Abstract
If arguments for divine timelessness have shown themselves to be at best 1. inconclusive, what of arguments on behalf of divine temporality? Unfortunately, we do not have a convenient catalogue of arguments for divine temporality akin to that furnished us by Leftow in favor of divine timelessness. Nonetheless, three arguments come up again and again in the literature and so may serve as the focus of our discussion in this section.
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References
A New Dictionary of Christian Theology,ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983), s.v. “Time and Timelessness,” by Grace Jantzen.
John Yates, The Timelessness of God ( Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990 ), pp. 169–171.
Daniel Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in The Identities of Persons,ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 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.
J. R. Lucas, The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 213; cf. p. 212.
Ibid., p. 175. Nor does Lucas have anything more to add in his essay “The Temporality of God,” in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature,ed. Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1993), pp. 235–246. He argues that time can exist without change and that it is possible to have a subjective awareness of time’s passage even if nothing is happening, so that even a changeless and solitary deity, if He is conscious, must be temporal. At best, Lucas only shows that a temporal consciousness must experience time’s flow; he never shows that consciousness entails temporality, that there could not be an atemporal consciousness (whether in an atemporal world or in a temporal world) which fails to experience the passage of time.
Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 52.
Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness,Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 124; Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability,” p. 270; Paul Helm, Eternal God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 64–65; Yates, Timelessness of God,pp. 173–174; Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity,Cornell Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 285–290.
Gale, Nature and Existence of God,p. 52.
Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability,” p. 270.
Gale, Nature and Existence of God,pp. 52–53.
Thomas Aquinas Summa theologiae la.10.5. Cf. Leftow’s espousal of a modal conception of time (Leftow, Time and Eternity,p. 236).
Mann takes (vi) to require only second-order beliefs about oneself de re, e.g., A believes that A knows that p (Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability,” p. 270). But this is not a full-blooded interpretation of self-consciousness, which is normally understood to involve beliefs about oneself de se. Whether God’s beliefs de se are to be accounted for in terms of private propositions (Richard Swinburne, “Tensed Facts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27 [1990]: 127), or the mode of presentation of a proposition de re (Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Possibility of an All-Knowing God [New York: St. Martin’s, 1986], pp. 66–70), or His self-ascription of properties (David Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,” Philosophical Review 88 [1979]: 513–543) is a fascinating question which need not occupy is at this juncture.
On such a characterization of rationality, see Alvin Plantings, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality,ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, hid.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 29–34, 48–53.
I add this qualifier because Molina conceived of God’s decrees to be based on His deliberation over the content of His middle knowledge logically prior to His decision to create a world.
See the discussion in William Lane Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 222–225. Unless we are prepared to say that machines can have beliefs, omniscience actually seems to entail personhood.
Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant, The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1978 ), pp. 34–41.
John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1991 ).
Richard M. Gale, “Omniscience-Immutability Arguments,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 333; cf William Kneale, “Time and Eternity in Theology,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61 (1960–61): 99; Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 257; cf. p. 7.
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Craig, W.L. (2001). Timelessness and Personhood. In: God, Time, and Eternity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1715-1_2
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