Author
GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & Time
3 quotes Popular first.
- “Most philosophers today disagree. While agreeing that God is eternal, they understand his eternality as his being temporally everlasting. He exists at all times and through all times.3 God never began to exist, and he will never go out of existence, but he is in time. God experiences temporal succession. God experiences the birth of Caesar before he experiences the making of the Caesar salad. God, on this view, exists at all times. He exists at the present moment, he has existed at each past moment, and he will exist at each future moment.”— GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & TimeSource:God & Time: Four Views
- “What is the Now? The A-theorist says that the Now exists in a way that the past and the future do not. The Now is a privileged temporal location. The B-theorist holds that the Now is dependent on the psychological states of knowing minds. In other words, it is part of how we are conscious of the world. If there were no minds, there would be no Now. It is part of our subjective take on the world. Each moment of time, according to the B-theory, is as real as any other moment.
Take some particular event, such as the event of a particular elephant taking a drink of water 141 years ago. Most A-theorists will hold that this event does not exist. It is not real. It did exist (141 years ago), but it no longer does. The B-theorist will believe that the event in question is real. It does exist. It exists now even if it is not occurring now. It occurred 141 years ago.
These theories are important to our topic because many philosophers think that if the A-theory of time is true, then God must be a temporal being. God can be atemporal only if the B-theory is true. Not every philosopher thinks there is this connection between the atemporality of God and the B-theory, but many, including some of our authors, do. Why do some philosophers make this connection? There are two reasons. First, they believe that, if the A-theory is true, God must change (and therefore he must be temporal). Second, they also think that if the A-theory is true, an atemporal God could not be omniscient. The claim that God knows everything that can be known is a claim with strong scriptural support.
God must change, it is held, because he stands in relation to a changing reality. For example, if God sustains a changing world in existence, he sustains Caesar’s existence before he sustains the existence of the Caesar salad. On the A-theory, the existence of Caesar is most fundamentally past. So God no longer sustains Caesar’s existence. Now he is sustaining the existence of the Caesar salad. God is doing different things at different times. He is changing.”— GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & TimeSource:Time: Four Views (pp. 14–15) - “Nothing of his life is past, and nothing of it is future. God possesses his life “all at once.” Boethius’s famous definition of eternity captures this idea. “Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life.”
Those who think that God is in some way temporal do not want to attribute weakness or inadequacy to God. Nor do they hold that God’s life is less than maximally full. They will deny, rather, that God cannot experience a maximally full life if he is temporal.”— GREGORY E. GANSSLE, Thinking About God & TimeSource:God & Time: Four Views (p. 23)