III. Divine Knowledge of Tensed Facts
THOMAS AQUINAS CLAIMED that God is timeless and so sees all of time from beginning to end, just as a man on a watchtower sees the whole stretch of a caravan passing by on the road below. Thus, the whole of time is present to eternity. Reacting to Thomas’s claim, the medieval Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus protested,
Eternity will not, by reason of its infinity, be present to any non-existent time. . . . If (assuming the impossible) the whole of time were simultaneously existent, the whole would be simultaneously present to eternity. . . . For the “now” of eternity is formally infinite and therefore formally exceeds the “now” of time. Nevertheless it does not co-exist with another “now”.1
On Scotus’s understanding of time and eternity, God co-exists only with the present moment or “now.” He is eternal in the sense that He endures forever.
Again, we want to ask what reasons might be given for adopting this temporalist understanding of divine eternity. Of the various arguments on behalf of divine temporality, three stand out as especially significant.
EXPOSITION
We have seen that Isaac Newton founded his belief in the existence of absolute time on God’s infinite temporal duration. But so far as I can tell, Newton never offered any argument for thinking God to be temporal—he just asserted it. He regarded temporality and spatiality as inherent dispositions of being; that is to say, anything that exists must exist in time and space. But this assumption is far from obvious. Indeed, quite the contrary, it seems easy to conceive of God as transcending space, since He is incorporeal. Moreover, philosophers often regard abstract entities such as numbers or sets as existing in neither time nor space. So why could God not exist timelessly? Is there no logically conceivable world in which God exists and time does not?
According to the Christian doctrine of creation, God’s decision to create a universe was a freely willed decision from which God could have refrained. We can conceive, then, of a possible world in which God does refrain from creation, a world which is empty except for God. Would time exist in such a world? Certainly it would if God were changing, experiencing a stream of consciousness. As we have seen, even a succession in the contents of consciousness is sufficient to generate a temporal series.
But suppose God were altogether changeless. Suppose that He did not experience a succession of thoughts but grasped all truth in a single, changeless intuition. Would time exist? A relationalist like Leibniz would say no, for there are no events to generate a relation of earlier than or later than. There is just a single, timeless state.
It is true that in recent years there has been a good deal written about the possibility of time without change, and most contemporary relationalists espouse a view which allows there to be changeless periods of time sandwiched in between periods of change.2 But I know of no relationalist account that would allow a totally changeless world such as we are envisioning to be temporal. Such a world would, indeed, seem to be just a single, timeless state.
Newton would have disagreed, of course. For him timeless existence was a logical impossibility. But my point is that no reason has been offered why we should side with Newton on this score rather than with Leibniz, whose view seems extremely plausible.
If timeless existence as such is not demonstrably impossible, then, why should we think that God could not exist timelessly? Let us stick with our envisioned empty world in which God alone exists. Why could God not exist timelessly in such a world?
“Because God is personal!” is the answer given by certain advocates of divine temporality. They contend that the idea of a timeless person is incoherent and therefore God must be temporal. They argue that in order to be a person, one must possess certain properties which inherently involve time. Since God is essentially personal, He therefore cannot be timeless.
We can formulate this argument as follows (using x, y, z to represent certain properties to be specified later):
1. Necessarily, if God is timeless, He does not have the properties x, y, z.
2. Necessarily, if God does not have the properties x, y, z, then God is not personal.
3. Necessarily, God is personal.
4. Therefore, necessarily, God is not timeless.
The argument, if successful, shows that timelessness and personhood are incompatible and, since God is essentially personal, it is timelessness which must be jettisoned.
CRITIQUE
The defender of divine timelessness may attempt to turn back this argument either by challenging the claim that the properties in question are necessary conditions of personhood or by showing that a timeless God could possess the relevant properties after all. So what are the properties x, y, z that the advocate of divine temporality is talking about?
In his article “Conditions of Personhood,”3 Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of mind, delineates six different conceptions of personhood, each of which lays down a necessary condition of any individual P’s being a person:
P is a person only if:
i. P is a rational being.
ii. P is a being to which states of consciousness can be attributed.
iii. Others regard (or can regard) P as a being to which states of consciousness can be attributed.
iv. P is capable of regarding others as beings to which states of consciousness can be attributed.
v. P is capable of verbal communication.
vi. P is self-conscious; that is, P is capable of regarding him/her/itself as a subject of states of consciousness.
All of these criteria depend in some way on P’s having or being said to have consciousness. So, as an initial step in assessing the present argument, we may ask whether the concept of a conscious, timeless being is possible.
John Lucas is one of those philosophers who maintains that this is not possible. He writes,
Time is not a thing that God might or might not create, but a category, a necessary concomitant of the existence of a personal being, though not of a mathematical entity. This is not to say that time is an independent category, existing independently of God. It exists because of God: not because of some act of will on His part, but because of His nature: if ultimate reality is personal, then it follows that time must exist. God did not make time, but time stems from God.4
On Lucas’s view, even in an otherwise empty world, time would exist if a personal God exists. Unfortunately, Lucas never explains why personal consciousness could not be unchanging and therefore, plausibly, atemporal. Why could not the contents of God’s consciousness in such a world be comprised exclusively of such changelessly true beliefs as “No human beings exist,” “7+5=12,” “Anything that has a shape has a size,” “If I were to create a world of free creatures, they would fall into sin,” and so forth? If God never acquires any new beliefs and never loses any beliefs, why could not such a changeless consciousness of truth be plausibly regarded as timeless? Why think that such a changeless, timeless consciousness is impossible? Here Lucas has nothing to say. He confesses, “My claim . . . that time is a concomitant of consciousness, is of course only a claim, and I have been unable to argue for it, except by citing poetry. . . . arguments would be better.”5
Indeed, they would! So what arguments are there against the possibility of an atemporal consciousness? Richard Gale, a well-known philosopher of time, would make short work of the question: “the quickest and most direct way of showing the absurdity of a timeless mind is as follows: A mind is conscious, and consciousness is a temporally elongated process.”6 The difficulty with Gale’s reasoning, however, is that he fails to show that being temporally extended is an essential property of consciousness, rather than just a common property of consciousness. Defenders of divine timelessness have frequently pointed out that the act of knowing something need not take any time at all.7 It makes sense, for example, to say that a timeless being knows the multiplication table. So why is an atemporal, conscious knowledge of unchanging truth impossible?
Gale responds that anyone who knows some particular truth must have a disposition to engage in certain temporal activities. But Gale’s assertion is clearly false. There is no reason to think that God cannot know 2+2=4 without having a disposition to engage in temporal activities. And remember, on the Christian view, God is free to refrain from creation altogether, in which case I see no reason to think He must be disposed to engage in temporal activities at all.
I am not aware of any other arguments in the literature aimed at showing that an atemporal consciousness is impossible. Accordingly, we may conclude that no good reason has been given for thinking that God could not satisfy condition (ii) above. Similarly, condition (iii) is satisfied, since on the basis of our investigation thus far, I (and, I trust, the reader) can regard God, existing timelessly, as a being to whom a state of consciousness can be attributed. Again, even in our envisioned empty, timeless world, God is at least capable of regarding others as conscious—even if, were He to create such beings, He would not then be timeless. (We may leave that hypothesis an open question at this point.) Thus, God could satisfy condition (iv). What about condition (v)? God in the empty world is once more at least capable of verbal communication, for He could create language users like us and communicate to them by inspiring prophets or even causing sound waves in the thin air. Thus, (v) is met.
Could a timeless God be self-conscious, as (vi) stipulates? In order to be self-conscious a being must hold beliefs about himself not only from the third-person perspective, such as, in God’s case, “God is omnipotent” or “God believes that 2+2=4,” but also from the first-person perspective, such as “I am omnipotent” or “I believe that 2+2=4.”8 But it takes no more time to believe truly that “I have no human company,” for example, than it does to believe that “No human beings exist.” For any truth God knows from a third-person viewpoint, we can formulate a corresponding belief from the first-person perspective. Hence, if God can be timelessly conscious, there is no reason He cannot be timelessly self-conscious. Hence, criterion (vi) is also met.
That leaves criterion (i), that God must be rational in order to be personal. Without going into the debate over what it means to be rational, we may say rather confidently that God’s being timeless impairs neither God’s noetic structure (His system of beliefs) nor His ability to discharge any intellectual duties He might be thought to have. Since He is omniscient, it is pretty silly to think that God could be indicted for irrationality! Nor, as we have seen, would timelessness inhibit His knowing all truth in a timeless world such as we are contemplating.
Thus, a timeless God could fulfill all the various necessary conditions laid down for being personal. More than that, I should say that being self-conscious is not merely a necessary but also a sufficient condition for personhood. Our thought experiment of God’s existing timelessly alone suggests that it is quite possible for God to be both timeless and self-conscious in such a state and, hence, personal.
Now some philosophers have denied that a timeless God can be a self-conscious, rational being, because He could not exhibit certain forms of consciousness which we normally associate with personal beings (namely, ourselves). The metaphysician Robert Coburn has written,
Surely it is a necessary condition of anything’s being a person that it should be capable (logically) of, among other things, doing at least some of the following: remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, intending, and acting intentionally. To see that this is so one need but ask oneself whether anything which necessarily lacked all of the capacities noted would, under any conceivable circumstances, count as a person. But now an eternal being would necessarily lack all of these capacities in as much as their exercise by a being clearly requires that the being exist in time. After all, reflection and deliberation take time, deciding typically occurs at some time—and in any case it always makes sense to ask, “When did you (he, they, etc.) decide?”; remembering is impossible unless the being doing the remembering has a past; and so on. Hence, no eternal being, it would seem, could be a person.9
Now even if Coburn were correct that a personal being must be capable of exhibiting the forms of consciousness he lists, it does not follow that a timeless God cannot be personal. For God could be capable of exhibiting such forms of consciousness but be timeless just in case (that is, “if and only if”) He does not in fact exhibit any of them. In other words, the hidden assumption behind Coburn’s reasoning is that God’s being timeless or temporal is an essential property of God, that either God is necessarily timeless or He is necessarily temporal. But that assumption seems to me dubious. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that God is in fact temporal. Is it logically impossible that God could have been timeless instead? Since God’s decision to create is free, we can conceive of possible worlds in which God alone exists. If He is unchanging in such a world, then on any relational view of time God would be timeless, as we have seen. In such an atemporal world God would lack certain properties which we have supposed Him to have in the actual world—for example, the property of knowing what time it is or the property of co-existing with temporal creatures—and He would have other properties which He lacks in the actual world—for example, the property of being alone or of knowing that He is alone—but none of these differences seems significant enough to deny that God could be either timeless or temporal and still be the same being. Just as my height is a contingent rather than essential property of mine, so God’s temporal status is plausibly a contingent rather than essential property of His. So apart from highly controversial claims on behalf of divine simplicity or immutability, I see no reason to think that God is either essentially temporal or essentially timeless.
So if timelessness is a merely contingent property of God, He could be entirely capable of remembering, anticipating, reflecting, and so on; only were He to do so, then He would not be timeless. So long as He freely refrains from such activities He is timeless, even though He has the capacity to engage in those activities. Thus, by Coburn’s own lights God must be regarded as personal.
At a more fundamental level, it is in any case pretty widely recognized that most of the forms of consciousness mentioned by Coburn are not essential to personhood—indeed, not even the capacity for them is essential to personhood. Take remembering, for example. Any temporal individual who lacked memory would be mentally ill or a mere animal. But if an individual exists timelessly, then he has no past to remember. He thus never forgets anything! Given God’s omniscience, there is just no reason to think that His personhood requires memory. Similarly with regard to anticipation: Since a timeless God has no future, there just is nothing to anticipate. Only a temporal person needs to have beliefs about the past or future.
As for reflecting and deliberating, these are ruled out not so much by God’s timelessness as by His omniscience. An omniscient being cannot reflect and deliberate because He already knows the conclusions to be arrived at! Even if God is in time, He does not engage in reflection and deliberation. But He is surely not impersonal as a result.
What about deciding, intending, and acting intentionally? I should say that all of these forms of consciousness are exhibited by a timeless God. With respect to deciding, again, omniscience alone precludes God’s deciding in the sense of making up His mind after a period of indecision. Even a temporal God does not decide in that sense. But God does decide in the sense that His will intends toward one alternative rather than another and does so freely. It is up to God what He does; He could have willed otherwise. This is the strongest sense of libertarian freedom of the will. In God’s case, because He is omniscient, His free decisions are either everlasting or timeless rather than preceded by a period of ignorance and indecision.
As for intending or acting intentionally, there is no reason to think that intentions are necessarily future-directed. One can direct one’s intentions at one’s present state. God, as the Good, can timelessly desire and will His own infinite goodness. Such a changeless intention can be as timeless as God’s knowing His own essence. Moreover, in the empty world we have envisioned, God may timelessly will and intend to refrain from creating a universe. God’s willing to refrain from creation should not be confused with the mere absence of the intention to create. A stone is characterized by the absence of any will to create but cannot be said to will to refrain from creating. In a world in which God freely refrains from creation, His abstaining from creating is a result of a free act of the will on His part. Hence, it seems to me that God can timelessly intend, will, and choose what He does.
Now some theologians have objected to the picture I have painted of a timeless, solitary deity, for such a being lacks all interpersonal relationships, and such relationships, they believe, are essential to personhood. If God is to be personal, He must be engaged in relationships with other persons. But the give-and-take of personal relationships inherently involves temporality.
In response to this objection, I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to prove that engaging in personal relationships, as opposed to the capacity to engage in personal relationships, is essential to personhood. A timeless God could have the capacity for such relationships even if, were He to engage in them, He would in that case be temporal. But let that pass. The more important assumption underlying this objection is the assumption that the persons to whom God is related must be human persons. For on the Christian conception of God, that assumption is false. Within the fullness of the Godhead itself, the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit enjoy the interpersonal relations afforded by the Trinity which God is. As a Trinity, God is eternally complete with no need of fellowship with finite persons. It is a marvel of God’s grace and love that He would freely create finite persons and invite them to share in the love and joy of the inner Trinitarian life of God.
But would the existence of these Trinitarian interrelationships necessitate that God be temporal? I see no reason to think that the persons of the Trinity could not be affected, prompted, or responsive to one another in an unchanging and, hence, timeless way. To use a mundane example, think of iron filings clinging to a magnet. The magnet and the filings need not change their positions in any way in order for it to be the case that the filings are stuck to the magnet because the magnet is affecting them and they are responding to the magnet’s force. Of course, on a deeper level change is going on constantly in this case because the magnet’s causal influence is mediated by finite velocity electro-magnetic radiation. Nonetheless, the example is instructive because it illustrates how on a macroscopic level action and response can be simultaneous and, hence, involve neither change nor temporal separation. How much more is this so when we consider the love relationship between the members of the Trinity! Since intra-Trinitarian relations are not based on physical influences or rooted in any material substratum but are purely mental, the response of the Son to the Father’s love implies neither change nor temporal separation. Just as we speak metaphorically of two lovers who sit, not speaking a word, gazing into each other’s eyes as “lost in that timeless moment,” so we may speak literally of the timeless mutual love of the Father, Son, and Spirit for one another.
The ancient doctrine of perichoreisis, championed by the Greek Church Fathers, expresses the timeless interaction of the persons of the Godhead.10 According to that doctrine, there is a complete interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity, such that each is intimately bound up in the activities of the other. Thus, what the Father wills, the Son and Spirit also will; what the Son loves, the Father and Spirit also love, and so forth. Each person is completely transparent to the others. There is nothing new that the Son, for example, might communicate to the Spirit, since that has already been communicated. There exists a full and perfect exchange of the divine love and knowledge, so that nothing is left undone which needs to be completed. In this perfect interpenetration of divine love and life, no change need occur, so that God existing alone in the self-sufficiency of His being would, on a relational view of time, be timeless.
Thus, I think it is evident that God can enjoy interpersonal relations and yet be timeless. So even if we conceded that God is essentially timeless and that interpersonal relations are essential to personhood, it is still not true that if God is timeless, He cannot stand in interpersonal relations.
In conclusion, then, the argument for divine temporality based on God’s personhood cannot be deemed a success. Advocates of a temporal God have not been able to show that God cannot possess timelessly the properties essential to personhood. On the contrary, we have seen that a timeless God can be plausibly said to fulfill the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a person. A timeless, divine person can be a self-conscious, rational individual endowed with freedom of the will and engaged in interpersonal relations.
All this has been said, however, in abstraction from the reality of a temporal universe. Given that such a universe exists, it remains to be seen whether God can remain untouched by its temporality.
EXPOSITION
In the previous section we abstracted from the actual existence of the temporal world and considered God existing alone without creation and asked whether He could exist timelessly. We saw that He could. But, of course, the temporal world does exist. The question therefore arises whether God can stand in relation to a temporal world and yet remain timeless.
It is very difficult to see how He can. Imagine once more God existing changelessly alone without creation, but with a changeless determination of His will to create a temporal world with a beginning. Since God is omnipotent, His will is done, and a temporal world comes into existence. Now this presents us with a dilemma: Either God existed prior to creation or He did not. Suppose He did. In that case, God is temporal, not timeless, since to exist prior to some event is to be in time. Suppose, then, that God did not exist prior to creation. In that case, without creation, He exists timelessly, since He obviously did not come into being along with the world at the moment of creation.
This second alternative presents us with a new dilemma: Once time begins at the moment of creation, either God becomes temporal in virtue of His real relation to the temporal world or else He exists just as timelessly with creation as He does without it. If we choose the first alternative, then, once again, God is temporal. But what about the second alternative? Can God remain untouched by the world’s temporality? It seems not. For at the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which He did not stand before (since there was no “before”). Even if in creating the world God undergoes no intrinsic change, He at least undergoes an extrinsic change.11 For at the moment of creation, God comes into the relation of sustaining the universeor, at the very least, of co-existing with the universe, relations in which He did not stand before. Since He is free to refrain from creation, God could have never stood in those relations, had He so willed. But in virtue of His creating a temporal world, God comes into a relation with that world the moment it springs into being. Thus, even if it is not the case that God is temporal prior to His creation of the world, He nonetheless undergoes an extrinsic change at the moment of creation which draws Him into time in virtue of His real relation to the world. So even if God is timeless without creation, His free decision to create a temporal world also constitutes a free decision on His part to exist temporally.
The argument of the advocate of divine temporality can be summarized as follows:
1. God is creatively active in the temporal world.
2. If God is creatively active in the temporal world, God is really related to the temporal world.
3. If God is really related to the temporal world, God is temporal.
4. Therefore, God is temporal.
This argument, if successful, does not prove that God is essentially temporal, but that if He is a Creator of a temporal world—as He in fact is—then He is temporal.
CRITIQUE
One way to escape this argument is to deny premise (2). This might not appear to be a very promising strategy, since it seems obvious that God is related to His creatures insofar as He sustains them, knows them, and loves them. Remarkably, however, it was precisely this premise that medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas denied.
Thomas agrees with premise (3). On his view, relations between God and creatures, such as God’s being Lord over the world, first begin to exist at the moment at which the creatures come into being. Hence, if God stands in real relations to His creatures, He acquires those relations new at the moment of creation and thus undergoes extrinsic change. And anything that changes, even extrinsically, must be in time.
Thomas escapes the conclusion that God is therefore temporal by denying that God stands in any real relation to the world. Since God is absolutely simple, He stands in no relations to anything, for relations would introduce complexity into God’s being. Aquinas holds, paradoxically, that while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures. The relation of God to creatures is just in our minds, not in reality.
To give an illustration: Suppose Joe is jealous of John. In that case, Joe is related to John by the is envious of relation, and John is related to Joe by the is envied by relation. But Aquinas would say that only Joe’s relation to John is real: He really is envious of John. But John’s relation to Joe is just in our heads: Whether Joe exists or not, John is the same; his being envied by Joe does not make any real difference in him.
Similarly, Aquinas says, creatures are really sustained, known, and loved by God, but God would be the same whether creatures existed or not. He therefore does not stand in real relations of sustaining, knowing, or loving His creatures. On Aquinas’s view, then, God undergoes no extrinsic change in creating the world. He just exists, and creation is creatures’ coming into existence with a real relation to God of being caused by God.
This is certainly an extraordinary doctrine. Wholly apart from its reliance on divine simplicity, the doctrine of no real relations is very problematic. God’s sustaining the world is a causal relation rooted in the active power and intrinsic properties of God as First Cause. It is therefore not at all analogous to the passive relation is envied by. Thus, to say that the world is really related to God by the relation is sustained by, but that God is not really related to the world by the relation is sustaining seems unintelligible. It is to say that one can have real effects without a real cause—which seems self-contradictory or incomprehensible.
Moreover, God is surely really related to His creatures in the following sense: In different logically possible worlds which we can imagine, God’s will, knowledge, and love would be different than they actually are. For example, if God had not chosen to create a universe at all, He would surely have a different will than that which He has (for He would not will to create the universe); He would know different truths than the ones He knows (for example, He would not know The universe exists, since that would be false in that world); He would not love the same creatures He actually loves (since no creatures would exist). Incredibly, however, Aquinas denies this. It is the implication of his view that God is perfectly similar in every possible world we can conceive: He never wills differently, He never acts differently, He never knows differently, He never loves differently. Whether the world is empty or chock-full of creatures of every sort, there is no difference in God. But then it becomes unintelligible why this universe or any universe exists rather than just nothing. The reason cannot lie in God, for He is perfectly similar in all possible worlds. Nor can the reason lie in creatures, for we are asking for some explanation of their existence. Thus, on Thomas’s view there just is no reason for why this universe or any universe at all exists.
Therefore, Thomas’s attempt to evade the present argument by denying premise (2) is just not plausible. The defender of divine timelessness must seek some other way of escape.
Recent defenders of timeless eternity have turned their guns on premise (3) instead. They have tried to craft theories of divine eternity that would permit God to be really related to the temporal world and yet to exist timelessly.
For example, Eleonore Stump and the late Norman Kretzmann, who rekindled contemporary discussion of divine timelessness, attempted to craft a new simultaneity relation, which they believed would allow a timeless God to relate to His creation.12 They understand the generic relation of simultaneity to be existence at once (or together). Temporal simultaneity is one type of simultaneity indicating existence at one and the same time. Eternal simultaneity (which would hold between timeless entities, say, God and numbers) is existence at one and the same eternal present. Now the problem of relating a timeless entity to a temporal entity is that there is no single mode of existence that would allow one to define Eternal-Temporal simultaneity as existence at one and the same _____. There is nothing to fill in the blank.So how can one relate two such disparate modes of existence as timelessness and temporality?
In order to craft a definition of this new type of simultaneity (which they abbreviate as ET-simultaneity), Stump and Kretzmann appeal to the analogy of the Special Theory of Relativity (STR). There, as we have seen, simultaneity is relative to inertial frames. Temporal simultaneity means existence at one and the same time within the reference frame of a given observer. Stump and Kretzmann propose to treat modes of existence as analogous to reference frames and to construct a definition of ET-simultaneity in terms of two reference frames (timelessness and temporality) and two observers (one in eternity and one in time).
Their definition is very complicated in its wording, but the basic idea is as follows. Take some eternal being x and some temporal being y. These two are ET-simultaneous just in case, relative to some hypothetical observer in the eternal reference frame, x is eternally present and y is observed as temporally present, and relative to some hypothetical observer in any temporal reference frame, y is temporally present and x is observed as eternally present.
A word of clarification: By “eternal” Stump and Kretzmann mean “timeless,” and by “temporal reference frame” they mean “moment of time.” It is also worth noting that this definition is not really analogous to simultaneity in STR at all. A better analogy would be to say that x and y are ET-simultaneous just in case they both exist at the same eternal present relative to the eternal reference frame and both exist at the same moment of time relative to the temporal reference frame. But then God would be temporal relative to our mode of existence, which Stump and Kretzmann do not want to say.
On the basis of their definition of ET-simultaneity, Stump and Kretzmann believe they have solved the problem of how a timeless being can be really related to a temporal world. For relative to the eternal reference frame, any temporal entity which exists at any time is observed to be present, and relative to any moment of time God is observed to be present. The metaphysical relativity postulated by ET-simultaneity implies that all events are present to God in eternity and therefore open to His timeless causal influence. Every action of God is ET-simultaneous with its temporal effect.
Now the Stump-Kretzmann account is a veritable mare’s nest of philosophical difficulties. But in the interest of brevity, let us pass them by and cut to the heart of the matter: Their proffered definition of ET-simultaneity is explanatorily vacuous. As many critics have pointed out, the language of observation employed in the definition is wholly obscure.13 In STR very specific physical content is given to the notion of observation through Einstein’s operational definitions of distant simultaneity. But in the definition of ET-simultaneity, no hint is given as to what is meant, for example, by x’s being observed as eternally present relative to some moment of time. In the absence of any procedure for determining ET-simultaneity, the definition reduces to the assertion that, relative to the reference frame of eternity, x is eternallypresent and y is temporally present, and that relative to some temporalreference frame, y is temporally present and x is eternally present—which is only a restatement of the problem! Worse, if y is temporally present to God, then God and y are not ET-simultaneous at all, but temporally simultaneous. Thus, God would be temporally simultaneous with every temporal event, which is to sacrifice divine timelessness.
Paul Helm of the University of London, himself a defender of divine timelessness, is not being uncharitable when he complains that Stump and Kretzmann’s “‘solution’ to the problem is found simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity. ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it.”14
To their credit, Stump and Kretzmann later revised their definition of ET-simultaneity so as to free it from observation language.15 Basically, their new account tries to define ET-simultaneity in terms of causal relations. On the new definition, x and y are ET-simultaneous just in case, relative to an observer in the eternal reference frame, x is eternally present and y is temporally present, and the observer can enter into direct causal relations with both x and y; and relative to an observer in any temporal reference frame, x is eternally present and y is at the same time as the observer, and the observer can enter into direct causal relations with both x and y.
Again, there are many difficulties with this new definition which we may overlook. The fundamental problem with this new account of ET-simultaneity is that it is viciously circular. For ET-simultaneity was originally invoked to explain how a timeless God could be causally active in time; but now ET-simultaneity is defined in terms of a timeless being’s ability to be causally active in time. Our original problem was to explain how God could be both timeless and yet creatively active in the world. That is hardly explained by saying that a timeless God is ET-simultaneous with His effects in time and then defining ET-simultaneity in terms of the ability of a timeless being to be causally related to temporal effects. This amounts to saying that God can be causally active in time because He can be causally active in time! Brian Leftow, who has written extensively on God and time, concludes,
any definition of ET-simultaneity which invokes any form of ET-causality . . . is implicitly circular. For to fully explain how ET-causation can occur, we must bring in the concept of ET-simultaneity. If we do, we cannot then define ET-simultaneity by invoking ET-causation, for then the concept to be defined in effect recurs in the definition.16
Since their first definition was explanatorily vacuous and their second definition viciously circular, Stump and Kretzmann must be judged to have failed in their attempt to undercut premise (3) of the argument under discussion and so to stave off its conclusion.
Leftow himself has offered another, different account of divine eternity in order to refute premise (3).17 It will be recalled that on the Stump-Kretzmann model, there is no common reference frame or mode of existence shared by timeless and temporal beings. As a result, Stump and Kretzmann were unable to explain how such beings could be causally related. The essence of Leftow’s proposal is to remedy this defect by maintaining that temporal beings do exist in eternity; they share God’s mode of existence and so can be causally related to God. But, he insists, this does not imply that time or temporal existence is illusory, for temporal beings also have a temporal mode of existence.
How can it be shown that temporal beings exist in timeless eternity? Leftow’s argument is based on three theses:
I. The distance between God and every thing in space is zero.
II. Spatial things do not change in any way unless there is a change of place (a motion involving a material thing).
III. If something is in time, it is also in space.
On the basis of these theses Leftow argues as follows: There can be no change of place relative to God because the distance between God and everything in space is zero. But if there is no change of place relative to God, there can be no change of any sort on the part of spatial things relative to God. Moreover, since anything that is temporal is also spatial, it follows that there are no temporal, non-spatial beings. The only temporal beings there are exist in space, and none of these changes relative to God. Assuming, then, some relational view of time, according to which time cannot exist without change, it follows that all temporal beings exist timelessly relative to God. Thus, relative to God all things are timelessly present and so can be causally related to God.
The problem with this reasoning is that all three of its foundational theses seem false, some obviously so. Take (I), for example. This thesis rests pretty obviously on a category mistake. When we say that there is no distance between God and creatures, we do not mean that there is a distance and its measure is zero. Rather we mean that the category of distance does not even apply to the relations between a non-spatial being such as God and things in space.
There is a helpful illustration of the point from the history of Relativity Theory. In defending the existence of an aether, H. A. Lorentz had denuded the aether of virtually every physical property except the property of being motionless; the aether as he conceived it was virtually equivalent to the inertial frame of absolute space. Einstein once joked that all he had done was to divest the aether of the last physical property Lorentz had left it: its state of motion.18 Einstein said that he was quite willing to admit the existence of an aether just so long as no state of motion is ascribed to it. Now in denying that the aether has a state of motion, Einstein was clearly not saying that the motion of the aether was zero. That was Lorentz’s position: The aether is at rest; it has a state of motion and its measure is zero. What Einstein was saying is that the category of motion does not even apply to the aether: It is neither moving nor at rest. To think that it is is a category mistake.
Now in exactly the same way, thesis (I) is just a category mistake. The concept of spatial separation or distance cannot be applied to a being which transcends space and things in space. It is therefore wrong-headed to say that the distance between them is zero. Unfortunately, Leftow’s whole theory balances on thesis (I) like a pyramid on its point. Without it, the theory collapses because things in space are not, then, changeless relative to God.
But let us press on. What about thesis (II)? Again, this thesis is false if time is dynamic or “tensed.”19 On this view of time, the difference between past, present, and future is not just in our minds, and temporal becoming is real. If temporal tenses are real, spatial things can change even if there is no spatial motion by changing in their temporal properties. For example, some spatial object can change by being one year old and then becoming two years old, even if no change of place has occurred. (It will be recalled that even most relationalists are today willing to admit that time can go on during periods of spatial changelessness.20) The significance of the falsity of (II) is that, even if the entire universe were frozen into immobility, there would still be change relative to God, namely, change of temporal properties. Hence things would not be changeless and therefore timeless relative to God, which undermines Leftow’s claim that temporal beings exist in eternity. Thus, if time is dynamic—and Leftow allows that it may be—then his theory is nullified.
Finally, consider thesis (III). Leftow needs this thesis, lest someone say that there are non-spatial, temporal beings such as angels that are changing relative to God. Such beings would (on Leftow’s analysis) have a zero distance from God and yet not be changeless relative to God. Thus, they would not exist in eternity. So in order to sustain his claim that temporal beings exist in eternity, Leftow has to get rid of such beings. He does so by means of the reductionistic thesis (III), which says that if anything exists in time it also exists in space.
Now we have already seen good reason to reject this radical thesis.21 Even in the absence of a physical universe, God could choose to entertain a succession of thoughts or to create an angelic being or an unembodied soul which experiences a stream of consciousness, and such a series of mental events alone is sufficient for such entities’ being in time. On what grounds, then, does Leftow adopt (III)?
Leftow appeals to the geometric representation of space-time in contemporary physics as a justification for (III).22 In such a geometrical presentation, three dimensions of the geometry represent length, width, and height, and the fourth represents time. If something has a coordinate in one dimension of this four-dimensional structure, then it has three other coordinates as well. Thus, if something is in time, it must be in space as well.
There is a huge metaphysical assumption underlying this reasoning, however, a veritable philosophical iceberg of which Leftow seems unaware: the assumption of space-time realism. That is to say, his reasoning presupposes that the geometrical representation of space-time is more than just a graphic way of presenting STR or GTR—that it depicts the actual structure of the world. It is to suppose that temporal becoming is unreal; that things located at any spatio-temporal location are equally real or existent. In other words, space-time realism entails the static or “tenseless” view of time alluded to earlier.23 We shall have much to say of this later; but for now it is sufficient to note that such a metaphysical assumption requires some justification.
Neither STR nor GTR requires space-time realism, for in the original 1905 STR paper Einstein treated time as a parameter, not a coordinate; that is to say, he did not assume a four-dimensional view of the world, a view he came to adopt only later under the influence of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski. Similarly, in GTR-based cosmological models, cosmic time is a parameter, not a coordinate.
A good many philosophers of science think of the four-dimensional, geometrical representation of space-time, not realistically, but instrumentally, that is to say, as an elegant and handy way of presenting STR or GTR and of thinking about problems of time and space; but they do not invest such pictures with reality. For example, the French physicist Henri Arzeliès writes, “The Minkowski continuum is an abstract space of four-dimensions, the sole role of which is to interpret in geometrical language statements made in algebraic or tensor form. . . . The four-dimensional continuum should therefore be regarded as a useful tool, and not as a physical ‘reality’.”24 Similarly, philosopher Max Black complains, “this picture of a ‘block universe,’ composed of a timeless web of ‘world lines,’ in a four-dimensional space, however strongly suggested by the theory of relativity, is a piece of gratuitous metaphysics.”25 Some reason is needed, therefore, if we are to reject an instrumentalist view of space-time in favor of a realist interpretation. And that Leftow has not given.
Now it might be said that even on a dynamic view of time according to which only the present exists, still if things are in time, they must be in space. But even leaving aside the distinction between parameter time and coordinate time, what we must keep in mind is that such an assertion assumes that Newton erred in distinguishing between time itself and our measures of time. Even if our measures of time and space are bound up together, that is no reason to think that time and space themselves cannot exist independently. On the contrary, we have seen good reason to think that they can, since mental events alone are a sufficient condition of a temporal series. Thus, things can exist temporally without existing spatially.
In short, Leftow’s thesis (III) assumes both space-time realism and the identity of time and space with our physical measures thereof—enormous assumptions which we have good reason to doubt.
Thus, all of Leftow’s key theses are at least dubious, if not clearly false. We have little choice but to conclude that he has given no good grounds for thinking that temporal beings exist in timeless eternity.
Moreover, we must ask, is Leftow’s theory even coherent? If all events exist timelessly in God’s eternal reference frame, then none of them can exist earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than another event, for these are temporal relations. Thus, in God’s reference frame, all He is confronted with is a chaos of point-events all temporally unrelated to one another. This not only seems incompatible with divine omniscience and providence but contradicts Leftow’s own statements that in eternity God discerns the sequence in which events occur.
Finally, if all things really do exist timelessly in eternity, are not time and temporal existence ultimately illusory? Leftow denies this because in STR actuality, like simultaneity, is relative to inertial frames. Thus, things can be actual relative to God’s reference frame but not yet actual or no longer actual relative to the temporal reference frame.
It is worth noting two things about this appeal to STR. First, while one can relativize actuality to inertial frames or space-time points in STR, doing so has enormously implausible consequences (of which we shall speak later26). These might well prompt us to prefer a Lorentzian interpretation of STR instead. In that case, all frames are not relative, as Leftow’s theory demands. Second, in STR simultaneity relations are not relative for causally connected events. For causally connected events the relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than are absolute. Since God is causally related to all events, His timeless relation with them should be absolute, not relative. Insofar as Leftow must deny this, his theory is disanalogous to STR.
In any case, serious objections may be lodged against Leftow’s metaphysical relativity. (1) God’s frame of reference is surely privileged. As the Creator of the universe, God’s timeless mode of existence in which He sustains all events ought to be recognized as the preferred frame. In that case, Leftow’s theory implies that time and temporal becoming are illusions of finite creatures, who are ultimately timeless in their being. (2) If we deny the preferred status of God’s frame and insist on a democracy of frames, then relative to the temporal reference frame God ought to be in time, just as relative to the eternal frame creatures are timeless. For in the temporal frame of reference, God undergoes extrinsic change in virtue of the intrinsic changes in creatures to whom He is related. (3) In any case, the metaphor of God’s frame of reference is empty, being based on the spurious assumption (I) above. God, as a non-spatial object, simply is not spatially related to creatures and so has no “reference frame” as such. If one means by this metaphor simply His timeless mode of existence, then it does not seem logically coherent to speak of temporal beings’ sharing a timeless mode of existence. How can creatures be coherently said to exist both timelessly and temporally? It explains nothing to appeal to metaphors of reference frames relative to which creatures are timeless or temporal, for these reference frames just are the two modes of existence, timelessness and temporality, and it merely restates the problem to say that creatures exist both ways. Thus, Leftow’s theory proves no more successful than Stump and Kretzmann’s in explaining how God can be timeless and yet causally related to the world.
In summary, it seems to me that we have here a powerful argument for divine temporality. Classical attempts such as Aquinas’s to deny that God is really related to the world, and contemporary attempts such as those of Stump, Kretzmann, and Leftow to deny that God’s real relation to the world involves Him in time, all appear in the end to be less plausible than the premises of the argument itself. It seems that in being related to the world God must undergo extrinsic change and so be temporal.
EXPOSITION
We have seen that God’s real relation to the temporal world gives us good grounds for concluding God to be temporal in view of the extrinsic change He undergoes through His changing relations with the world. But the existence of a temporal world also seems to entail intrinsic change in God in view of His knowledge of what is happening in the temporal world. For since what is happening in the world is in constant flux, so also must God’s knowledge of what is happening be in constant flux. Defenders of divine temporality have argued that a timeless God cannot know certain tensed facts about the world—for example, what is happening now—and therefore, since God is omniscient, He must be temporal.
With this argument we move out of the philosophy of science and into the philosophy of language. The key notion to be understood here is the idea of “tensed facts.”
First, let us say a word about what we mean by “fact.” A fact may be defined as the state of affairs described by a true declarative sentence.27 Thus, for example, while “Snow is white” and “Der Schnee ist weiß” are two different sentences, they both describe the same fact, namely, snow’s being white.
Second, let us define what we mean by a “tensed fact.” We are all familiar with tense as it plays a role in language. In English we normally express tense by inflecting the verb of a sentence so as to express the past, present, or future tense, or by compounding verbs to express more complex tenses such as the past perfect or the future perfect. Although most of our ordinary language is tensed, there are occasions on which we employ sentences that are grammatically in the present tense to express what are really tenseless truths. For example, we say such things as “Lady Macbeth commits suicide in Act V. scene v,” “The glass breaks easily,” “The area of a circle is πr2,” and “Centaurs have the body of a horse and the torso of a man.” That the verbs in the above sentences are in fact tenseless is evident from the fact that it would be wrong-headed to replace them by the present tense equivalent of “is + (present participle),” for example, “is committing,” “is breaking,” and so forth. Such a substitution would render some of these true sentences plainly false.
The function of tense is to locate something in relation to the present. This can be done not only by means of verbs but also by means of temporal indexical expressions. An indexical expression is a word or phrase which systematically changes its referent (the thing it refers to) as the context of its utterance changes. For example, if I tell someone on June 1, “John is arriving tomorrow,” the indexical word “tomorrow” refers to June 2. But on the next day, if I were to say, “John is arriving tomorrow,” the same word would refer, not to June 2, but to June 3. In order to refer to June 2, I should have to employ a different indexical word, “today,” to express John’s arriving on that day. The reason these expressions systematically change their referents is due to their being tensed expressions. They locate something in relation to the present, which is constantly changing, and so what they refer to changes, too.
Temporal indexical expressions include adverbial phrases (such as “today,” “now,” “three days ago”), adjectives (such as “past,” “present,” and “future”), prepositional phrases (such as “by next Saturday,” “at present,” “in yet two days’ time”), and even nouns (as in “Today is Wednesday”).
Such tensed expressions differ radically from expressions using clock-times or dates, which are tenseless. “January 3, 1812” invariably refers to the same day, whether it is past, present, or future; whereas temporal indexical expressions such as “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow” depend upon the context of their utterance for what day they refer to. Dates can therefore be employed in conjunction with tenseless verbs to locate things tenselessly in time. For example, we can state, “In 1960 John Kennedy pledges to send a man to the moon before the end of the decade” (the italics being a stylistic convention to show that the verb is tenseless). This sentence expresses a tenseless fact and is therefore always true. Notice that even if one knew this truth, one would not know whether Kennedy has issued his pledge unless one also knew whether 1960 was past or future. By contrast, if we replaced the tenseless verb with the past-tensed verb “pledged,” then we would know that the event referred to has happened. This tensed sentence would, however, not always be true: Prior to 1960 it would be false. Prior to 1960 the tensed verb would have to be the future-tense “will pledge” if the sentence is to be true. In contrast to tenseless sentences, then, tensed sentences serve to locate things in time relative to the present and so may change their truth value.
The salient point of all this is that in addition to tenseless facts, there also appear to be tensed facts. The information conveyed by a tensed sentence concerns not just tenseless facts but also tensed facts as well, facts about how far from the present something is. Thus, what is a fact at one moment may not be a fact at another moment. It is now a fact that I am writing this sentence; in a moment it will no longer be a fact. Thus the body of tensed facts is constantly changing.
The upshot is that a being which only knew all tenseless facts about the world, including which events occur at any date and time, would still be completely in the dark about tensed facts. He would have no idea at all of what is now going on in the universe, of which events are past and which are future. On the other hand, any being which does know tensed facts cannot be timeless, for his knowledge must be in constant flux, as the tensed facts known by him change.
Thus we can formulate the following argument for divine temporality:
1. A temporal world exists.
2. God is omniscient.
3. If a temporal world exists, then if God is omniscient, God knows tensed facts.
4. If God is timeless, He does not know tensed facts.
5. Therefore, God is not timeless.
Again, this argument does not prove that God is essentially timeless, but, if successful, it does show that if a temporal world exists, then God is not timeless.
CRITIQUE
Defenders of divine timelessness have attempted to refute this argument either by arguing that a timeless God can know tensed facts or by revising the definition of omniscience, so that God may still qualify as omniscient even if He is ignorant of tensed facts.
Let us look first at the plausibility of denying premise (4). Can a timeless God know tensed facts? Jonathan Kvanvig, a keen philosophical thinker at Texas A & M, contends that He can.28 Kvanvig’s defense of this point is based upon his analysis of beliefs in terms of a personal attitude, the factual content of a belief, and a particular way of accessing or grasping that factual content. Take a sentence such as “Today is June 1, 1999.” Kvanvig contends that the same factual content is expressed by the sentence “Today is June 1, 1999,” when that sentence is used on June 1, 1999, as is expressed by the sentence “Yesterday was June 1, 1999,” when that sentence is uttered on June 2, 1999. In his view, temporal indexical words express the individual essence of the moment they refer to (an essence being a set of properties which uniquely designate a thing). In this example, the words “today” and “yesterday,” by expressing the essence of the moment referred to, pick out the same time. A person will grasp this factual content directly only if he grasps it at the very time referred to (in which case he will form a present-tense belief), and a person will grasp the same content indirectly if he does so not at that time (in which case a temporal person will form beliefs involving other tenses).
In God’s case, then, if He is timeless, He grasps the factual content of tensed sentences indirectly and so does not form tensed beliefs as we do, who grasp some factual content directly. Therefore, Kvanvig concludes, “one can affirm the doctrines of timelessness, immutability and omniscience by affirming that God indirectly grasps every temporal moment, and directly grasps none of them.”29
Does Kvanvig’s theory succeed in giving an account of how a timeless God can know tensed facts? It seems not. For on Kvanvig’s analysis the essences of the times picked out by temporal indexical words do not include the tense of those times (that is, whether they are past, present, or future). Otherwise a time would be, say, essentially past, in which case it is impossible for that time ever to have been present or future, which is absurd. Words such as “today” and “yesterday” could not refer to the same day, since they, being different in tense, would express different essences. And God could not timelessly grasp the factual content involving such essences, since if He grasped a moment which is essentially present, He would exist at the time of that moment. Thus, it is evident that the factual content expressed by tensed sentences is, on Kvanvig’s analysis, tenseless. Tense is merely a feature of our mental state, the by-product of how we grasp the tenseless factual content of tensed sentences. Kvanvig explicitly denies that there is any temporal element expressed by tensed sentences which is not part of their factual content. Thus, on Kvanvig’s view tense is merely linguistic: There are no tensed facts.
Thus, Kvanvig’s account backfires. Far from explaining how a timeless God can know tensed facts, on his analysis there are no tensed facts to be known. The factual content expressed by the sentence “Kvanvig now teaches at Texas A & M” is something like Kvanvig teaches (tenselessly) at TexasA & M at time t. God, grasping this factual content indirectly, has no idea where Kvanvig is now teaching or whether he has even been born or is long dead and buried.
A somewhat similar, but crucially modified, account of God’s knowledge of tensed facts has been offered by Edward Wierenga in his philosophical analysis of the principal divine attributes.30 On Wierenga’s view the factual content of a present-tense sentence includes the tense expressed in the sentence. Like Kvanvig, he believes that moments of time have individual essences. Unlike Kvanvig, however, Wierenga seems to believe that the individual essence of a moment somehow involves the present tense. If the factual content of a sentence includes a moment’s individual essence, then that content will involve presentness. Anyone who grasps that content at the time referred to will form a present-tense belief about what is “now” the case.
Wierenga contends that a timeless God is able to grasp the factual content of a tensed sentence, but without forming a present-tense belief as we do. For one only forms a present-tense belief if one both exists at the time referred to in the factual content of a sentence and grasps that content at that time. God grasps this factual content timelessly and so forms no present-tense belief about what is “now” going on. Thus, God knows tensed facts without having tensed beliefs.
Does Wierenga’s account of God’s knowledge of tensed facts fare any better than Kvanvig’s analysis? The crucial difference between them is that Wierenga makes presentness a feature of the individual essence of every moment of time. At first blush this might seem hopelessly incoherent. If the essence of every moment of time involves presentness, then every moment of time would be present and no moment would ever be future or past, which makes nonsense of time. Wierenga could escape this absurdity, however, by advocating a view of time called presentism, according to which the only time which exists is the present time. According to presentism, future times do not yet exist and past times no longer exist. Therefore, there literally are no times which have the properties of pastness or futurity. When a time becomes past, it does not exchange the property of presentness for the property of pastness; rather it just ceases to exist altogether. Thus, the individual essences of all moments of time could involve presentness. This does not imply that all moments of time are somehow permanently present. Rather it implies that times are present when and only when they exist. They come into existence successively and are present just as long as they exist. No time exists which is not present, but that does not imply that all times are present together.
If the individual essence of every moment of time somehow involves presentness, then the question is whether a timeless God can grasp the factual content involving such an essence. It remains extraordinarily difficult to understand on Wierenga’s account how God can grasp the essence of a time without that time’s being present for Him. Consider the analogy (which Wierenga himself appeals to) of first-person indexical words such as “I”. If my individual essence is, as Wierenga says, the property of just being me, then how can God possibly grasp the factual content of a sentence which includes this essence? If I say, “I feel miserable,” then God could grasp the fact that William Craig feels miserable; but if the factual content of this sentence includes my individual essence of being me, expressed by the word “I,” then a “Private Access Only” sign is posted before the route to this factual content, which is open to me alone. Even God could not grasp this content, since He and I are not the same person.
Analogously, if the individual essence of a time involves presentness, then in order to grasp the factual content of a sentence involving such an essence one would need to be present. If I say, “John left three hours ago,” then there is no problem in a timeless God’s grasping factual content involving the time t and the property being such that John leaves three hours earlier than then, which is ascribed to t—no problem, that is, so long as t is a tenseless date or clock-time. But if t involves presentness, then God, in grasping t as present, must be in the present, that is to say, must be temporal. Later at t’ it will be true that “John left four hours ago,” and God will no longer grasp the essence of t, but of t’, for t is no longer present. It is always true that John leaves three hours earlier than t, and God immutably knows that fact. But if He is to know tensed facts, He must know that t is present. Thus, His factual knowledge must be constantly changing, in which case God must be in time. Hence, in making presentness part of the individual essence of every time, Wierenga only succeeds in temporalizing God.
Finally, let us consider Brian Leftow’s account of God’s timeless knowledge of tensed facts.31 It will be recalled that on Leftow’s view all events exist in eternity, where they are eternally actual, even though in time these same events are past, present, or future. Thus, relative to God’s frame of reference, it seems that there are no tensed facts to be known. Relative to eternity no event is known as temporally past, present, or future, for all events are timelessly present to God.
But Leftow maintains that God also knows events as they exist relative to various temporal frames of reference. Leftow says that God knows “all the facts of simultaneity” relative to any temporal reference frame.32 Thus, God would know that relative to the temporal frame R1, events e1 and e2 are simultaneous, whereas relative to R2, e1 is earlier than e2. But clearly such knowledge does not constitute knowledge of tensed facts, as Leftow believes. It is merely knowledge of the classes of simultaneous events at any time relative to any reference frame. Since simultaneity is a purely tenseless relation, it will not yield knowledge of what is past, present, or future relative to any frame. God could at best know relative to any frame the tenseless location of any event (its date and time) and its tenseless relation to any other event (whether it is earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than). But He would not know, even relative to a temporal frame of reference, what events are past, present, or future. (If He did, His knowledge concerning that frame would be constantly changing, and thus He would exist in the time of that frame.)
Indeed, Leftow’s explanation of what He calls “factual omniscience” makes it evident that on his view God’s knowledge is tenseless. For he contends that the same fact renders true It is now 3:00 and It is then 3:00 at their respective times. The fact which makes these statements true can be grasped independently of the times at which they are true. Thus, he concludes, God can be factually omniscient even if He cannot grasp tensed truths.
This explanation reveals that on Leftow’s view there really are no tensed facts. For a tensed fact such as its now being 3:00 can only be grasped at 3:00. One can timelessly grasp its being 3:00 at 3:00 or its being 3:00 earlier than 4:00, but such knowledge leaves one completely in the dark as to whether 3:00 is past, present, or future. Since on Leftow’s account God knows all facts, and the only temporal facts known to God are tenseless facts, it follows that there are no tensed facts. Thus, Leftow’s account of God’s knowledge fails to supply Him knowledge of tensed facts.
Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow’s accounts are the most sophisticated attempts to explain how God can be timeless and yet know tensed facts, yet they all fail. Thus, premise (4) of the argument for divine temporality from God’s knowledge of tensed facts seems secure.
The defender of divine timelessness has no recourse, then, but to deny premise (3). He must deny that omniscience entails a knowledge of tensed facts. He can do this either by revising the traditional definition of omniscience or else by maintaining that tense, while an objective feature of time, does not strictly belong to the factual content expressed by tensed sentences. Let us examine each strategy in turn.
The general problem with the strategy of revising the traditional definition of omniscience is that any adequate definition of a concept must be in line with our intuitive understanding of that concept. We are not free simply to “cook” the definition arbitrarily just to solve some problem under discussion. According to the traditional definition, a person is omniscient if and only if, for every fact, he knows that fact and does not believe its contradictory. On such a definition, if there are tensed facts, an omniscient person must know them. What plausible alternative definition of omniscience might the defender of divine timelessness offer?
Wierenga, as a sort of second line of defense, offers a revised account of omniscience which would not require God to know tensed facts.33 Some facts, he says, are facts only from a particular perspective. They must be known to an omniscient being only if he shares that particular perspective. Thus, a person is omniscient if and only if, for every fact and every perspective, if something is a fact from a certain perspective, then that person must know that it is a fact from that perspective, and if that person shares that perspective, then he must know the fact in question. Wierenga treats moments of time as perspectives relative to which tensed facts exist. So while a temporal person existing on December 8, 1941, must (if he is omniscient) know the fact Yesterday the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a timeless person must know only that from the perspective of December 8, 1941, it is a fact that Yesterday the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On this definition God’s omniscience does not require that He know the tensed fact, but only the tenseless fact that from a certain perspective a certain tensed fact exists.
Wierenga’s revised definition of omniscience seems to me to be unacceptably “cooked.” He is not denying that there are tensed facts. It might be tempting to understand his definition as an effort to eliminate tensed facts in favor of exclusively tenseless facts. For example, to say, “The Japanese attack is past relative to December 8, 1941,” might sound like just a circumlocution for saying the attack is earlier than December 8, 1941, which is a tenseless fact. To say that something is past, present, or future relative to a time is just a misleading way of saying that it is earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than that time. One is not stating a tensed fact at all. If this were Wierenga’s meaning, then he would simply be denying that there are tensed facts, and there would be no need to revise the definition of omniscience.
Rather, Wierenga wants to allow that there really are tensed facts but to maintain that an omniscient being need not know them. This claim seems quite implausible. On Wierenga’s view temporal persons like you and me know an incalculable multitude of facts of which God is ignorant. Temporal persons know that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is over; God has no idea whether it has occurred or not. He knows merely that for people on December 8, 1941, and thereafter, it is a fact that the attack is over. Since He does not know what time it actually is, He does not know any tensed facts. This is an unacceptably limited field of knowledge to qualify as omniscience.
Leftow also entertains the idea of revising the definition of omniscience in such a way that omniscience does not entail knowledge of all truths.34 Leftow’s strategy here is strangely defeatist. He argues, in effect, that there are many sorts of truths which God cannot know, so there is no harm in admitting one more class of truths (namely, tensed truths) of which God is ignorant. I should have thought to the contrary that as Christian theologians we ought to construe God’s knowledge as robustly as possible. If it turns out that there are truths God cannot know, that is no reason for further eroding the extent of His knowledge by denying Him knowledge of tensed truths! The rub is that Leftow is so deeply committed to divine timelessness that he is prepared to restrict or even jettison God’s omniscience in order to preserve His timelessness. This strikes me as an odd set of theological priorities: abandoning a central doctrine that enjoys considerable scriptural support in order to hold on to a controversial doctrine at best intimated in Scripture.
In any case, does Leftow succeed in showing that there are truths which God cannot know? I think not. His examples of things God cannot know include how it feels to be oneself a failure or a sinner. But Leftow has confused knowing how with knowing that. Philosophers recognize that knowing how does not take truths as its object. God can know such truths as Being a sinner feels lousy, Being a sinner feels depressing, Sinners feel guilty and hopeless, and so on. These are the facts about how it feels to be oneself a sinner, and God knows these truths. When we talk about omniscience, we are speaking of knowledge in the sense of knowing that, where “knowing that” is followed by some truth. God’s not knowing how it feels to be Himself a sinner is not an example of a truth He fails to know and so does not constitute a restriction on His omniscience. Leftow furnishes no example of any truth which might be conjoined with “knows that” such that we cannot say, “God knows that ____,” where the blank is filled by the truth in question. Therefore, he has not adequately motivated our denying that knowledge of tensed truths properly belongs to omniscience.
It seems to me, therefore, that no adequate grounds have been given for thinking that someone could be omniscient and yet not know tensed truths. The traditional definition of omniscience requires it, and we have no grounds which do not involve special pleading for revising the usual definition.
So what about the second strategy for denying premise (3), namely, maintaining that tense does not, strictly speaking, belong to the factual content expressed by tensed sentences, even though tense is an objective feature of the world? This alternative takes us into very subtle issues in the philosophy of language. Although many philosophers think that the factual content expressed by tensed sentences includes tense, others construe the factual content tenselessly. The latter maintain that any indexical expressions in a sentence should be eliminated, along with the tense of the verb, in giving the factual content expressed by the sentence. For example, in a certain context of utterance, the sentence “I came by here yesterday” expresses the fact Albert Wesselink comes by the Reformers’ Wall in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 8, 1991. In a different context that same sentence might express a wholly different fact. Tense could be analyzed as a feature of the mode in which the factual content is presented to someone expressing that content, or of the way in which a person grasps the factual content, or of the context of someone’s believing the factual content. Alternatively, tense could be understood in terms of a person’s ascribing to himself in a present-tense way the property of being such as the factual content expressed by the sentence specifies. On such analyses, an omniscient being could be timeless because tense is not part of the factual content of tensed sentences. Tense is real, all right, but since it does not belong to the factual content of a sentence, a being which knew only tenseless facts would on the traditional definition count as omniscient.
Fortunately, I do not think that a discussion of these recondite semantical theories will be necessary here, for even though I find such analyses plausible and attractive, I do not think that they ultimately serve to save the day for the defender of divine timelessness. For according to Christian theism, God is not merely factually omniscient, but also maximally excellent cognitively. For example, on the theories under discussion, a factually omniscient God would know such things as God is omnipotent, God loves His creatures, God created the universe, and so on. But He would not have to possess any first-person beliefs such as “I am omnipotent,” “I love my creatures,” “I created the universe,” and so forth. God would not even have to know that He is God! A machine could count as omniscient under such analyses. But such a God or machine would clearly not have maximum cognitive excellence. In order to qualify as maximally excellent cognitively, God would have to entertain all and only the appropriate, true first-person beliefs about Himself. This would furnish Him with what philosophers call knowledge de se (first-person self-knowledge) in addition to mere knowledge de re (knowledge of a thing from a third-person perspective). Notice that in order to be maximally excellent cognitively, God would not have to possess all knowledge de se in the world, but only such knowledge de se as is appropriate to Himself. It would be a cognitive defect, not a perfection, for God to have the belief “I am Napoleon,” though for Napoleon such a belief would be a perfection. The point is: Omniscience (on these theories) is not enough; God must be maximally excellent cognitively.
Now in the same way, it is a cognitive perfection to know what time it is, what is actually happening in the universe. A being whose knowledge is composed exclusively of tenseless facts is less excellent cognitively than a being who also knows what has occurred, what is occurring, and what will occur in the world. This latter person knows infinitely more than the former and is involved in no cognitive defect in so knowing. On the analogy of knowledge de se, we can refer to such knowledge as knowledge de praesenti (knowledge of the present). A being who lacks such knowledge is more ignorant and less excellent cognitively than a being who possesses it. Accordingly, if we adopt views according to which tense is extraneous to the factual content expressed by a tensed sentence, we should simply revise premise (3) to read
3’. If a temporal world exists, then if God is maximally excellent cognitively, then God has knowledge de praesenti
and, with appropriate revisions, the argument goes through as before.
In response to the contention that God, being maximally excellent cognitively, must have knowledge de praesenti, Kvanvig offers two alternatives.35 One alternative would be to maintain that God grasps all moments of time directly. But this alternative makes no sense, for then all moments of time would be apprehended by God as present, not in the metaphorical sense of the eternal “present,” but as temporally present. That would annul all temporal relations of earlier than/later than among events and leave God ignorant of which moment really is present. The other alternative is simply to give up the doctrine of divine timelessness. In Kvanvig’s opinion the arguments for this doctrine are not compelling, so that if it is incompatible with God’s omniscience or cognitive excellence, then it can be abandoned. This is the conclusion to which the present argument seems to be driving us.
Such a conclusion goes down hard with Leftow, however.36 In his view, if timelessness and omniscience are incompatible, then we should give up the doctrine of omniscience. For he contends that a timeless God who is ignorant of tensed facts is more perfect on the whole than an omniscient God who is temporal.
How shall we assess such a comparison? We have already examined Leftow’s claim that the life of a temporal being is inferior to the life of a timeless being due to the former’s incompleteness.37 While the argument has some plausibility, we found its force diminished, interestingly, due to a temporal God’s omniscient power to recall or anticipate past and future events. On the other hand, the superiority of temporal over timeless existence, we have discovered, lies in the ability which is afforded uniquely by temporal existence for God to be causally related to a temporal world. The incarnation of the second person of the Trinity is a special thorn in the side of advocates of divine timelessness. Leftow also attempts to downplay the importance of the attribute of omniscience, arguing that it is not essential to perfect knowledge. He rightly observes that cognitive perfection involves many other qualities than just the breadth of one’s knowledge. Assuredly; but that is no reason to doubt that cognitive perfection should not encompass knowledge of tensed facts. Leftow also argues that omniscience is impossible, since God could not know the factual content expressed by sentences containing personal indexical words such as “I am overweight.” But we have already seen how such knowledge de se can be handled without recourse to private, first-person facts. And in any case, placing one restriction on God’s knowledge hardly makes it a matter of indifference if additional abridgments are proposed. To be as knowledgeable as possible is an important perfection which magnifies God’s greatness. Thus, it seems to me a poor bargain, indeed, to auction off omniscience in order to purchase timelessness.
The attempt to deny premise (3) of the present argument thus seems to fare no better than the effort to refute premise (4). If God is omniscient, then given the existence of a temporal world, He cannot be ignorant of tensed facts.
From the premises of the argument, it follows that God is not timeless, which is to say, He is temporal. So in addition to the argument from God’s real relation to the world, we now have a second powerful reason based on God’s changing knowledge of tensed facts for thinking that God is in time.
Conclusion
On the basis of our foregoing discussion, we have seen comparatively weak grounds for affirming divine timelessness but two powerful arguments in favor of divine temporality. It would seem, then, that we should conclude that God is temporal.
But such a conclusion would be premature. For there does remain one way of escape still open for defenders of divine timelessness. The argument based on God’s real relation to the world assumed the objective reality of temporal becoming, and the argument based on God’s knowledge of the temporal world assumed the objective reality of tensed facts. If one denies the objective reality of temporal becoming and tensed facts, then the arguments are undercut. For in that case, nothing to which God is related ever comes into or passes out of being, and all facts tenselessly exist, so that God undergoes neither extrinsic nor intrinsic change. He can be the immutable, omniscient Sustainer and Knower of all things and, hence, exist timelessly.
In short, the defender of divine timelessness can escape the arguments of this chapter by embracing the static (or tenseless) theory of time.38 According to that theory of time, all things and events in time are equally existent. Events in time are related by the tenseless relations of earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than. But the distinction between past, present, and future is not an objective distinction, being merely a subjective feature of consciousness. If there were no minds, there would be no past, present, or future. There would be just the four-dimensional space-time universe existing en bloc.
Fig. 3.1. A picture of a tenselessly existing space-time universe. The vertical dimension t represents time, which begins at the Big Bang and ends at the Big Crunch. The x, y dimensions represent three-dimensional space, one dimension of which cannot be pictured on the diagram because its place is assumed by the t dimension.
The reader looking at Fig. 3.1 represents God, who transcends space and time (of course, the reader must imagine himself as unchanging). The space-time universe is intrinsically temporal in that it has an internal dimension which, in virtue of its ordering relations (earlier/later than), is time. But the space-time universe is extrinsically timeless in that it is not embedded in some higher dimension (a hyper-space-time) but co-exists timelessly with God.
Given such a static view of time, it is easy to see why God never experiences extrinsic change in relation to temporal events. For there is no temporal becoming. Nothing in the space-time block ever comes into or goes out of being, nor does the space-time block as a whole come into being or pass away. It simply exists timelessly along with God. God is the Creator of the universe in the sense that the whole block and everything in it depends upon God for its existence. God by a single timeless act makes it exist. By the same act He causes all events to happen and things to exist at their tenseless temporal locations. Thus, God never acquires or loses any of His relations. God does not come into the relation Creator of with the Big Bang at t0 and cease to stand in this relation at a later time t1. Rather He timelessly stands in the Creator of relation to all events at their respective times. Thus, by denying the reality of temporal becoming, the defender of divine timelessness can undercut premise (2 ) of the argument for divine temporality based on God’s real relation to the world. God is really related to the world, but He is not temporal.
Similarly, on the static theory of time there really are no tensed facts. The factual content of sentences containing tensed verbs and temporal indexicals includes only tenseless dates and tenseless relations of events. Linguistic tense is an egocentric feature of language users. It serves only to express the subjective perspective of the user. Thus, there really are no tensed facts for God to know. There is no objective truth about what is now happening in the universe, for “now” serves merely to signify the time relative to which the tensed judgment is made. Every person at every time in the space-time universe regards his time as “now” and others as “past” or “future.” But in objective reality there is no “now” in the world. Everything just exists tenselessly. God, in knowing the tenseless times at which events occur and the tenseless temporal relations among them, knows all the objective facts there are. Thus, premise (3) of the argument for divine temporality based on God’s knowledge of the temporal world is undercut. In knowing all tenseless facts, God is truly and timelessly omniscient.
The defender of divine timelessness therefore has a way out: He can adopt a static theory of time and deny the reality of tensed facts and temporal becoming. It is noteworthy, however, that almost no defender of divine timelessness has taken this route. Virtually the only proponent of timeless eternity to do so is Paul Helm. On his view there is no difference in the reality of the past, present, and future: “Do the times which are at present future to us exist, or not?” he asks. “Answer: they exist for God . . . and they exist for those creatures contemporaneous with that future moment, for that moment is present to them, but it is not now present to us.”39 In the same way, “the past event . . . belongs in its own time, and is therefore real, belonging to the ordered series of times which comprise the creation and which are . . . eternally present to God.”40 Thus, Helm affirms, “in creation God brings into being (timelessly) the whole temporal matrix,” and “God knows at a glance the whole of his temporally ordered creation. . . .”41 Similarly, tense is but an ephemeral feature of language; the truth conditions of tensed sentences are given by tenseless facts, facts that are known to God.42 Helm thus appears to be one of the few advocates of divine timelessness who have seen and taken the way out.
If our discussion of the nature of divine eternity is not to end at this point, we have no option but to explore the viability of this escape route. Is the tenseless theory of time as credible as the tensed theory of time? In raising this question, we enter into the very heart of the philosophy of time and space. This is difficult and mysterious territory. One eminent metaphysician has called the nature of time “the most puzzling and paradoxical feature of the world.”43 But we have no choice: If we are to understand eternity, we must first understand time.
Recommended Reading
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ATEMPORAL PERSONHOOD
Yates, John C. The Timelessness of God, chapter 6. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990.
Leftow, Brian. Time and Eternity, chapter 13. Cornell Studies in Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Walker, Ralph C. S. Kant, pp. 34-41. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
DIVINE RELATIONS WITH THE WORLD
Craig, William Lane. “The Tensed vs. Tenseless Theory of Time: A Watershed for the Conception of Divine Eternity.” In Problems of Time and Tense, pp. 221-250. Edited by Robin Le Poidevin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Padgett, Alan. Eternity and the Nature of Time, chapter 4. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Hill, William. “Does the World Make a Difference to God?” Thomist 38 (1974): 146-164.
Alston, William P. “Hartshorne and Aquinas: A Via Media.” In Existence and Actuality, pp. 78-98. Edited by John B. Cobb, Jr., and Franklin I. Gamwell.
hicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Craig, William Lane. “The Special Theory of Relativity and Theories of Divine Eternity.” Faith and Philosophy 11 (1994): 19-37.
DIVINE KNOWLEDGE OF TENSED FACTS
Kretzmann, Norman. “Omniscience and Immutability.” Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966): 409-421.
Castañeda, Hector-Neri. “Omniscience and Indexical Reference.” Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967): 203-210.
Smith, Quentin. Language and Time, pp. 58-60. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Davis, Stephen T. Logic and the Nature of God, chapters 2, 3. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983.
Kvanvig, Jonathan L. The Possibility of an All-Knowing God, pp. 66-70, 154-159. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.
Wierenga, Edward R. The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes, pp. 179-185. Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Nelson, Herbert J. “Time(s), Eternity, and Duration.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 22 (1987): 3-19.
Gale, Richard M. “Omniscience-Immutability Arguments.” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 319-335.
1 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 1. 38-39. 9-10.
2 See the seminal paper by Sidney Shoemaker, “Time without Change,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 363-381.
3 Daniel Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 175-196. Dennett’s criteria were first used in defense of divine, timeless personhood by William E. Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability in God,” International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983): 267-276.
4 J. R. Lucas, The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 213; cf. 212.
5 Ibid., 175.
6 Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52.
7 Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1970), 124; Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability,” 270; Paul Helm, Eternal God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 64-65; John C. Yates, The Timelessness of God (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990), 173-174; Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity, Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 285-290.
8 Philosophers distinguish between knowledge de re, which is non-perspectival knowledge of a thing, and knowledge de se, which is self-knowledge.
9 Robert C. Coburn, “Professor Malcolm on God,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 41 (1963): 155.
10 See St. John Damascene, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 2.1 (St. John of Damascus, Writings [New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958], 204).
11 Recall the distinction made in chapter 2, note 2, between intrinsic and extrinsic change. It is disputed among philosophers of religion whether creating the world involves some intrinsic change on God’s part (for example, an exercise of power). My argument does not presuppose an intrinsic change in God but is based on the inevitability of mere extrinsic change on God’s part.
12 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 429-458.
13 Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), 20; Delmas Lewis, “Eternity Again: A Reply to Stump and Kretzmann,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 15 (1984): 74-76; Helm, Eternal God, 32-33; William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 164-166; Yates, Timelessness of God, 128-30; Leftow, Time and Eternity, 170-172.
14 Helm, Eternal God, 33.
15 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): 477-478.
16 Leftow, Time and Eternity, 173.
17 Brian Leftow, “Eternity and Simultaneity,” Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991): 148-179; cf. idem, Time and Eternity, chapter 10.
18 A. Einstein, Äther und Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag, 1920), 7-9.
19 Such a view is in contrast to the static or tenseless view of time mentioned in chapter 2, pages 69-70.
20 See note 2 above.
21 See chapter 2, page 66.
22 For more on the geometrical representation of space-time, see chapter 5, pages 167-180.
23 See chapter 2, pages 69-70.
24 Henri Arzeliès, Relativistic Kinematics, rev. ed. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966), 258. The mathematics of STR is algebra; the mathematics of GTR is called tensor calculus.
25 Max Black, review of The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G. J. Whitrow, Scientific American 206 (April 1962), 181.
26 See chapter 5, pages 169-173.
27 What I am calling a fact could be treated as a true proposition. Accordingly, what I call “factual content” is the same as “propositional content.” I am trying my best to avoid technical jargon.
28 Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Possibility of an All-Knowing God (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 150-165.
29 Ibid., 159.
30 Edward R. Wierenga, The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes, Cornell Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 179-185.
31 Leftow, Time and Eternity, 312-337.
32 Ibid., 334.
33 Wierenga, Nature of God, 189.
34 Leftow, Time and Eternity, 321-323.
35 Kvanvig, All-Knowing God, 159-160.
36 Leftow, Time and Eternity, 323-326.
37 See chapter 2, pages 67-74.
38 Recall the distinction drawn in chapter 2 (pages 69-70) between the two theories of time.
39 Paul Helm, “Eternal Creation: The Doctrine of the Two Standpoints,” in The Doctrine of Creation, ed. Colin Gunton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), 42.
40 Ibid., 43.
41 Helm, Eternal God, 27, 26.
42 Ibid., 25, 44, 47, 52, 79.
43 E. J. Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 84