Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time

by William Lane Craig

Publisher:

Crossway

, 2001

Overview

This remarkable work offers an analytical exploration of the nature of divine eternity and God’s relationship to time. Unravel the issues of divine complexity and omni-temporality, divine simplicity and immutability and divine temporality/atemporality. Written for the informed lay person, William Lane Craig’s book will inform the reader of current philosophy and scholarship into the nature of time with many suggestions for further reading.

Contents

Top Highlights

“We have seen that God’s real relation to the temporal world gives us good grounds for concluding God to be temporal in view of the extrinsic change He undergoes through His changing relations with the world. But the existence of a temporal world also seems to entail intrinsic change in God in view of His knowledge of what is happening in the temporal world. For since what is happening in the world is in constant flux, so also must God’s knowledge of what is happening be in constant flux. Defenders of divine temporality have argued that a timeless God cannot know certain tensed facts about the world—for example, what is happening now—and therefore, since God is omniscient, He must be temporal.” (Pages 97–98)

“If time began to exist—say, for simplicity’s sake, at the Big Bang—then in some difficult-to-articulate sense God must exist beyond the Big Bang, alone without the universe. He must be changeless in such a state; otherwise time would exist. And yet this state, strictly speaking, cannot exist before the Big Bang in a temporal sense, since time had a beginning. God must be causally, but not temporally, prior to the Big Bang. With the creation of the universe, time began, and God entered into time at the moment of creation in virtue of His real relations with the created order. It follows that God must therefore be timeless without the universe and temporal with the universe.” (Page 233)

“In God’s temporal experience, there would be a moment which would be present in absolute time, whether or not it were registered by any clock time. He would know, without any dependence on clock synchronization procedures or any physical operations at all, which events were simultaneously present in absolute time. He would know this simply in virtue of His knowing at every such moment the unique set of present-tense truths at that moment, without any need of physical observation of the universe.” (Pages 53–54)

Product Details

• Title: Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time
• Author: William Lane Craig
• Publisher: Crossway
• Print Publication Date: 2001
• Logos Release Date: 2016
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: God › Immutability; Eternity; Time › Religious aspects--Christianity
• ISBNs: 9781581342413, 1581342411, 9781433509797, 9781433509780, 9781433517563, 1433509792, 1433509784, 1433517566
• Resource ID: LLS:TMTRNTYRLTNSHTM
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T03:25:02Z

About William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig (PhD, University of Birmingham, England) is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University and lives in Marietta, GA.