Trent Dougherty: You are best known for your work on the nature of God's relation to time, especially for defending divine timelessness. This view has relatively few defenders today. Why do you think that is?
Brian Leftow: Original sin. Or else that (a) temporalism is the picture we think we see in the Bible (though there are things there that point in a different direction, I think) and tend to develop as we think of God on analogy with ourselves, and (b) the metaphysical picture which tended to offset this in more enlightened times (broadly, Platonism) has less pull today. As (b) is so, the weight of argument needed to offset (a) has grown. Or were you looking for the answer "I'm not very persuasive"?
Trent Dougherty: Do you mean to say that atemporalism is logically dependent on some kind of Platonism? Do you think there is any devotional theology riding on this issue?
Brian Leftow: There's no logical dependence. It's just that Platonists are generally friendly to timeless entities. In one respect I don't see a devotional issue here. Lived Christianity is carpentry; the temporalism/atemporalism issue concerns the physics of wood. The world we experience should come out looking the same no matter what the true underlying account is- that's a condition on the adequacy of the account. Of course in saying this I am supposing that things do look the same to us if God is atemporal. But that seems correct. I pray; something happens which I take to be God's answer to it. Surely it doesn't matter whether He heard the prayer just when I prayed it or 'from all eternity.' And if the latter, then again surely it doesn't matter whether we read that phrase as temporalists or as atemporalists do. I'm also supposing that atemporalism doesn't throw up obstacles to events' being answers to prayer, but I've argued this elsewhere. I guess I tend to think God "bigger" or more awesome if atemporal than He would be if temporal; it's that sort of feeling that inclined me toward atemporalism enough to want to investigate whether it was defensible. But others seem not to share that view.
