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God and Real Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William Lane Graig
William Lane Graig
Affiliation:
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A.
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Extract

While certain of the traditional attributes of God such as omnipotence or omniscience (particularly divine foreknowledge) have been thoroughly – and, one is tempted to say, nearly exhaustively – analyzed and defended in recent philosophical literature, others of the divine attributes such as God's eternity have received scant and generally superficial analysis. Current discussions of God's eternity have been for the most part carried out in almost complete ignorance of the philosophy of space and time and without any profound knowledge of Relativity Theory and its analysis of time – a remarkable shortcoming, when one thinks about it, for how can one pretend to formulate an adequate doctrine of God's eternity and His relationship to time without taking cognizance of what modern philosophy and science have to say about time?

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 335 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Notice that literature on divine eternity is so scant that it does not even merit a mention in Wainwright's, William J.Philosophy of Religion: an Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth Century Writings in English (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978).Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Pike, Nelson, God and Timelessness (New York: Schocken Books, 1970);Google ScholarDavis, Stephen T., Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983);CrossRefGoogle ScholarStump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Eternity’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXVIII (1981), 429–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Padgett, Alan, ‘God and Time: Toward a New Doctrine of Divine Timeless Eternity’, Religious Studies (forthcoming);Google Scholar see further idem, ‘Divine Eternity and the Nature of Time’ (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University, 1988).Google Scholar

4 The distinction between the A- and B-series of temporal events was originally made by McTaggart, J. M. E., The Nature of Existence, 2 vols., ed. Broad, C. D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927; rep. ed.: 1968), Book V, chap. 33;Google Scholar for discussion, see Broad, C. D., Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938;Google Scholar rep. ed.: New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 2: 265–344.Google Scholar See also Gale, Richard, ‘Introduction’ to Section II: ‘The Static versus the Dynamic Temporal’, in The Philosophy of Time, ed. Gale, R. (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 65–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 On the connection between classical conceptions of divine eternity and a B-theory of time, see Craig, Wm. L., The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 7 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 116–2,;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, ‘St. Anselm on Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency’, Laval théologique et philosophique, XLII (1986), 93–104.Google Scholar See also Lewis, Delmas, ‘Eternity, Time and Tenselessness’, Faith and Philosophy, V (1988), 72–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For a brief critique, see Craig, Wm. L., ‘God, Time, and Eternity’, Religious Studies XIV (1979), 497–503.Google Scholar

7 Mellor, D. H., Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 5.Google Scholar

8 See refutation in Horwich, Paul, Asymmetries in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 26–7.Google Scholar Horwich's own rejection of the A-theory is based on the mistaken view that an A-theory implies the denial of semantic bivalence for future contingent propositions.

9 Such an objection needs to be formulated more carefully, but is adumbrated in Capek, Milic, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 165;Google Scholaridem, ‘Introduction’, in The Concepts of Space and Time, ed. Capek, M., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976), p. xlvii;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFerré, Frederick, ‘Grünbaum on Temporal Becoming: A Critique’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XII (1972), 432–3;Google ScholarMcGilvray, James A., ‘A Defense of Physical Becoming’, Erkenntnis, XIV (1979), 275–99.Google Scholar

10 See Hoy, Ronald C., ‘Becoming and Persons’, Philosophical Studies, XXXIV (1978), 269–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See Smith, Quentin, ‘Problems with the New Tenseless Theory of Time’, Philosophical Studies, LII (1987), 371–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the therein cited literature.

12 See, for example, Polkinghorne, John, ‘Cosmology and Creation’, paper presented at the conference ‘The Origin of the Universe’,Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, Colorado,22–25 September, 1988. The proceedings will probably be published by SUNY Press.Google Scholar

13 This much misunderstood distinction was carefully drawn by Newton himself in the Scholium to the Definitions at the beginning of his Principia (Newton, Isaac, Sir Isaac Newton's ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’ and his ‘System of the World’, trans. Motte, Andrew, rev. with an Appendix by Florian Cajori, 2 vols. [Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966], pp. 6–12).Google Scholar Cf. Cleugh, M. F., Time and its Importance in Modern Thought (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 29–67;Google ScholarFrank, Philipp, Philosophy of Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), pp. 140–43;Google ScholarDingle, Herbert, ‘Time in Philosophy and Physics’, Philosophy, LIV (1979), 99–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Typical are the recent assertions by Hawking, : ‘…the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time … The theory of relativity does… force us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time’ (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time [New York: Bantam Books, 1988], pp. 21, 23).Google Scholar

15 Einstein, A., ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, in The Principle of Relativity, trans. Perrett, W. and Jeffery, G. B. with Notes by A. Sommerfield (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), Pp. 37–65.Google Scholar

16 Two spatially separated events are simultaneous if they both occur at the same clock times recorded by two synchronized clocks A and B situated respectively at the places of the events, where A and B are stationary relative to each other and B reads the same as A at the temporal mid-point of the time required for A to send a light signal to B and receive it back again. The assumption is that A and B are not both moving with reference to the æther-frame, so that the travel-time of the signal is not greater (or less) on the return leg of its journey. Now clearly, unless one is an operationalist, this is not what simultaneity means, and unless one is a positivist, the underlying assumption of the definition is wholly gratuitous.

17 The influence of Mach's positivism upon Einstein and his Special Theory of Relativity is widely recognized by historians of science, but is surprisingly rarely discussed by philosophers exploring the philosophical foundations of that theory. For discussion, see Holton, G., ‘Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality’, in Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 6 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1970), pp. 167–77;Google ScholarFrank, P., ‘Einstein, Mach, and Logical Positivism’, in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Schilpp, P. A., Library of Living Philosophers 7 (LaSalle, III.: Open Court, 1949), pp. 271–86;Google ScholarReichenbach, H., ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity’, in Albert Einstein, pp. 289–311.Google Scholar

18 For alternative operational definitions of ‘simultaneity’ and ‘synchronization’ which preserve absolute simultaneity see Sjödin, T., ‘On the One-Way Velocity of Light and its Possible Measurability’, paper presented at the conference Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory,British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Imperial College,London,16–19 September, 1988.Google Scholar

19 This is, in fact, the modern Lorentzian interpretation of STR, which holds that velocity affects one's measuring devices so that moving rods contract and moving clocks run slow. Such an interpretation does not commit one to a substantival æther, but merely to an æther frame, i.e., a privileged frame of reference. That the Lorentzian interprets length contraction and time dilation as not merely apparent, but real, cannot be cited as a disadvantage of the theory, since the Einsteinian also must posit real contraction and dilation (see Peter Kroes's paper ‘The Physical Status of Time Dilation within the Special Theory of Relativity’ at the conference mentioned in note 18; see also Dieks, Dennis, ‘The “Reality” of the Lorentz Contraction’, Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, XV/2 (1984), 330–42).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The difference between the two on this score is that the Lorentzian offers some explanation for these effects, while the Einsteinian does not. The decision between a Lorentzian and an Einsteinian interpretation of STR will probably depend on whether God's time can be plausibly construed to coincide with some coordinate time, which would thereby be the privileged time of the æther-frame.

20 Frank, , Philosophy of Science, p. 140.Google Scholar

21 Bell, J. S., ‘How to Teach Special Relativity’, in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, ed. Bell, J. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 77.Google Scholar

22 Sklar, Lawrence, ‘Time, reality and relativity’, in Reduction, Time and Reality, ed. Healey, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 141.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. p. 132.

24 Healey, R., ‘Introduction’, in Reduction, Time and Reality, p. vii.Google Scholar

25 Shallis, Michael, ‘Time and Cosmology’, in The Nature of Time, ed. Flood, Raymond and Lockwood, Michael (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 68–9.Google Scholar

26 Eddington, Arthur, Space, Time and Gravitation, Cambridge Science Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 168.Google Scholar ‘In the first place, absolute space and time are restored for a phenomena on a cosmical scale …The world taken as a whole has one direction in which it is not curved; that direction gives a kind of absolute time distinct from space. Relativity is reduced to a local phenomenon; and although this quite sufficient for the theory hitherto described, we are inclined to look on the limitation rather grudgingly. But we have already urged that the relativity theory is not concerned to deny the possibility of an absolute time, but to deny that it is concerned in any experimental knowledge yet found; and it need not perturb us if the conception of absolute time turns up in a new form in a theory of phenomena on a cosmical scale, as to which no experimental knowledge is yet available.’

27 Smoot, G. F., Gorenstein, M. V., and Muller, R. A., ‘Detection of Anisotropy in the Cosmic Black-body Radiation’, Physical Review Letters, XXXIX (1977), 899.Google Scholar

28 Davies, P. C. W., ‘Space-Time Singularities in Cosmology and Black Hole Evaporations’, in The Study of Time III, ed. Fraser, J. T., Lawrence, N., and Park, D. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1978), p. 76.Google Scholar I have corrected spelling errors in the quotation.

29 See Misner, Charles W., Thorne, Kip S., Wheeler, John A., Gravitation (San Francisco: W. H. Free-man, 1973), pp. 813–14.Google Scholar The author's attempt to criticize global proper time as inadequately physical fails to appreciate the counterfactual nature of the metric's application; the time elapsed is measured as if an atomic clock were present and functioning.

30 See helpful discussion in Kroes, Peter, Time: Its Structure and Its Role in Physical Theories, Synthese Library 179 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 49.Google Scholar

31 By postulating a cosmic rotation of matter, Gödel was able to draft model universes satisfying Einstein's field equations in which no cosmic time exists (Gödel, Kurt, ‘A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy’, in Albert Einstein, pp. 557–62).Google Scholar In such worlds, Padgett's view would be correct. But in fact, there is a cosmic time, and it would naturally seem to coincide with real time.

32 See my ‘God, Time, and Eternity’, pp. 497–503Google Scholar, where I argue that God existing without creation is timeless and that He enters time at its inception with His creation of the universe. Since creation is a freely willed act of God, the existence of real time is therefore contingent.

33 See for example, Eddington's remark, ‘Just as each limited observer has his own particular separation of space and time, so a being co-extensive with the world might well have a special separation of space and time natural to him. It is the time for this being that is here dignified by the title “absolute”’ (Eddington, , Space, Time and Gravitation, p. 168).Google Scholar

39 See Kroes, , Time, pp. 60–96.Google Scholar