Tenseless Time and Identity over Time
2
God and Time
On a Framework for Thinking about God, Creation, and Time
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 that 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 he 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 that 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
Hello, Dr. Craig,
When studying systematic theology, and specifically the doctrine of God, I have come to God’s relation to time and eternity and I want to see if you could address a few concerns that are popping up. I have come across an excerpt from a certain systematic theology book that affirms
It is … worthy of note that it is … incoherent to speak of God being eternal before creation and temporal after creation. For a theist, creating the world does not change the nature of God. The world is not created ex deo (‘out of God’); that is pantheism. And for theism, the world is created ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’). Consequently, God does not change ‘internally,’ that is, in His essence, by creating something else. The only thing that changes is ‘external,’ the relationship of the world to Him. Prior to creation, the world has no relationship to God, since it did not exist. At creation and after, God became ‘Creator’ for the first time…. Prior to creation, He was God, but not Creator. That is, at creation God gained a new relationship, but not any new attributes. He did not change in His essence, but in His external activity…. [The divine temporality argument] assumes that to act in time is to be temporal. It does not demonstrate that the Actor is temporal; only that His acts are temporal. Classical theists do not deny that God’s actions are temporal—they only insist that God’s attributes are not temporal.
From listening and reading your work I understand that you hold to the position that God is eternal without creation and temporal subsequent to creation. My question is, “Is it not possible that God can remain eternal while His acts are seen temporally?” Why assume that by simply acting that He must becoming “wholly” spatially and temporally located?
An example of what I am trying to get across: A person could take a stamp with a date and press it on a piece of paper. While the stamped date is fixed with that specific date—we have a time at which something occurred—the stamper is not necessarily contained (trying not to use emotionally laden terms like “trapped”) to that stamped time. Right?
I am trying to make sense of this. Why would God simply acting in time fix Him to time? Further is it not even possible or probable that a model of some divine hyper time could not actually be (even possibly formulated in the future) and we are simply limited in fully grasping a concept like eternity?
Sincerely,
Michael
Dr. Craig’s Response
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.
INSIGHT
This really is one of the most succinct statements of Dr. Craig’s view of time. It is worth returning to in the midst of all the interesting, stimulating, and challenging questions regarding God’s relationship to time and 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.7
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,8 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 among the three persons of the Trinity in that timeless state without creation. There exists a perfect, changeless state of mutual knowledge, will, and love among 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.
Now, Michael, to your questions, I think an answer (which you might be already anticipating based on the above) will depend on which view of time you adopt: a tensed view (A-theory) or a tenseless view (B-theory). According to the B-theory of time, there is no mind-independent temporal becoming; all events in time are equally real, just as every inch on a yardstick is equally real. On this view, it’s easy to see how God can exist outside of time and His acts be located at various points in time. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that God has just one multifaceted timeless action and its effects occur at various points in time. It would be like a three-dimensional person’s simultaneously producing effects at various places in two-dimensional flatland. Since the whole four-dimensional space-time “block” co-exists tenselessly with God, God never comes into a new relation to it, and His effects in it need not be produced by successive actions on His part.
Contrast the A-theory. According to this view, temporal becoming is real, and events in time are not all on an ontological par. God cannot be tenselessly causing future events or else they would exist at their future coordinates, which on an A-theory they do not. Your analogy of the stamper is not really relevant. It just amounts to saying that someone can stamp a false date. The relevant point is that God cannot tenselessly produce an event at a future date without the event’s existing tenselessly at that date.
The theologian you cite actually gives his case away by admitting that at creation God comes into a new relation to the universe. If something changes in relation to other things, then it has undergone an extrinsic change and so must be in time. For example, if I change in relation to my son from standing in the taller than relation to standing in the shorter than relation, I have not changed intrinsically. Nevertheless, in order to undergo such a relational change, I must be in time. There was a time when I stood in one relation and then another time at which I stood in the other relation.
Thomas Aquinas recognized that God’s undergoing even such an extrinsic change would be sufficient to render God temporal, and he avoided this conclusion only by adopting the very problematic doctrine that while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures.
So it is not quite right to say that “[The divine temporality argument] assumes that to act in time is to be temporal.” Rather it holds that if an A-theory of time is true, then to act in time is to be temporal.
It is futile to try to avoid this argument by positing a higher hyper-time in which God produces all events in our time. For then the whole debate just replays itself on the hyper-level. Is hyper-time a tensed time or is it a tenseless time? The same conclusions will follow, and nothing has been gained by kicking the debate upstairs.
Is There a Contradiction in God’s Creation of Time?
The Law of Contradiction states that two mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect.
The statements “God exists and the universe does not exist” and “God exists and the universe exists” are mutually exclusive statements and do not differ in respect. The only way to avoid a contradiction, if both are to be asserted, is to assert that each is true at a different time.
But if we take the word “universe” to mean both space and time, and affirm that time itself had a beginning, then time only exists provided that the statement “God exists and the universe exists” is true, and time does not exist provided that the statement “God exists and the universe does not exist” is true. And if time does not exist, provided that the statement “God exists and the universe does not exist” is true, then there is no time at which that statement is true. But if that is the case, then must we not conclude that each of these statements cannot be true at different times, and so that to maintain that God existed at a time before the universe existed is self-contradictory? Would it not also lead to the conclusion that if God is the cause of the universe, the universe must co-exist eternally with Him and, therefore, has no beginning? Or would that only lead one to the bizarre, but not necessarily self-contradictory, conclusion that the universe had a beginning and yet there was no time at which the universe did not exist?
Travis
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
This is a delightful brainteaser, Travis! Your informal statement of the Law of Contradiction is, “Two mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect.” Let’s accept that statement. So consider the two statements:
1. God exists and the universe does not exist.
and
2. God exists and the universe exists.
These are, as you put it, mutually exclusive, that is to say, they cannot both be true without qualification. But why is that? Each statement is a conjunction, and there is obviously no incompatibility between their initial conjuncts—indeed, they are the same: “God exists.” So any incompatibility between (1) and (2) has to be between their second conjuncts. Adding God to the picture does nothing to generate a contradiction, any more than if we were to add “Obama exists” as a conjunct to each. The real problem, then, is how
1*. The universe does not exist.
and
2*. The universe exists.
can both be true, since they are logically contradictory. The theist who believes that God created time and the universe believes that (1*) and (2*) are, indeed, both true in the actual world. But how can he avoid running afoul of the Law of Contradiction?
You say, “The only way to avoid a contradiction, if both are to be asserted, is to assert that each is true at a different time.” But, as you point out, that is impossible, given that God created time. For at no time is (1*) true. To think that there was once such a time is to postulate a time before time began, which is logically incoherent. So you are quite right to conclude that “each of these statements cannot be true at different times, and so … to maintain that God existed at a time before the universe existed is self-contradictory.”
Is the defender of creatio ex nihilo thus trapped in self-contradiction? Not at all! For it does not follow from the Law of Contradiction that “the only way to avoid a contradiction, if both are to be asserted, is to assert that each is true at a different time.” For the Law states merely that the two mutually exclusive statements “cannot both be true at the same time,” not that they must be true at different times. And even though (1*) and (2*) are not true at different times, still they are not true at the same time. (2*) is true at every time (assuming that time begins at creation); but (1*) is true but not true at any time. (1*) is true relative to the state of affairs of the actual world, which is God, existing timelessly sans the universe. This state of affairs is causally prior to the universe but not temporally prior to the universe.
So it does not then follow that “if God is the cause of the universe, the universe must co-exist eternally with Him and, therefore, has no beginning.” God existing alone sans the universe is simply timeless, and time comes into being with the universe at the moment of creation. Hence (1) and (2) do not violate the Law of Contradiction: they are not true at the same time.
So I agree with and wholeheartedly endorse “the bizarre but not necessarily self-contradictory conclusion that the universe had a beginning and yet there was no time at which the universe did not exist.” (This conclusion is actually an implication of the standard model of big bang cosmology!) What I would add is the even stranger, but non-contradictory, conclusion that God exists timelessly without the universe and that (1) is true relative to that state of affairs.
Tenseless Time and Identity over Time
Hi, Dr. Craig, I’m from Brazil. I watched your interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn (host of PBS’ “Closer to Truth”),9 in which you distinguished two philosophical views of time. The first one is the tensed view of time.
But I have wondered deeply about the tenseless one. In this view, the past, the present and the future are equally real and the observed “tenseness” of time is just an illusion of our minds.
Here is the problem: if the positions (a) and (b) of an observed electron (x) are simultaneously real, then the statement “electron (x) is electron (x)” would be false, which means that the principle of identity would be false too. Is that right?
The tenseless model has some other absurd implications:
• If all the states of my mind are simultaneously real, why in the world do I have this dynamic illusion?
• Am I already dead but not aware of it?
• Moreover, I think that it entails that the nature of our minds isn’t material.
If this model of time is indeed so absurd, why does Stephen Hawking embrace it despite all odds? Is modern science that much incompatible with our awareness of the world? Or is Hawking just making the same mistake as Einstein did regarding the expansion of space just to avoid the beginning of the Cosmos?
I’m not an English native writer, but I did my best. God bless you Dr. Craig!
Daniel
Brazil
Dr. Craig’s Response
I’m so encouraged by the number of astute Christians in Brazil whom we are encountering through Reasonable Faith. As Brazil emerges to superpower status during this century and as the Christian church there continues to burgeon, it gives grounds for great optimism about the future.
Your perceptive question, Daniel, is one that I’ve addressed in my essay “McTaggart’s Paradox and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics.”10 For those who are unfamiliar with the background of Daniel’s question, let me explain that, broadly speaking, there are two competing views of the nature of time: the tensed view, which holds that temporal becoming is a real, objective feature of the world, and the tenseless view, which holds that all moments of time, whether past, present, or future, are equally real and existent, so that temporal becoming is an illusion of human consciousness. Philosophers are deeply divided as to which view is correct.
Now, what Daniel has noticed is that the tenseless view has a very strange implication. Consider some entity x that exists at two different moments of time. Rather than an electron, let x be you yourself, to sharpen the paradox. It follows from the Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals that you are not the same person who existed just one minute ago! For on the tenseless theory of time, these are two distinct objects occupying different locations in space-time. Moreover, they have different properties: the later person may have a slightly different shape or a few less molecules. So they cannot be identical, since they have discernible properties.
What this implies is not that the tenseless time theorist must abandon the principle of identity, since that is a necessary truth of logic, but rather that the tenseless time theorist must hold that intrinsic change is impossible and that nothing actually endures through time! These consequences are generally acknowledged by tenseless time theorists. They hold that what we call persons are just three-dimensional slices of four-dimensional space-time “worms.” The various slices are different objects, just as the different slices of a loaf of bread are. One slice does not turn into another, nor does any undergo intrinsic change. The appearance of change arises because the various temporal slices have different intrinsic properties. There is no more intrinsic change in objects over time than in a loaf of bread that tapers from large slices at one end to small slices at the other.
I agree with you, Daniel, that this seems really crazy. I have every reason to believe that there is at least one thing that endures through intrinsic change, namely, I myself. I existed a second ago, and despite the changes which have taken place in me, I still exist now. No sane person really believes that he is not the same person who existed a minute ago. Moreover, the tenseless view is incompatible with moral responsibility, praise, and blame. The non-conscious, four-dimensional object of which I am a part cannot be regarded as a moral agent and is, therefore, not morally responsible for anything. One might say that the spatio-temporal slices or parts of such objects are moral agents. But then it becomes impossible to hold one slice responsible for what another slice has done. How can one person be blamed and punished for what an entirely distinct, different person did? Why should I be punished for his crimes? By the same token, how can moral praise be given to a person for what some other, no longer existent person did? Why should I, who have done nothing, get the credit for the heroism of some other person?
This argument has serious theological ramifications, for Christian theism affirms not only that people are responsible moral agents but also that God is just in holding them responsible for their deeds.
Your second objection about the explanation of the illusion of temporal becoming is also a pressing problem. On the tenseless view, mental events themselves are strung out in a tenseless series just as physical events are and are all equally real. My now-awareness of tomorrow is just as real as my now-awareness of today. The experience of the successive becoming of experiences is illusory. Experiences do not really come to be and pass away. But that flies in the face of the phenomenology of time consciousness. It denies that we experience the becoming of our experiences. For if we do have such an experience, then we must ask all over again whether that experience is mind-dependent or not, and so on. To halt a vicious infinite regress, the tenseless time theorist must deny that we do experience the becoming of experiences. But such a phenomenology is obviously inaccurate.
I’m not sure why you say that the tenseless view implies materialism with respect to human beings; but tenseless time theorists are for the most part wedded to naturalistic epistemology and so would in any case be ill-disposed to any mind-body dualism.
So why does someone like Stephen Hawking espouse a tenseless view of time? I think that the main reason is that physics finds it useful to treat time and space as a four-dimensional entity called space-time in which temporal becoming plays no part. Relativity Theory in particular becomes perspicuous in such a context. Unfortunately, far too many physicists, having never studied philosophy, naively take this geometrical representation as a piece of metaphysics rather than as a merely heuristic device. One, therefore, has to be very cautious about the statements of physicists when it comes to the nature of time.
7. See Dr. Craig’s discussion in Time and Eternity (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2001).
8. Greg Ganssle, ed., God & Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2001).
9. You can watch this for free at ReasonableFaith.org (http://bit.ly/KuhnGodTime).
10. Published in Analysis 58 (1998): 122–27.