Eternity
Eternity
The idea that God transcends, or is beyond, temporal change has a rich history. To some extent, the great monotheistic traditions inherited a Platonic concept of reality and value, according to which that which is most real and valuable (for Plato, this was described as “the good”) is incorruptible and not subject to the alteration, fragmentation, and decay that comes about through time. Some philosophers have held that God must be eternal because otherwise God is in some way a prisoner of time and unable to enjoy the unity of life that should mark supreme perfection.
A contemporary advocate of God's eternity, Brian Leftow, makes the case this way: the life of a temporal being has what he calls “inner limits,” in which parts of the being's life are separate from others. Such limitations have their advantages for beings living in time but with God would mark a splintering and fragmentation that does not befit the fullness and perfection of the divine. A perfect being would have its full being or reality in a complete state rather than spread out in a past that is gone and in a future that has yet to arrive.
The thesis that God is eternal may appear at odds with scriptural narratives in which God first does one act and then another. Most theologians in the three monotheistic traditions treat such references to God as highly analogical or metaphorical because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and the Qur'an describe God from our point of view. We cannot help thinking of God as acting successively in time (first doing one thing, then another), and yet God does not in fact act this way. Some explain this by arguing that God eternally wills succession, that God wills that there will be changes but God's will itself does not change. God's inner being is therefore changeless or immutable, not subject to alteration, fragmentation, and decay. God may have a temporal dimension by being at all times or (as Christians believe) in the incarnation, as Jesus Christ in first-century Palestine, but God's inner being is transcendent. God's life is tota simul, or all at once, as Boethius famously described it.
This understanding of God has at least two benefits. The belief that God transcends time provides a promising way to address the problem of freedom and foreknowledge discussed earlier. If God is in some sense beyond time, what is for us past and future may be present to God. God therefore does not so much foreknow future acts, as God grasps them in a divine present moment. God's transcendence of time has the additional benefit of allowing that God created time. If God is temporally extended (meaning that God has a past, present, and future), God cannot be independent of time and therefore cannot be the creator of time.
There is an enormous literature arguing over whether God is temporally eternal or temporal but without beginning. Consider just one objection and reply.
According to what may be called the objection from simultaneity, the relation of simultaneity is transitive. A transitive relationship allows one to transfer a relation: if you are taller than Socrates and Socrates is taller than Plato, then you are taller than Plato. In terms of temporal relations, we seem to have transitivity. That is, if I am writing at the same time you are running and you are running at the same time Chris is singing, I am writing at the same time Chris is singing. If God exists simultaneously with Nero's burning Rome and with your whistling, then Nero is burning Rome at the same time you are whistling.8 If you are whistling at the same time Nero is burning Rome, we have an obvious absurdity, and so God cannot be eternal.
Defenders of God's eternity have replied that the argument from simultaneity fails because simultaneity is transitive for temporal creatures like us but not for God, for whom all times are present. The life of God is not, as it were, lived instant by instant but in an extended, timeless present. As Leftow puts it; “An eternal God is God present with the whole of time by His life's being stretched out alongside it.”9 Once one consistently grasps what is involved in thinking of an eternal being, one can see that the simultaneity objection unfairly transfers temporal relations to the atemporal.