God’s Relation To Time

God’s eternity is affirmed in Scripture as God’s being beginningless and endless. He exists permanently. The Scriptural data are underdeterminitive with regard to God’s Relation To Time. Is God trans-temporal? Is he outside of time? Is God an atemporal being who doesn’t exist in time at all? Or is God rather an everlasting being who exists omnitemporally – at every time?

Therefore this issue is one that must be resolved by philosophical theology. What needs to be looked at are arguments for and against divine timelessness and temporality.

Divine Timelessness
Of all of the various arguments that have been offered for God’s being timeless the best argument is the argument from the incompleteness of temporal life. Temporal existence is terribly incomplete in that the being does not yet has a future – it is merely potential. And the being no longer has the past. It is over and done with. All the being has is the present. That is a brief fleeting instant that passes away as soon as it comes. So temporal existence is a fleeting sort of existence where the being does not have the fullness of its entire life at once, but it just has a brief momentary slice of that life one slice after another. The argument here is that this kind of incomplete existence is incompatible with the existence of a most perfect being, which is what God is. A most perfect being should have his life all at once so to speak. He should never lose his past or have a future that is yet to be gained. He should have his life all at once.

This is a powerful argument. In God’s case, however, the incompleteness of temporal life is diminished somewhat by his omniscience. For an eternal omniscient being, he knows the future with all the detail that he knows the present and past. He knows everything. Moreover, he recalls the past in perfect detail so that he could mentally relive it as though it were present to him. For an omniscient being, the passage of time is not so melancholy an affair as it is for finite transient beings. Therefore, the incompleteness of temporal life in the case of God is not quite so melancholy and deficient a mode of existence as it might be for finite temporal beings.

Nevertheless, this argument does have some force and could motivate a doctrine of divine timelessness, unless there are arguments for divine temporality that are even more powerful and outweigh it.

Divine Temporality
There are two especially powerful arguments for thinking that God is temporal and does not transcend time.

God’s Changing Relations With The World
The first would be based on God’s changing relations with the world. God changes in his relationships with things in the temporal world.

Here it is important to distinguish between intrinsic change and extrinsic change. Something changes intrinsically if it changes in one of its non-relational properties – a property that it has in and of itself. For example, an apple might change from being green to being red. That would be an intrinsic change in the apple. An extrinsic change, by contrast, would be a relational change. Something might not change intrinsically but it would change in its relations to other things about it. For example, a man was once taller than his son, John, but now he is shorter than John. Is that because of an intrinsic change in me? No! The man is the same height he has always been, but he has become shorter than John as John has changed intrinsically and grown taller. The man once stood in the relation “taller than” to his son, but now he stands in the relation “shorter than” to his son. So he has undergone not an intrinsic but an extrinsic change in his relationship to him.

In creating a temporal world, God would seem to undergo if not intrinsic change at least extrinsic change because in creating a temporal world God now stands in new relations like “causing the universe.” God is now causally related to the universe, and he was not causally related to the universe existing without it. Similarly he now has the relationship minimally of co-existing with the universe – a property that he did not stand in prior to creation. Indeed, there was no moment prior to creation. So God would undergo, it would seem, these sort of extrinsic relational changes insofar as he is related to a temporal universe. That would be sufficient for being in time.

To see the point, imagine a rock existing isolated in outer space. Suppose this rock is absolutely changeless. It is frozen at absolute zero. This is physically impossible, but this is just a thought experiment. So imagine this hypothetical rock that is absolutely changeless and isolated in outer space. Then imagine that a meteor whizzes by and another meteor whizzes by. Clearly the rock would not be timeless even though it is intrinsically changeless. Why? Because it changes in its relation to other changing things about it. First there was the one meteor going by, then later another meteor went by. The rock, though changeless intrinsically, would clearly be in time because it is related to changing things. Since God is really related to a changing temporal world, God would undergo extrinsic change and therefore he would be in time. This seems to be a very powerful argument for God’s being temporal.

This relational change in God becomes especially difficult for timelessness when thinking of the doctrine of the incarnation. Because in the incarnation the second person of the Trinity takes on a human nature. He now is related to this human nature in a way in which he was not before. There clearly seems to be a time at which the second person of the Trinity was not yet related to the human nature that Jesus of Nazareth had, and then there is a time after which he does have a human nature and is related to that human nature. That would imply that God is therefore in time in virtue of these changing relations even if he is intrinsically changeless. Even if he is intrinsically changeless he would still be temporal in view of his changing relationships with temporal things.

God’s Foreknowledge
The second argument in favor of divine temporality would be based upon God’s knowledge of tensed facts. Tensed facts mean facts that are related to the past, present, and future. For example, that it is now 3:00 PM. That would be a tensed fact. It was 2:30 PM a half hour ago. That is a tensed fact. It will be 3:30 PM a half hour from now. All of these would be tensed facts. As an omniscient being, God must know all facts. If there are facts about the world of which God is ignorant then he could not count as omniscient. If there are tensed facts then God would then have to know them because he is omniscient. He knows what time it is now. But if God knows that it is now 3:00, he is obviously located at that moment in time to know that it is now 3:00. If he is located at 2:30, he’ll know it is now 2:30. So there would be change going on constantly in God as these tensed facts change. The simplest way to think about this is just knowing what time it is. He knows what time it is now. If God were not in time he would not know whether now is the era of galaxy formation, or the time of life on Earth, or the time at which the universe is suffering thermodynamic destruction. He would not know what is now happening in the universe if he is not in time. In virtue of his omniscience God must know tensed facts and therefore must be in time. This would seem to imply not simply extrinsic but even intrinsic change in God; namely, God would be constantly changing in his thought life. He would know it is now 3:00, it is now 3:01, it is now 3:02. There would be a flow in the contents of consciousness in God as he keeps track of what time it is.

Far from being an imperfection in God, this kind of knowledge is a perfection in God. It is in virtue of his omniscience that God cannot be fooled about what time it is; he is not frozen into immobility but he keeps track of what is happening in the universe. Therefore, he knows what is going on now.

These two arguments, if sound, provide very powerful grounds for thinking that God is in time and that therefore they more than counterbalance the argument for divine atemporality based on the incompleteness of temporal life.

There is one way of escape for the defender of divine timelessness. These arguments both assume that there are tensed facts about the world, about what is present, past, or future. And they assume that temporal becoming is real. That the temporal world really is changing. Things come into being and pass away. Whether or not someone thinks that is true is going to depend on what theory of time the person adopts. Whether it is a tensed theory of time (this is often called the A-Theory – that is just an arbitrary designation, not descriptive) or if the person has a tenseless theory of time (this is usually called the B-Theory).

Theories of Time
The arguments for divine timelessness and temporality stand or fall depending on the correct view of time.

Tenseless Theory of Time (B-Theory of Time)
According to the tenseless theory of time, the difference between past, present, and future is just an illusion of human consciousness. There really is no such thing objectively speaking. Nor do things really come into being and pass away. That, again, is just an illusion of human beings. Rather, everything in time is spread out kind of like a spatial line, and everything is equally existent. For the people in 1868, 1868 is now. For the people in 2015, 2015 is now. For the people in 5030, 5030 is now. If you say which one is really now, the answer is there is no real now. It is just each of their subjective personal perspectives, none of which is objectively true.

If someone were to make a diagram of this theory the person can let a drawn disk represent space. Now suppose that as someone goes back in time space is shrinking so that it shrinks back to a beginning at the Big Bang. That would be the beginning of time and space. Now suppose just for the sake of convenience that as someone goes into the future the universe re-contracts again down to a point at which time and space come to an end. On the B-Theory, or the tenseless theory, of time, time is merely an internal dimension that orders the spatial cross-sections of this space-time continuum. From the beginning at the Big Bang until the end at the Big Crunch it is all equally real. There is no temporal becoming. There are no tensed facts. Rather, for any cross-section of this that someone picks the people at that point will think that that is now, and the people at that point will think that their point is now. But all of these are just subjective perspectives.

So on this tenseless theory of time it is very easy to think of God as existing outside of time. He is not in this space-time continuum. Therefore, he does not change in his relationships to it. He is related to everything in time and space from beginning to end in a tenseless way. Indeed, in one sense this creation – this space-time world – is in a sense co-eternal with God. To say it comes into being just means it has a front edge. But God never exists without it. Time is simply an internal dimension of this thing. On this view God never undergoes extrinsic change because there really is no relational change between God and things in time. Similarly, there are no tensed facts to know. What God knows is that the tenseless facts like that X occurs at t=7 and Y occurs at t=10. Those are changeless. Those never change. His mind never undergoes a stream of consciousness. He has no past, present, and future. That is just an illusion of the people in time. On this tenseless theory these arguments for Divine temporality do not go through because God never undergoes extrinsic or intrinsic change.

Theological Objections
Moreover, there is a theological objection to the tenseless theory that would be pressed. That is it emasculates the doctrine of creation. On this view, the world is really co-eternal with God. Now, it depends upon God – it is ontologically dependent upon him. God is independent of the world, but the world is not independent of God. The world depends on God for its existence. Nevertheless there is no state of affairs in which God exists alone without the world. To say that God created the universe just means that the universe has a front edge so to speak. This whole co-eternal object depends upon God for its existence. That really emasculates the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing which says that there is a state of affairs in the actual world which is God existing alone. Nothing is with him. As Isaiah says, “Who was with me? No one! Nothing!” Then God speaks the world into being, and the world begins to exist in a tensed way.

Moreover, notice that on this view, in a very uncomfortable way, evil is never really vanquished. Evil exists here in the world. Even if later in history God’s judgment falls upon evil, evil is never really eradicated. It still exists at those earlier space-time points. But it is never really done away with. What this means is that Christ hangs permanently on the cross. The crucifixion never passes away. Certainly there is a resurrection later in the time slices. At a later time slice, Jesus rises from the dead. But the crucifixion never passes away. It is never over with. That is theologically objectionable. God abolishes evil. He does away with evil. It is vanquished or annihilated. In order for that to happen it needs to be a tensed theory. It will not happen on the tenseless theory.

Tensed Theory of Time (A-Theory of Time)
On the A-Theory of time all that really exists is the present moment. Moments that are past or moments that are future are not real. They are purely potential. The past has gone away, the future has not yet come to be. So all that really exists is the present. On the A-Theory of time if God is causally related to the world then he will undergo extrinsic change as the present moment changes, and he will know different tensed facts about what is now happening in the universe as time elapses.

It is universally acknowledged that the A-Theory (or the tensed theory) is the common-sense view of time. This is the layman’s view. Things really do come to be and pass away. There really is a present and that is different than the past and future. This common-sense view is rooted in people’s experience of temporal becoming – as everyone experiences the passage of time and things coming to be and passing away. There is no reason to deny that experience. It is perfectly rational to go with what experience tells people: that in fact, temporal becoming is objective and there is a difference between past, present, and future.

If time had a beginning, God existing alone without the world is timeless. So he has a kind of timeless existence. But that is a contingent property of God, not an essential property. When he creates the universe in virtue of his real relations to the temporal world, he becomes temporal. So God without creation is timeless, but since the moment of creation he is temporal and in time.