermore, Delmas Lewis has argued that a temporal being can observe something only if that thing is itself temporal and a timeless being can observe only what is timeless. Therefore, the observation talk, as well as the reference frame talk, must be only analogous or metaphorical. It has also been argued that the notion of atemporal duration, that Stump and Kretzmann hold to be required by the timeless view, is at bottom incoherent.
Fitzgerald argues that if a timeless duration does not have these analogues with temporal or spatial duration, it is hard to think of it as a case of bona fide duration. Stump and Kretzmann attempt to respond to such objections and have revised their analysis of ET-simultaneity accordingly.
In their first response to Fitzgerald Stump and Kretzmann, , they make much of his analyzing timeless duration in a way that makes it incompatible with the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity. There are no distinct events or moments at all within the life of a God who is metaphysically simple. Although the two positions are linked throughout medieval thought, there is a cost to holding that a timeless God must be metaphysically simple as well.
Any independent argument against divine simplicity such as in Wolterstorff, will count against such a view of timelessness. This version of the principle eliminates the observation difficulties but continues to use the notion of reference frames to describe the timeless and the temporal states.
Alan Padgett has argued that Stump and Kretzmann cannot be defending anything more than a loose analogy with relativity theory here. He points out that they admit that the use of relativity theory is a heuristic device and nothing more.
Yet their analysis of the relation between a timeless being and events in time requires more than a loose analogy. This feature of Special Relativity makes the analogy of the relations between a timeless being and a temporal event on the one hand and the relations between events in different reference frames quite weak.
Brian Leftow has defended timeless duration in the life of God in another way. These moments stand in the successive relations of earlier and later to one another, although they are not temporally earlier or later than one another.
A QTE being is timeless in that it lives all of its life at once. No moment of its life passes away and there is no moment at which some other moment has not yet been lived.
Because the life of a QTE being has sequential moments, its duration is significantly like the duration or extension of the life of a temporal being.
There can be the sort of duration that allows discrete moments to be individuated by location in the life of a metaphysically simple, timeless God. Leftow argues that there is a significant difference between a being that has spatial or material parts and a being that has a duration consisting of different moments or positions or points. Points are not parts, however. A finite line segment is not made up of some finite number of points such that the addition or subtraction of a finite number of points will change its length.
If the points or moments or positions in the duration of the life of God are not to count as parts of that life, they must be of zero finite length. Leftow allows that in the life of a timeless God and a metaphysically simple God there are distinct points.
He insists that these points are not parts in the life of God. Therefore God is not a being whose life contains distinct parts. He is metaphysically simple. His life does contain points that are ordered sequentially, however.
So the QTE God with its sequential points allows God to have the sort of duration that Fitzgerald wanted, yet be timeless. In this way, the QTE concept of timeless duration is more satisfactory than the one put forward by Stump and Kretzmann. In a recent essay, he defends the idea that such features can be shared without rendering God temporal Leftow He distinguishes between those properties that make something temporal and those that are typically temporal.
A typically temporal property TTP is a property that is typical of temporal events and which helps make them temporal. Having some TTP is not sufficient to make an event a temporal event, however. What will make an event temporal is having the right TTPs. For example, being wholly future relative to some temporal event is a TTP; but God, even if he is temporal, does not have that property.
God has no beginning. As a result his life is not wholly future to any temporal event. This description captures what is meant by a timeless duration. While having a duration and being an event are each cases of TTPs, Leftow has well-argued that they are not the sort of TTP that only temporal beings can have. Which other TTPs does God have if he is timeless?
Not all whens are times, however. Eternity, in the sense of being a timeless location, can also be a when see also Leftow A timeless God can be present, though not temporally present, to the world. He can have a life which is an event having duration, though not temporal duration.
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