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In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.
On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).
Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.
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- Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford 1977)Google Scholar and Wolterstorff, Nicholas, ‘God Everlasting’, in Cahn, Steven M. and Shatz, David (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Oxford and New York, 1982)Google Scholar.
2 I defended this position in ‘A Timeless God?’ (New Blackfriars, 64, May 1983). Cf. also my Thinking About God (London, 1985)Google Scholar.
3 Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, by Paul Helm. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988. Pp. xv + 230. £25.00. In this article I am largely critical of Helm, but I agree with much that he says on matters outside the scope of my present concerns.
4 The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, 1979), pp. 38fGoogle Scholar.
5 The Coherence of Theism, p. 220.
6 I defended it in ‘Kenny on God’, Philosophy 57, No 219 (January 1982)Google Scholar. But what I said there was wrong.
7 This would be the line with someone in sympathy with the work of P.T. Geach and Arthur Prior. See Geach, P.T., Logic Matters (Oxford, 1972), pp. 302–318Google Scholar and Arthur Prior, Past Present and Future (Oxford, 1967).
8 This argument has been put to me by Herbert McCabe OP.
9 You might compare ‘now’ with ‘still’ as in ‘Fred is still writing his book’. Here ‘still’ hints at some expectation surprisingly not fulfilled (‘Is Fred still writing his book; I thought he'd finished by now’). To add ‘now’ to ‘Fred is writing his book” hints at the expectation that Fred has already finished writing, or is asleep, or is dead and using a medium, or something like that. To say ‘It is true that God exists now’ hints at the expectation of God not existing at some time.
10 Some have said that believing in God means believing that he does not exist. This has been said by people purporting to explain what it means to believe in God. But believing that God does not exist is to believe that nothing whatsoever has the divine attributes, which any atheist can accept. So I deny that believing in God means believing that he does not exist. One might say ‘God does not exist’ in order to stress that to be God is not to be what other things are. ‘God does not exist’ might be taken to mean something like ‘God is no physical object’ or ‘God is the source of the existence of everything we can classify or understand, and must therefore be distinguished from such things’. But atheism is entailed by such statements if they are also taken to say that nothing whatsoever has the divine attributes. Even such an austerely apophatic writer as Pseudo‐Dionysius would surely have agreed with this conclusion. Aquinas would certainly have agreed with it, though he quotes Denys at enormous length.
11 I would say the same of statements like ‘It is now true that 2 + 2 = 4’. We would not normally say that, for we presume that 2 + 2 cannot but equal 4. But it certainly is now true that 2 + 2 = 4, just as it was true yesterday and just as it will be true tomorrow.
12 Though one can give sense to the notion of God being at a place (cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, lae, 8), this does not imply that, since God makes and sustains all places, he must have spatial location as bodies do. If God is incorporeal, he cannot thus have spatial location (as God) because he has no body to be in or to constitute a place. On the other hand, if it is true that God exists it must be true that he exists at the time we say he does. ‘God exists’ entails God's temporal location in some sense in a way that it does not entail his spatial location. I may be misunderstanding him, but this seems to be what David Braine is arguing in The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (Oxford, 1988), pp. 130fGoogle Scholar.
13 ‘What Actually Exists’, in God and the Soul (London, 1969), pp. 66ffGoogle Scholar.
14 So it seems, I think. But one treads on dangerous grounds in making such assertions. In Chapter 1 of his book Helm briefly considers the topic of biblical documents and what is consistent with them. I entirely agree with what Helm says on this matter. So what ‘seems’ to me concerning biblical talk about God's duration is subject to constraints along the lines which Helm suggests. On the other hand, however, it surely is true that the Bible does not generally teach that God lacks duration, isn't it? And it surely is true that its language pulls the other way, isn't it? Cf. Barr, James, Fundamentalism (London, 1977), p. 277Google Scholar.
15 Consolationis Philosophiae, V, VI. Richard Sorabji argues that Boethius is pretty unequivocal in denying duration to God (Time, Creation and the Continuum, London, 1983). He notes that Boethius distinguishes between a temporal and an eternal ‘always’, between sempitemitas and aetemitas, and between sempiternus and aeternus (pp. 115ff.). But one can make such distinctions without wishing to deny that God has duration. Sorabji reads Consolation V, VI as denying duration, but the text does not enforce this reading. It tells us that what is eternal does not pass from a past state, that it does not grasp tomorrow and lose yesterday, that it has all its life in a motionless way. This need only mean that God undergoes no distinguishable real changes. Boethius says that if the world lacked beginning or end it would still be only perpetuus, not aeternus. But that, he explains, is because it would fail to be like God who ‘stays still’–i.e., so far as I can see, ‘does not change’. For a better exposition of Boethius, see Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity’ (reprinted in Morris, Thomas V., ed., The Concept of God, Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.
16 Summa Theologiae, 1a, 10,1, 14,13 and 57,3. In the last passage here Aquinas says that eternity is ‘present to all time and embraces all time’ (toti tempori adest, et ipsum concludit). Cf. also 1a, 42, 2 where the language of ‘duration’ is again accepted by Aquinas in talking of God. In the Compendium of Theology, Ch. 7 (Quod deus semper est) Aquinas several times over insists that God exists always (Deus est Semper).
17 Summa Theologiae, 1a, 10, 2 ad.4.
18 By ‘unchangeable’ Aquinas seems to mean ‘unable to undergo real change’. ‘Real change’ is hard to define. Here I take it to mean genuine alteration in a subject. On this criterion, you do not undergo real change by, for example, coming to be thought of by me. But you do by moving, growing, or coming to have different thoughts. Cf. P.T. Geach, ‘What Actually Exists’.
19 That Aquinas conceives of God's eternity principally in terms of changelessness emerges with particular clarity in the Compendium of Theology, Ch. 8 and the Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Lecture 18, 586. In the first of these passages Boethius's definition of eternity is explained in terms of immutability. In the second Aquinas writes: ‘As the “now” of time is understood as the number of a mobile object, the “now” of eternity is understood as the number, or rather the unity, of a thing which is always the same’. Cf. also la,10,5, where Aquinas talks of the difference between aeon and time. For some analysis of Aquinas on eternity as duration see Peter, Carl J., Participated Eternity in the Vision of God: A Study of the Opinion of Thomas Aquinas and his Commentators on the Duration of the Acts of Glory (Rome, 1964)Google Scholar.
20 In Chapter 8 of the Compendium of Theology Aquinas denies that succession occurs in God. But the context makes clear that by ‘succession’ he means the occurrence in a subject of real change. ‘Succession is not found except in things that are in some way subject to motion … God, however, is in no sense subject to motion’. In the sense in which Aquinas denies that succession occurs in God, I am also happy to deny that succession occurs in God.
21 Cf. Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Time Without Change’, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969). Aristotle and Aquinas, of course, famously take a different view (cf. Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Lecture 16, when the passing of time is linked to the perception of motion).
22 An analogy would be ‘God became man’.
23 Cf. Helm, Ch. 3.
24 I am not, however, totally confident of this line of reasoning. For ‘now’‘here’ and ‘I’ function differently, and one might query the practice of lumping them together as if they constituted members of a distinct category.
25 By ‘proposition’ here I mean what Frege calls ‘Gedanken’, ‘thoughts’. Frege's views on thoughts can be found in ‘Sense and Meaning’ and ‘Thoughts’ (Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy (ed. McGuinness, Brian, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar).
26 Cf. Anscombe, G.E.M., ‘The First Person’, in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Vol. II (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.
27 Cf. St Augustine, Confessions, XI, 13.
28 For useful comments on early drafts of this article I am grateful to Gilbert Markus OP, James Claffey OP, Christopher Williams, Peter Geach, Richard Swinburne and Mark Wynn.