God, time

Therefore, time must exist. Further, agents, which participate in this change, must sustain change themselves, even if it is an extrinsic change in relations to the events in question. Therefore these agents are in time also. Now, that seems pretty straightforward to me.

If God is an agent of change, then He must be in time or at least enter time at the particular point that the change obtains. This is called the A-theory of time. Tenses are real and becoming is real because real change marks duration, distinguishing past from present from future. There seems to be only one way to avoid this conclusion. Is it possible time can be reduced to a series of static events, causally related, yet not in time?

We have to have God in a changeless state, and the time-space universe existing as a static storybook block. When did God create the universe out of nothing? It always existed with God. He is the eternal cause of it—like those two plates, one resting upon the other for eternity—but it never came into existence at any time. If God does create, then the game is up. He may have had an eternal intention to do certain things, but then He must exercise His will, He must act with power, and He must create the universe.

And it does seem to be that such a creation was a process, at least six days, and that means God was in time, at least by then. What about God in a kind of hypertime? God can still act and create, but He can be above our time and intervene at different points in our timeline. Imagine being a character in a book. Fitzgerald argues that if a timeless duration does not have these analogues with temporal or spatial duration, it is hard to think of it as a case of bona fide duration.

Stump and Kretzmann attempt to respond to such objections and have revised their analysis of ET-simultaneity accordingly. In their first response to Fitzgerald Stump and Kretzmann, , they make much of his analyzing timeless duration in a way that makes it incompatible with the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity. There are no distinct events or moments at all within the life of a God who is metaphysically simple.

Although the two positions are linked throughout medieval thought, there is a cost to holding that a timeless God must be metaphysically simple as well. Any independent argument against divine simplicity such as in Wolterstorff, will count against such a view of timelessness. This version of the principle eliminates the observation difficulties but continues to use the notion of reference frames to describe the timeless and the temporal states. Alan Padgett has argued that Stump and Kretzmann cannot be defending anything more than a loose analogy with relativity theory here.

He points out that they admit that the use of relativity theory is a heuristic device and nothing more. Yet their analysis of the relation between a timeless being and events in time requires more than a loose analogy. This feature of Special Relativity makes the analogy of the relations between a timeless being and a temporal event on the one hand and the relations between events in different reference frames quite weak.

Brian Leftow has defended timeless duration in the life of God in another way. These moments stand in the successive relations of earlier and later to one another, although they are not temporally earlier or later than one another. A QTE being is timeless in that it lives all of its life at once. No moment of its life passes away and there is no moment at which some other moment has not yet been lived. Because the life of a QTE being has sequential moments, its duration is significantly like the duration or extension of the life of a temporal being.

There can be the sort of duration that allows discrete moments to be individuated by location in the life of a metaphysically simple, timeless God. Leftow argues that there is a significant difference between a being that has spatial or material parts and a being that has a duration consisting of different moments or positions or points. Points are not parts, however. A finite line segment is not made up of some finite number of points such that the addition or subtraction of a finite number of points will change its length.

If the points or moments or positions in the duration of the life of God are not to count as parts of that life, they must be of zero finite length. Leftow allows that in the life of a timeless God and a metaphysically simple God there are distinct points. He insists that these points are not parts in the life of God. Therefore God is not a being whose life contains distinct parts. He is metaphysically simple. His life does contain points that are ordered sequentially, however.

So the QTE God with its sequential points allows God to have the sort of duration that Fitzgerald wanted, yet be timeless. In this way, the QTE concept of timeless duration is more satisfactory than the one put forward by Stump and Kretzmann.

In a recent essay, he defends the idea that such features can be shared without rendering God temporal Leftow He distinguishes between those properties that make something temporal and those that are typically temporal.

A typically temporal property TTP is a property that is typical of temporal events and which helps make them temporal. Having some TTP is not sufficient to make an event a temporal event, however. What will make an event temporal is having the right TTPs. For example, being wholly future relative to some temporal event is a TTP; but God, even if he is temporal, does not have that property.

God has no beginning. As a result his life is not wholly future to any temporal event. This description captures what is meant by a timeless duration. While having a duration and being an event are each cases of TTPs, Leftow has well-argued that they are not the sort of TTP that only temporal beings can have. Which other TTPs does God have if he is timeless? Not all whens are times, however. Eternity, in the sense of being a timeless location, can also be a when see also Leftow A timeless God can be present, though not temporally present, to the world.

He can have a life which is an event having duration, though not temporal duration. So the critics of Stump and Kretzmann are correct in so far as they argue that these properties are the sort of things that make their bearers temporal.

It may be that though things that have these properties are typically temporal, they are not necessarily so. Katherin Rogers , has argued that both Leftow and Stump and Kretzmann have not succeeded in articulating a compelling, or even coherent, notion of divine timeless duration. She challenges their claims that the views of timelessness found in Boethius and other medieval thinkers include duration.

These texts, she argues, are at best ambiguous. Given their background in Plotinus and Augustine, Rogers argues that it is better not to read these philosophers as attributing duration to the life of God. Augustine and Anselm especially express the notion of timelessness by the use of the notion of the present.

Even if the medieval thinkers did think of timelessness as involving duration, the more difficult question is whether we ought to think about it in this way. Rogers points out that both Stump and Kretzmann and Leftow, in defending the notion of divine timelessness against common objections do not make use of their distinctive notions of timeless duration at all. Furthermore, the explanations given of the coherence of timeless duration are not compelling. Stump and Kretzmann use the analogy of two parallel lines Stump and Kretzmann The higher one is completely illuminated all at once while the lower has illuminated a point at a time moving with uniform speed.

The light on each line represents the indivisible present. The entirety of the timeless line is one indivisible present while each point on the temporal line is a present one at a time. In this way the life of God is stretched out, so to speak, alongside temporal reality.

This analogy breaks down at crucial points. It if is not, then timelessness has no duration. The geometric aspect of the analogy is strained considerably when it is seen that some point on T call it T1 is going to be much closer to a point on E E1 then the point T will be.

Rogers points out that such an analogy is never found in the medieval writers. Their favorite geometric analogy is the circle and the point at the center. The circle represents all of time and the dot, timelessness.

Timelessness stands in the same relation to each point along the temporal array. The point itself has no extension or parts. If God is a QTE being, then his timeless life does have earlier and later points. These are not experienced by God sequentially, however. They are experienced all at once in the one timeless now.

Rogers argues that Leftow has two options. Rogers offers a non-geometric analogy, found in Augustine , that captures the relation between a timeless God and temporal reality.

Just as in one present mental exercise, a human being can call to mind a whole series of events that are themselves sequential, God in his timeless state can know the whole sequence of temporal events non-sequentially. These terms are temporal in nature. They each imply a motionless state through a period of time. His life does, however, lack extension. Although there are many arguments for the claim that God is timeless, this essay will look at three of the most important.

In addition, we will look at some responses to these arguments. The challenge of reconciling human freedom and divine omniscience is best seen if we presume that God is temporal.

If God is omniscient and infallible, he knows every truth, and he is never mistaken. If human beings are free in a libertarian sense, then some actions a person performs are up to her in the sense that she can initiate or refrain from initiating the action. The problem arises if it is supposed that someone will in the future choose freely some particular action. Suppose Jeanie will decide tomorrow to make a cup of tea at pm.

If this is a free act on her part, it must be within her power to make the cup of tea or to refrain from making it. If God is in time and knows everything, then hundreds of years ago, he already knew that Jeanie would make the cup of tea. When tomorrow comes, can Jeanie refrain from making the cup of tea? As Nelson Pike has argued, Pike she can do so only if it is within her power to change what it was that God believed from the beginning of time.

So, although God has always believed that she would make the tea, she must have the power to change what it was that God believed. She has to be able to make it the case that God always believed that she would not make the cup of tea. Many philosophers have argued that no one has this kind of power over the past, so human freedom is not compatible with divine foreknowledge.

If God is timeless, however, it seems that this problem does not arise. She does need power over his timeless beliefs. It is the occurring of the event that determines the content of our knowledge of the event. If Jeanie makes a cup of tea, God knows it timelessly.

If she refrains, he knows that she refrains. One might argue that even if God is temporal, the content of his foreknowledge is determined by the occurring of the event in the same way. This claim, of course, is true. There are two items which allow for difficulty here. In other words, the fact that God knows what he knows is fixed before she initiated the event. If it is a free choice on her part, she can still refrain from making the tea. If God is timeless, after all, he does not fore know anything.

While the proposal that God is timeless seems to offer a good strategy, at least one significant problem remains. This problem is that of prophecy. Suppose God tells Moses, among other things, that Jeanie will make a cup of tea tomorrow. Now we have a different situation entirely. Furthermore, since the information came from God, Moses cannot be mistaken about the future event Widerker , Wierenga, The prophet problem is a problem, some will argue, only if God actually tells Moses what Jeanie will do.

God, it seems, does not tell much to Moses or any other prophet. After all, why should God tell Moses? Some have argued, however, that if it is even possible for God to tell Moses or anyone else for that matter what Jeanie will do, then we have a version of the same compatibility problem we would have if we held that God is in time and foreknows her tea making.

He knows everything that it is possible to know. He can do anything that it is possible to do. He is maximally merciful. God is a living being. He is not an abstract object like a number. He is not inanimate like a magnetic force. He is alive. If whatever is true of him is true of him to the greatest degree possible, then his life is the fullest life possible. No being that experiences its life sequentially can have the fullest life possible.

Temporal beings experience their lives one moment at a time. The past is gone and the future is not yet. He can remember it, but he cannot experience it directly. The future part of his life is not yet here. He can anticipate it and worry about it, but he cannot yet experience it. He only experiences a brief slice of his life at any one time. The life of a temporal thing, then, is spread out and diffuse. It is the transient nature of our experience that gives rise to much of the wistfulness and regret we may feel about our lives.

This feeling of regret lends credibility to the idea that a sequential life is a life that is less than maximally full. Older people sometimes wish for earlier days, while younger people long to mature. We grieve for the people we love who are now gone. We grieve also for the events and times that no longer persist. When we think about the life of God, it is strange to think of God longing for the past or for the future.

The idea that God might long for some earlier time or regret the passing of some age seems like an attribution of weakness or inadequacy to God. God in his self-sufficiency cannot in any way be inadequate. If it is the experience of the passage of time that grounds these longings, there is good reason not to attribute any experience of time to God.

Therefore, it is better to think of God as timeless. He experiences all of his life at once in the timeless present. Nothing of his life is past and nothing of it is future. However, those who think that God is in some way temporal do not want to attribute weakness or inadequacy to God. They will deny, rather, that God cannot experience a maximally full life if he is temporal. These philosophers will point out that many of our regrets about the passage of time are closely tied to our finitude.

It is our finitude that grounds our own inadequacy, not our temporality. We regret the loss of the past both because our lives are short and because our memories are dim and inaccurate.

He does not lose anything with the passage of time. Nor does his life draw closer to its end. If our regrets about the passage of time are more a function of our finitude than of our temporality, much of the force of these considerations is removed.

If time is contingent and God is not, then it is at least possible that God exist without time. This conclusion is still far from the claim that God is, in fact, timeless but perhaps we can say more. If time is contingent, then it depends upon God for its existence. Either God brought time into existence or he holds it in existence everlastingly.

The claim that time is contingent, though, is not uncontroversial. Arguments for the necessity of time will be considered below.

If God created time as part of his creation of the universe, then it is important whether or not the universe had a beginning at all.

Although it might seem strange to think that God could create the universe even if the universe had no beginning, it would not be strange to philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas. Working within the Aristotelean framework, he considered an everlasting universe to be a very real possibility. He argued in his third way that even a universe with an infinite past would need to depend upon God for its existence. In his view, even if time had no beginning, it was contingent.

God sustains the universe, and time itself, in existence at each moment that it exists. The majority position today is that the universe did have a beginning. What most people mean by this claim is that the physical universe began. It is an open question for many whether time had a beginning or whether the past is infinite. If the past is infinite, then it is metaphysical time and not physical time that is everlasting.

Arguments such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument aim to show that it is not possible that the past is infinite Craig and Smith, ; Craig b.

Suppose time came into existence with the universe so that the universe has only a finite past. This means that physical time was created by God. Somewhat ironically, the God of Time was forgotten over time. The lack of references to any such deity in the Biography of Gunnhildr confirms that the Gunnhildr Clan likely no longer remembers them. Too little is known about the Lawrence Clan after their banishment after Vennessa 's rebellion a thousand years ago, [5] but considering their role in suppressing knowledge of Mondstadt's history during the late Aristocratic Period, [6] it is likely that they no longer acknowledge the God of Time either.

The Imunlaukr Clan has not been mentioned outside of the establishment of modern Mondstadt, so their fate is unknown. Nearly nothing is left of the God of Time's legacy, but the carvings on the sundials of the Thousand Winds Temple and Nameless Island leave messages associated with the God of Time and Barbatos. As such, both of the locations have had some connection to the God of Time. The messages respectively read:. During the quest Time and Wind , which is related to the Sundial found near to the Thousand Winds Temple , a faint voice is heard to say "An ancient tale comes whisked in the wind In time, it will grow and sprout once again The Sumeru scholar Sayid , while visiting the Mondstadt Library during nighttime, recites a truncated version of the phrases inscribed on the sundials: "Seeds brought on the wind will sprout in due time Roald mentions the Winds of Time in his account of his journey to Dragonspine : Old Mondstadt fairytales speak of the mountain as a place of punishment that was abandoned by the Wind of Time and left for the howling winds to sweep in and freeze everything in its moment of destruction.