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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases (e.g. Aquinas) these two views have been held side by side, in others separately.
The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. (Convenient documentation can be found in God and Timelessness by Nelson Pike.)1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know (timelessly) that e is earlier than f. But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over, or going to happen, or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because (for example) what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f.2
page 315 note 1 London, 1970.Google Scholar
page 315 note 2 See Prior, A. N., Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford, 1968), p. 29.Google Scholar
page 315 note 3 Cf. Kneale, Martha, ‘Eternity and Sempieternity’, P.A.S. (1968–1969), p. 227.Google Scholar
page 316 note 1 Papers on Time and Tense, p. 38Google Scholar
page 316 note 2 American Philosophical Quarterly (1966).Google Scholar
page 316 note 3 New Blackfriars, vol. 54, no. 636 (May 1973).Google Scholar
page 316 note 4 Op. cit. p. 215. Geach labels this view ‘Thomist’. It is given explicit expression by non-Thomists too, as in Reformed theology. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) states that God freely and unchangeably ordains whatsoever comes to pass (ch. 3, S. 1x).Google Scholar
page 317 note 1 ‘Some Problems about Time’, Logic Matters (Oxford, 1972), pp. 302–18.Google Scholar
page 318 note 1 ‘Causality and Creation’ in God and the Soul (London, 1969), p. 83.Google Scholar
page 319 note 1 ‘The Future’, p. 211.Google Scholar
page 319 note 2 Op. cit. p. 211.Google Scholar
page 319 note 3 Ibid
page 320 note 1 Op. Cit. p. 212.Google Scholar
page 321 note 1 Papers on Time and Tense, pp. 26 ff.Google Scholar
page 321 note 2 ‘The Future’, p. 217.Google Scholar
page 321 note 3 Op. cit. p. 215.Google Scholar
page 321 note 4 Op. cit. p. 217.Google Scholar
page 321 note 5 ‘The Future’, p. 219.Google Scholar
page 321 note 6 Op. cit. p. 215.Google Scholar
page 321 note 7 Papers on Time and Tense, p. 69.Google Scholar
page 321 note 8 ‘Temporal Flux’, pp. 280–1.Google Scholar
page 321 note 9 Papers on Time and Tense, p. 30.Google Scholar
page 322 note 1 ‘The Future’, p. 215.Google Scholar
page 322 note 2 Ibid.
page 322 note 3 ‘An Irrelevance of Omnipotence’, Philosophy (Oct. 1973), p. 332.Google Scholar
page 323 note 1 Ibid. p. 329.
page 323 note 2 ‘The Future’, p. 217.Google Scholar
page 323 note 3 Op. cit. p. 209.Google Scholar