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God and Whatever Comes to Pass

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Paul Helm
Paul Helm
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Liverpool
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Extract

In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases (e.g. Aquinas) these two views have been held side by side, in others separately.

The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. (Convenient documentation can be found in God and Timelessness by Nelson Pike.)1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know (timelessly) that e is earlier than f. But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over, or going to happen, or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because (for example) what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f.2

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Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 1978, pp. 315 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 315 note 1 London, 1970.Google Scholar

page 315 note 2 See Prior, A. N., Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford, 1968), p. 29.Google Scholar

page 315 note 3 Cf. Kneale, Martha, ‘Eternity and Sempieternity’, P.A.S. (1968–1969), p. 227.Google Scholar

page 316 note 1 Papers on Time and Tense, p. 38Google Scholar

page 316 note 2 American Philosophical Quarterly (1966).Google Scholar

page 316 note 3 New Blackfriars, vol. 54, no. 636 (May 1973).Google Scholar

page 316 note 4 Op. cit. p. 215. Geach labels this view ‘Thomist’. It is given explicit expression by non-Thomists too, as in Reformed theology. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) states that God freely and unchangeably ordains whatsoever comes to pass (ch. 3, S. 1x).Google Scholar

page 317 note 1 ‘Some Problems about Time’, Logic Matters (Oxford, 1972), pp. 302–18.Google Scholar

page 318 note 1 ‘Causality and Creation’ in God and the Soul (London, 1969), p. 83.Google Scholar

page 319 note 1 ‘The Future’, p. 211.Google Scholar

page 319 note 2 Op. cit. p. 211.Google Scholar

page 319 note 3 Ibid

page 320 note 1 Op. Cit. p. 212.Google Scholar

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page 321 note 8 ‘Temporal Flux’, pp. 280–1.Google Scholar

page 321 note 9 Papers on Time and Tense, p. 30.Google Scholar

page 322 note 1 ‘The Future’, p. 215.Google Scholar

page 322 note 2 Ibid.

page 322 note 3 ‘An Irrelevance of Omnipotence’, Philosophy (Oct. 1973), p. 332.Google Scholar

page 323 note 1 Ibid. p. 329.

page 323 note 2 ‘The Future’, p. 217.Google Scholar

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