I don't think so. Let me explain.
To say that God freely creates is to say that he could have refrained from creating and that he could have created a different sort of world, one with different initial and boundary conditions.
To say that God is timeless is to say that he undergoes no change in any respects whatsoever. In other words, it is to say that God is absolutely immutable.
Given these two assumptions (and assuming, of course, that there is a God who has in fact freely created), we can, I think, derive a contradiction:
- God is absolutely immutable.
- God has freely created.
- A free act proceeds from a free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities.
- Therefore, God made a free decision to create from among several mutually exclusive possibilities. (2,3)
- A free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities involves a change of 'intentional stance' from regarding something as indeterminate (as one of several possibilities) to regarding it as determinate (as the chosen course of action).
- Therefore, in freely created God undergoes a change in his intentional stance. (4,5)
- Therefore, God has changed in some respect. (6)
- Therefore, God is not absolutely immutable. (7)
(8) contradicts (1), and since (8) follows from (2), it follows that (2) contradicts (1). Hence, God cannot both be absolutely immutable (and timeless) and freely create. To avoid the conclusion, the eternalist must challenge the logic at some point or reject one of the independent premises, namely, (3) or (5). As far as I can see, the logic checks out. That leaves the premises to be examined.
One might try rejecting premise (3) by arguing that a free act need not proceed from a free decision. Perhaps God never decided to create. Perhaps he has just immutably willed to create. Okay, but what makes this "willing" free? That God has immutably willed to create could just as easily be said of a God who had no freedom, who had to create precisely the sort of world that we find ourselves in. Perhaps one could say that God's immutably willing to create is free because nothing about God's nature constrains God to will as he does. But if that's so, then why does God will as he does? Why does he immutably will to create precisely this type of world and not another or no world at all? It's not clear that any answer can be given unless it's along the lines of "because that's what he decided to do," in which case premise (3) is conceded. On the current proposal, therefore, it is just a brute fact that God wills as he does. He didn't choose to will as he does; he just does will as he does. I think it's safe to say that that's a rather lame explanation.
What's more, how is a denial of (3) to be squared with divine providence (i.e., God's manner of ruling creation)? Every theory of providence that I am aware of - Calvinism, Molinism, open theism, etc. - makes explicit reference to God's 'deciding' on or 'choosing' one possibility from among several others. The Biblical writers talk that way as well (for example, the nation of Israel is said to be "chosen" of God).
As for premise (5) it too seems highly plausible. Certainly when we make decisions we move from a state of indecision to a state of decision and a clear change in our intentional stance vis-a-vis our deliberative options takes place. But perhaps this doesn't have to be the case for a timeless God. Perhaps God's deliberative process can be understood in terms of distinct logical moments, rather than distinct temporal moments. An example of this distinction is the order of the steps in the proof of a mathematical theorem. It takes a human mathematician time to trace through the logical steps in performing the proof. That's a temporal sequence. But in the proof itself, considered abstractly as an ordered set of propositions connected by logical rules, there is only a logical sequence. The axioms from which the proof sets out are logically prior to the conclusion, but not temporally prior to it. Could God's decision to create be understood along similar lines? In other words could we say that God's contemplation of possibilities and his deciding to actualize one of them occur simultaneously, as it were, with the "change" in God's intentional stance reflecting a mere logical sequence and not a temporal one?
I don't think this will work because the relation between (1) God's contemplation of a set of creative possibilities and (2) his selecting one of those is not a logical sequence. In other words, no purely logical relation is going to get you from a proposition describing a set of possibilities ("Either A or B or C ...") to a proposition affirming just one of those possibilities ("A"). The latter just doesn't follow from the former. What we need is not a logical rule, but something substantive, namely, the exclusion of the other possibilities ("Neither B nor C ..."). It seems that this exclusion has to be due to a volitional act on God's part, an act that effects a transition from volitional indeterminacy ("Either A or B or C ...") to volitional determinacy ("A"). And it is simply incoherent to suppose that God (or anyone else) could be in both states at once. There are two distinct intentional stances here, and they are incompatible. Hence a free decision to create involves a qualitative change in God's mental life. And qualitative changes are temporal, not logical.
I conclude, then, that the above argument is sound. A timeless God could not freely create. On the assumption that God has freely created, therefore, it follows that God is not timeless.
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This is a neat post and a good thing to think about. I see St. Thomas as affirming the propositions that you see leading to trouble. I'm going to try to give a Thomistic reply. Just how Thomistic depends on which flavor of Thomism you favor.
Immutability only requires that in no world does God gain or lose properties. Immutability doesn't mean that God can't have other properties in other possible worlds. So, God can immutability have the property of creating in this world and immutability not have that very property in another world.
You say: "To say that God freely creates is to say that he could have refrained from creating and that he could have created a different sort of world." This, so far as I can see, is compatible with immutability insofar as immutability doesn't rule out there being other worlds where God eternally, atemporally and immutably wills not to create (or to create otherwise than he did).
3 says free actions proceed from free decisions. If you understand 'deciding' such that it requires time, then surely the atemporalist won't grant this. So let's understand deciding in such a way that it doesn't require time. Further, let's understand deciding such that it doesn't require ignorance (since, if it did require ignorance, again the atemporalist wouldn't grant 3). Concerning 3, you say: "Perhaps God never decided to create. Perhaps he has just immutably willed to create. Okay, but what makes this "willing" free?" The answer is that the willing is made free because it is possible that God not create. The next sentence begins with: "That God has immutably willed to create could just as easily be said of a God who had no freedom". That's true. What's needed to draw the distinction between the free and unfree God is whether the God could have done otherwise. The God you are talking about could have done otherwise, so calling the willing free seems like a fine thing to do (given what you say it means for God to create freely). It looks to me that that is all an atemporalist needs, but I think I may just be missing something.
Concerning providence, atemporal willing from among multiple, mutually exclusive possibilities doesn't require that God go from not intending to choose Abraham to choosing Abraham (which is an example of contingent providential care). It only requires that God eternally (not modally) be in a state of choosing Abraham, though if another world were actual he could be in a different state -- and immutably so.
5 seems to me to require that someone go from not knowing that A to knowing that A. This, as I said above, is unacceptable from an atemporalist position. So, the Atemporalist should, for consistency's sake, reject 5.
Why can't we say that God's free choosing and willing only requires that God's properties differ across worlds, and not across times?
I don't know. Suppose the decision and creation at t is instantaneous. It occupies exactly zero temporal space. There is therefore no earlier interval (t' - t)
What a pain. I'll try to post this one more time.
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I don't know. Suppose the decision and creation at t is instantaneous. It occupies exactly zero temporal space. There is therefore no earlier interval (t' minus t) < (t' plus t) at which God did not create the world. There is no earlier time (t' minus t) at which it is false that God created the world since t is instantanoeus. So (t' minus t) = (t' plus t). Since these intervals are equal in duration we can say that the creation occurred at t and that there was no earlier interval during which the world was not created. But then there was no change in God.
Alan,
As I tried to indicate on your blog, your discussion of the 'change' in intentional stance in (5) requires the entity to be temporal, which is exactly what the proponent of eternalism denies. If (5) isn't understood in such a way then, as both Mike and Tim have suggested, the eternalist can make sense of the divine decision to create.
I think the rejection of premise 1 is entirely consistent with the God of the Bible. I don’t think it’s necessary that God be atemporal or immutable.
When the Bible speaks of God’s immutability, the rational interpretation is that God’s nature/character never changes. Because He possesses all of His attributes perfectly, there is no sense of growing in wisdom, gaining wisdom, or having more or less wisdom at any moment in time. He remains the same. Some may even say that He is morally immutable (I think this is too weak, but absolute immutability goes beyond the intent of Scripture as a whole).
Those who suppose that God is absolutely immutable will face the contradiction you proposed. Movement of any kind no matter how slight (including a change of intentional stance) requires time. Position1 at T1 and P2 at T2 is the norm—it is impossible to have both P1 and P2 at T1 in the same world (or, in the case of creation, if we define P as “God created the world” not P and P at T1 in the mind of God). Hypothetically, we can have P1 in World1 and P2 in W2 at T1. But, while conceptually possible, this is inconsistent with the Christian God. The Bible depicts God as operating (moving) in the created world (the actual world).
When the Bible speaks of God’s eternality, it does not follow necessarily that God is timeless. Without time there is no movement (except, again hypothetically, points (snapshots) in time in different worlds). I think that time existed before God instantiated the actual world. And, “at the end of the age,” time will continue to exist. In Genesis 1, God did not create time, He established a way to measure and partition time with artificial divisions (creating light, creating the sun and moon, and separating the light from the darkness). God obviously is not bound by these artificial divisions (time as we know it). Interestingly, Revelation speaks of not having the light of the sun because God will illuminate the world (Rev. 22:5). The removal of the artificial divisions will leave God as the light—and no darkness and no separation. Without measure, there is infinity. Eternal life. But I think it is inconsistent with Scripture to suggest that there was timelessness before the creation of the world or that we return to a state of timelessness after the present world passes away. Inconsistent because Scripture speaks of things happening (movement) before and after time as we know it. Eternal life without time would be awfully boring. Sorry if this is not the type of comment you wanted—I was trying to address why your proof should not be so offensive based on a proper understanding of immutability and eternality.
Mike,
The < symbol is used to open tags/commands in HTML, so the system expects commands not commentary when you enter a <. If you use the symbol in the future you might try using the HTML code <
Tim,
Thanks for your comments. If I follow you, you're basically denying premise (3) of my argument. In other words, God didn't (strictly speaking) "choose" to create. Rather, he timelessly wills to create and such willing is free b/c in other possible worlds God wills differently.
However, you want to hang on to the language of "choosing". Thus, you speak of "God eternally [being] in a state of choosing Abraham." This puzzles me. In ordinary talk, to be in a state of choosing connotes not having chosen, i.e., it connotes that the choice has not yet been settled. So I have misgivings about the legitimacy of your employing the language of "choosing" and "deciding" here.
If you retain the language of "choosing", then I think your position is inconsistent because a free choice implies a transition from indeterminacy to determinacy. If you drop the language of "choosing" and simply stick with "willing", then you avoid the inconsistency but, I think, at the price of making it much harder to articulate an intelligible theory of providence.
Mike,
I concede that the decision to create and the start of creation are simultaneous. There is no temporal interval between the two. But that doesn't affect my argument.
If we grant that God makes a free choice in creating, then there are two distinct states: (a) God's contemplating the creative possibilities and (b) God's deciding for one of those possibilities. These states cannot be merely conceptually distinct. They must be really distinct since they involve mutually incompatible intentional stances on the part of God. In (a) God intentional stance is indeterminate among the creative possibilities, whereas in (b) it is determinately for one possibility and against all the others. Since these states are incompatible, they cannot be realized simultaneously. Thus, the transition between these two states defines a moment of time. The moment of God's decision is thus coincident with the first moment of creation.
Kevin,
Thanks for your feedback here and on my blog. I responded on my blog to the comment you posted there, so to keep things short I'll just address your present comment.
Basically, you accuse me of begging the question against the eternalist by supposing in premise (5) that a free decision entails a transition from intentional indeterminacy to intentional determinacy. I don't think that charge sticks, however. I don't assume in my argument that eternalism is false. Rather, I argue from the concept of a free decision and ask the eternalist to take that notion seriously. In short, I don't think the concept is elastic enough to support using the language of "choice" or "decision" for a timeless God. You seem to just assume that those concepts can be legitimately extended in some analogical manner to a timeless God. That's what I'm challenging.
As I see it, there are two ways for the eternalist to go with this. He may argue either (1) that God's freely creating doesn't involve a "decision" but simply a timeless "willing" or (2) argue that it does involve a "decision", but not one that requires any intentional shift. (1) seems to create problems for understanding divine providence. (2) requires an explication of the concept of "decision" that shows how it can be legitimately extended to a timeless God.
Chong,
I agree with you that the Bible does not clearly support the strong immutability doctrine that those committed to divine timelessness endorse. Nor am I at all impressed by the philosophical arguments for divine timelessness that I've seen, but maybe I've overlooked some.
Perhaps those of you who think there's a strong philosophical case for timelessness would be kind enough to state what you take the strongest arguments for that position to be.
(5) does assume one considers possibilities beforehand and then chooses one. It seems to me that a decision does not require that. Thinking about why you are doing something can be simultaneous with knowing that you will be doing it. If freedom is having choices available to one and being able to choose them based on their merits and demerits, then God could have all the options available, know which ones have which features, and be doing the ones he does on the grounds he does them on, all simultaneous with knowing which one he will do.
I would go as far as to say that a temporal decision-maker can know full well which decision to make and then to go through the reasoning process of why, leading to a free decision to do the thing already known to be the result of the process of decision-making. An example might be if someone is given divine revelation to do X and then reasons through the process of whether X or not-X is correct. Suppose the person chooses to obey God and then seeks to reason out why X is the better choice, concluding at the end that X is the better choice, never having any thought not to do X, expecting that the reasoning process would lead exactly to X. That seems to me to be a free choice to do X.
I think I agree with everything Tim says. Maybe you're going to push that into "(1) that God's freely creating doesn't involve a "decision" but simply a timeless "willing" or (2) argue that it does involve a "decision", but not one that requires any intentional shift".
But I don't think those are problematic. (1) is in fact what Aquinas says. Our sense of decisions requiring time is because we're temporal, but once you're willing to use analogical predication (which we have to do anyway to speak of God at all) this doesn't seem to be a real problem.
As for (2), I believe I just gave exactly such an account of how 'decision' can be used to describe a being in time who does something like what a timeless God would do, and thus it makes sense to apply the same language to God if God is timeless.
Dear Alan,
Thanks for the reply. I guess I do want to hang on to the language of God choosing, so long as it is understood as an atemporal action which neither involves change or ignorance. I think ordinary talk may be a hinderance here rather than a help because ordinary talk wasn't made to handle cases like this one. If you are employing a notion of choosing that requires ignorance on the agent's part as to which state the agent is shifting into, more then just atemporalists will reject it. Those who think that God isn't ignorant of anything will reject it as well.
As for providence, I don't think I see the problem yet. Even if I must drop the language of choosing, I can still get what I want with 'willing', can't I? Rather than God chooses Abraham, I will say, "God immutably wills that Abraham come to him" or some such thing. On a side, didn't Calvin and Molina affirm that God is atemporal? If so, aren't there references to God deciding or choosing more in line with a notion of choosing that doesn't require temporal extension?
Alan, I don't follow this,
". . .the transition between these two states defines a moment of time"
What transition? There is no transition between interval I = (t - t') and interval I' = (t + t') since (t-t') = (t+t'). There cannot be a transition between what happens in I and what happens in I' since I = I'.
That is the advantage of making decisions instantanously--viz., there is no transition required.
Matthew, thanks. I'm also having a little difficulty with 'Remember Personal Info'. For some reason the information is not being saved.
Tim's comment gave me an idea. We can run the same argument form to (putatively) show that an omniscient being cannot freely create.
1'. God is omniscient.
2. God has freely created.
3. A free act proceeds from a free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities.
4. Therefore, God made a free decision to create from among several mutually exclusive possibilities. (2,3)
5'. A free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities involves a change of 'intentional stance' from believing something is indeterminate (as one of several possibilities) to believing it is determinate (as the chosen course of action).
6'. Therefore, in freely creating God undergoes a change in his beliefs. (4,5)
7'. Therefore, God increases his knowledge. (6)
8'. Therefore, God is not omniscient. (7)
Note that once we cast this problem in terms of omniscience rather than eternality, time ceases to be the important factor. In both cases, (5) looks like the culprit to me.
God's act of creation is a "decision" or "choice" in the sense that it is an intentional action, an action done for reasons. It is free (if we need more) in that it could have been otherwise, as Tim's first post argued. I don't think the concept of decision or choice includes the concept of change, at least in the case of the divine mind.
Heath,
I like your point. If one has a view of omniscience where God can't gain knowledge, then I think your argument works great and shows just what it is supposed to. However, some people take a view of omniscience where God knows everything there is to know. However, everything there is to know changes as time goes on (maybe because future contingents have no truth value, maybe for other reasons). So, God is always omniscient, and God's knowledge can increase.
I don't like that notion of omniscience myself, but I could see someone employing it to get out of the argument you give here.
Did you ever teach at Valparaiso University?
Tim
Tim,
Yes, I taught at Valpo, and you graded logic papers for me. How many Heath White's do you think are running around in philosophical circles? :-)
You seem to be doing well--congrats.
Alan,
You say,
"(a) God's contemplating the creative possibilities and (b) God's deciding for one of those possibilities. These states cannot be merely conceptually distinct."
And then you go on to say that since these states are incompatible (cashed out it terms of intentional stance) there must be some time interval between them.
I just am not see it. (a) is clearly an act of intellect, and (b) an act of will. In general, I see no reason why two separate powers can't perform their actions simultaneously. You say that with (a) there is an indeterminate intentional stance but I just don't know what that means with regard to contemplation--unless you're just smuggling in that (a) is expressing that there is a time prior to (b) when there was no intentional stance. Of course that would be begging the question.
So why not think there just is one act which involves the simultaneous cooperation of intellect and will?
I've been enjoying this post, and the website in general. As an alternative approach to this question you may consider the work of some Christian philosophers working within the Dutch reformational (or Dooyeweerdian) tradition, such as (1) Roy Clouser's "Is God Eternal?" (http://www.freewebs.com/royclouser/longerarticles.htm) or (2) Chris Gousmett's "God the Creator of Time" (http://www.freewebs.com/gousmett/articles.htm). It would be interesting to hear what people in the analytic and Thomistic traditions think about their take on the subject.
Cheers,
Shawn
While I don't think God is timeless, I also don't accept this argument. I don't see a problem in the idea of God timelessly willing from all eternity to create at a time t. Where the problem lies for me is a timeless God knowing that "it is now t." Temporal indexicals cannot apply to atemporal entities.