Craig Time and Eternity

Exploring God's Relationship to Time
1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1756-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

This remarkable work offers an analytical exploration of the nature of divine eternity and God's relationship to time.

William Lane Craig (PhD, University of Birmingham, England; DTheol, University of Munich) is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, and at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. He has authored or edited over thirty books and is the founder of ReasonableFaith.org, a web-based apologetics ministry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Craig, William Lane

Leseproben

2

DIVINE TIMELESSNESS

“WHATEVER INCLUDES AND possesses the whole fulness of interminable life at once and is such that nothing future is absent from it and nothing past has flowed away, this is rightly judged to be eternal,” wrote the medieval theologian Boethius.1 On such an understanding of divine eternity God transcends time altogether. But what reasons can be given for adopting such an understanding of God’s eternity? In the next two chapters we shall examine what I consider to be the most important arguments for divine timelessness and for divine temporality. In this chapter we shall look at what I deem to be the most important arguments on behalf of the view that God is timeless.

I. Divine Simplicity and Immutability

EXPOSITION

Traditionally, Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas argued for God’s timelessness on the basis of His absolute simplicity and immutability. The argument can be easily formulated. As a first premise, we assume either

1. God is simple

or

1’. God is immutable.

Then we add

2. If God is simple or immutable, then He is not temporal,from which we can logically deduce

3. Therefore, God is not temporal.

Since temporality and timelessness are, as we have seen, contradictories, it follows that

4. Therefore, God is timeless.

Since this is a logically valid argument, the only question to consider is whether the premises of the argument are true.

CRITIQUE

Consider premise (2) above. The doctrine of divine simplicity states that God has absolutely no composition in His nature or being. Thus, the notion of simplicity operative here is the polar opposite of complexity. God is said to be an absolutely undifferentiated unity. This medieval doctrine is not popular among theologians today, and even when Christians do give lip service to it, they usually do not appreciate how truly radical the doctrine is. It implies not merely that God does not have parts, but that He does not possess even distinct attributes. In some mysterious way His omnipotence is His goodness, for example. He stands in no relations whatsoever. Thus, He does not literally love, know, or cause His creatures. He is not really composed of three distinct persons, a claim notoriously difficult to reconcile with the doctrine of the Trinity. His nature or essence is not even distinct from His existence, an assertion which led to the very difficult doctrine that God’s essence just existence; He is, Thomas Aquinas tells us, the pure act of existing.

Now if God is simple in the way described, it obviously follows that He cannot be temporal, for a temporal being is related to the various times at which it exists: It exists at and at , for example. But a simple being stands in no real relations, as we have seen. Moreover, a temporal being has phases of its life which are not identical but rather are related to one another as earlier and later. But an absolutely simple being could not stand in such relations and so must have its life, as Boethius put it, “all at once” ().

Similarly, if God is immutable, then even if He is not simple He still cannot be temporal. Like simplicity, the immutability affirmed by the medieval theologians is a radical concept: utter immobility. God cannot change in respect. He never thinks successive thoughts, He never performs successive actions, He never undergoes even the most trivial alteration. God not only cannot undergo intrinsic change, He cannot even change extrinsically by being related to changing things.2 But obviously a temporal being undergoes at least extrinsic change in that it exists at different moments of time and, given the reality of the temporal world, co-exists with different sets of temporal beings as they undergo intrinsic change. Even if we relax the definition of “immutable” to mean “incapable of intrinsic change,” or the even weaker concept “intrinsically changeless,” an immutable God cannot be temporal. For if God is temporal, He at the very least changes in that He is constantly growing older—not physically, of course, but in the purely temporal sense of constantly adding more years to His life. Moreover, God would be constantly changing in His knowledge, knowing first that “It is now ” and later that “It is now .” God’s foreknowledge and memory must also be steadily changing, as anticipated events transpire and become past. God would constantly be performing new actions, at causing the events at and at causing the events at . Thus, a temporal God cannot be changeless. It follows, then, that if God is immutable, He is timeless.

Thus, God’s timelessness can be deduced from either His simplicity or His immutability. Is this a good reason for thinking that God is timeless? That all depends on whether we have any good reason to think that God is simple or immutable. Here we run into severe difficulties. For the doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability are even more controverted than the doctrine of divine eternity. To try to prove divine timelessness via divine simplicity or immutability, therefore, takes on the air of trying to prove the obvious via the less obvious. More specifically, the doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability as explained above find absolutely no support in Scripture, which at most speaks of God’s immutability in terms of His faithfulness and unchanging character (Mal. 3:6; Jas. 1:17). Philosophically, there seem to be no good reasons to embrace these radical doctrines, and weighty objections have been lodged against them.3 These need not be discussed here; the point is that premises (1) and (1’) above are even less plausible and more difficult to prove than (4), so that they do not constitute good grounds for believing (4). Thus, while we may freely admit that a simple or immutable God must be timeless, we have even less reason to think God simple or immutable than to think Him timeless and so can hardly infer that He is timeless on the basis of those doctrines.

II. Relativity Theory

EXPOSITION

The branch of physics most directly concerned with the analysis of the nature of time and space is Relativity Theory, the brainchild of Albert Einstein. There are two theories of relativity, the restricted or Special Theory of Relativity (STR), which Einstein formulated in 1905, and the General Theory of Relativity (GTR), which he completed in 1915. According to physicist Hermann Bondi, “there is perhaps no other part of physics that has been checked and tested and cross-checked quite as much as the Theory of Relativity.”4 The predictions of both STR and GTR have been verified without fail to a fantastic degree of precision. Any adequate theory of God’s relationship to time must therefore take account of what these theories have to say about the nature of time. When we explore what STR has to say about the nature of time and particularly about simultaneity, however, a significant objection to divine temporality arises.

In order to grasp this objection, we need to have some understanding of STR. Although the mathematics of STR are not highly sophisticated, nonetheless the of time and space defined by the theory are so strange and counterintuitive that most people, I venture to say, find them nearly inconceivable. Undaunted, I shall attempt to explain in as simple a way as possible what Einstein’s theory holds with regard to the nature of time and space, so that we may then understand what impact this has on our conception of divine eternity.

Isaac Newton “And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.”

Let us begin with a historical retrospect. The physics which prevailed up until the reception of Relativity Theory was Newtonian physics, whose foundations were laid by Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, in his epochal (1687). In the to his set of Definitions leading off the Newton explains his concepts of time and space. In order to clarify these concepts, Newton draws a distinction between time and space and time and space:

I. Absolute . . . time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative . . . time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.

II. Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies; and which is commonly taken for immovable space; such is the dimension of a subterraneous, an aerial, or celestial space, determined by its position in respect of the earth.5

Fundamentally, Newton is here distinguishing between time and space themselves and our...