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Can History Measure Eternity? A Reply to William Craig

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Alan G. Padgett
Alan G. Padgett
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Bethel College, St Paul, MN 55 112
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Extract

I am grateful to Dr William L. Craig for his reply to an earlier article of mine in this journal, on the relationship between God and time. Craig and I agree on most points with respect to the relationship between God and time. What then is there for us to disagree about?

The point Craig argues for is, eternity is ‘coincident’ with our history, i.e. the duration of our space–time is simultaneous with some duration of eternity. But I already agree to this point. In fact, I argued that if God sustains the universe, and if the universe and God are temporal, then God's time must be related to our time. We are in God's time, and God's time is our time, when by time we mean ‘ontological time’ or what I call duration, rather than Measured Time. If this is so, where is our disagreement?

Our disagreement turns on this question: does history measure eternity? Does the ‘cosmic time’ of our universe give a proper measure to the same duration of God's time in eternity? I say it does not, while Craig says that it does.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 333 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Craig, W. L., ‘God and Real Time’, Religious Studies, XXVI (1991), 335–47.Google Scholar This is a response to my ‘God and Time’, op. cit. XXV (1989), 209–15.Google Scholar

2 Craig wrongly suggests that I differ from him at this point, attributing to me the view that God's ‘now’ is not simultaneous with the ‘now’ of our Measured Time. How could they not be, since I have said that we are in God's time, and our time and God's time are related (i.e. by the relations of before, after, and simultaneous)? See my ‘God and Time’, 210–11.Google Scholar

3 Craig objects, in correspondence, that this analogy does not hold because the world of the novel is not a real world. However, God as the ‘author’ of the universe does create a ‘real’ story, so the analogy remains relevant.

4 I address these issues more fully in a forthcoming volume, God, Eternity and the Nature of time (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar