The God of Time

Welcome, @shawn.pavey!

So, there are (broadly speaking) two ways of answering the question of how God relates to time. One response is that God is outside of time. And the other is that he persists through every moment within time.

William Lane Craig is well known for having studied this question, and he says that the answer goes together with your theory about the nature of time, specifically, your theory about what times exist. If you go for eternalism (all times exist, on ontological par), you’ll want to say that God is outside of time. If you go for presentism (only the present exists, objectively distinguished from the past and future), you’ll want to say that God exists through every moment within time. (You can read a bit more about the metaphysics of time on this forum: Science and the Metaphysics of Time)

If God exists outside time, then he is literally timeless and changeless. He can literally see the future, because it is right there in front of him. Though this kind of foreknowledge is useless to him, because the fact that it exists at all must already be a result of God’s timeless decision about what reality to create.

If God exists within time, then he relates to time in much the same way as us, though his relationship to the beginning of time, if time has a beginning, is a little more difficult to explain. (But I think it can be done in a coherent way, though I’m afraid I don’t have time to go into it right now!) And his foreknowledge has to be explained as being conceptual rather than perceptual: rather than seeing the future, it is more like God just intuitively knows what the future holds.

Talk about God, and time, and foreknowledge should eventually find it’s way to Molinism, which I recommend looking up! I think it is the best way to explain God’s foreknowledge, though others disagree.

I hope that helps kick this thread off. :slight_smile:

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