Recently I’ve been doing some research into the topics of metaphysics and classical theism. Classical theism is the traditional view of God that has been held by most philosophical theists from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists until the modern era, shared by Jews (e.g., Maimonides), Christians (e.g., Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas) and Muslims (e.g., Ibn Sina [Avicenna]). According to this view, God is the ultimate source and explanation of all things, who exists perfectly a se (self-sufficient), simple (without parts), immutable (without change), and timeless. Of these claims, one of the most difficult to explain is divine timelessness. In this post, I’ll present a few arguments to motivate belief in divine timelessness and show that it can be logically coherent.
Defining Divine Timelessness
First, we should define divine timelessness so that we know what this claim entails. All theists agree that God is “eternal,” but disagree on what this exactly means. On the view of divine sempiternalism (DS), or divine temporality, God undergoes temporal succession and exists at all times; he existed infinitely into the past and will exist infinitely into the future. On the view of divine timelessness (DT), God exists at no time, but is outside the time stream of creation; he does not undergo temporal succession in his life or experiences. On the view of divine relative timelessness (DRT), God exists outside the time stream of creation and at no time relative to creation, but does undergo temporal succession in his own separate time stream. On William Lane Craig’s view (WLC), God exists timelessly sans creation, but when he creates the universe he joins its time stream and becomes temporal. Any argument for DT should show it to be superior to the other three possible views.
Arguments for Divine Timelessness
The first and most obvious argument for DT is the fact that temporal succession appears to be a feature internal to creation, and so God must not essentially have this feature. But if God doesn’t essentially have temporal succession, then he can never undergo temporal succession, because that would mean he goes from not having an accidental feature (temporal succession) to having that feature, which itself implies temporal succession. We can formalize the argument as follows:
1. God undergoes temporal succession. (premise for reductio ad absurdum)
2. If God undergoes temporal succession, then temporal succession is either an essential or accidental attribute of God. (Law of Excluded Middle)
3. Temporal succession is not an essential attribute of God. (premise)
4. Therefore, temporal succession is an accident of God. (from 1-3)
5. If temporal succession is an accident of God, then something explains why God undergoes temporal succession. (Principle of Sufficient Reason)
6. Only God can explain why God does or does not have an accident. (premise)
7. Therefore, God explains why God undergoes temporal succession. (from 4-6)
8. If God explains why God undergoes temporal succession, then God goes from not undergoing temporal succession at logical moment m1 to undergoing temporal succession at m2. (premise)
9. If something goes from not having an accident at m1 to having an accident at m2, then it undergoes temporal succession from m1 to m2. (premise)
10. Therefore, God does and does not undergo temporal succession at m1. (from 7-9)
This reductio ad absurdum is logically valid, and so if the premises are true, it shows that God undergoing temporal succession entails a contradiction. Premises 8 and 9 appear self-explanatory to me (I spoke of logical, rather than temporal, moments to avoid baking a temporal conclusion into the premises); premise 6 follows from God’s self-sufficiency, which no theist denies; most philosophical theists will also not want to deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason (premise 5), without which God’s temporality would simply be a brute fact that can’t be explained by God’s nature or anything else!
Therefore, I anticipate that an objector would want to attack premise 3, that God is not essentially temporal. It could be argued that while physical time is internal to creation, metaphysical time (the mere fact of temporal succession and duration) is essential to God’s nature. This objection seems reasonable. Still, the above argument seems decisive against the WLC view, that God is timeless apart from creation and temporal with creation, as that would entail that God is both temporal and atemporal at m1.
Other arguments, however, work against the DS and DRT views. If temporal succession is an essential attribute of God, then he existed infinitely into the past, meaning that he traversed an actually infinite number of moments to get to this one. However, it’s impossible to traverse an actually infinite number of moments. Further, (assuming that creation had a beginning in time) if God was temporal prior to creation, then he must have had a reason for creating at the time that he did, lest the time of creation simply be a brute fact. But if God existed at an infinite number of moments prior to creation, then he would have no reason to create at t+n rather than t. Therefore, this leads to another contradiction.
With regard to the first of these arguments, an objector would likely want to attack the premise that it’s impossible to traverse an actually infinite number of moments. However, many philosophical arguments support the impossibility of an actual infinite in time, such as the Grim Reaper paradox. Even if it’s possible for an actual infinite to exist, it’s a mathematical truth that an actual infinite can’t be completed by successive addition, which seems to make it impossible to traverse an actual infinite. As for the second of these arguments, most philosophical theists (once again) won’t want to deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason that there can be no contingent brute facts. Instead, the most likely premise to attack is that creation had a beginning in time. This objection may be logically possible, but how many theists will want to deny that there was a beginning to creation?
These arguments taken together, if they’re sound, lead to the conclusion that DS, DRT, and WLC are false, and that DT is true. Another argument (from perfect being theology) can be given in support of the claim that God doesn’t undergo temporal succession. It seems that a being that knows all things directly would be more perfect than a being that knows only some things directly. However, any being that undergoes temporal succession would only know its past indirectly (mediated through memory). Thus, if God is the most perfect being, he doesn’t undergo temporal succession. We can formalize the argument as follows:
11. A knower that knows all things directly is more perfect than a knower that knows some things only indirectly. (premise)
12. Any knower that undergoes temporal succession knows its past only indirectly. (premise)
13. Therefore, a temporal knower is less perfect than an atemporal knower. (from 11-12)
14. God is the most perfect possible knower. (premise)
15. Therefore, God is an atemporal knower. (from 13-14)
Premise 12 appears self-explanatory to me; and no theist would want to deny premise 14, because that would mean there could be a more perfect being than God. Therefore, an objector would likely want to attack premise 11, perhaps by asserting that God’s memory is perfect and just as good as direct knowing (as William Lane Craig argues). However, no matter how perfect the temporal God’s knowledge of the past is, it’s still mediated by his memory, and therefore less perfect than direct knowing. (Admittedly, this response involves the premise that memory is inherently less perfect than direct knowing, which may not be intuitive to everyone.)
The last argument is, I believe, the strongest argument for divine timelessness, but it presupposes a metaphysical framework that not every theist will agree with. This is a modern version of the “unmoved mover” argument that classical theists like Aristotle and Aquinas used to prove God’s existence. Within Aristotelian metaphysics, all change is a movement from potentiality to actuality, and must be caused by something that is already actual. But this means that only simultaneous causation is possible in time: something that was actual in the past (but is merely potential now) can’t actualize anything else now. But if this is true, then what can explain the flow of time? Even an infinite chain of causes at the present moment can’t move time, because nothing that is actual now can actualize a potential at a moment in the future. We’re left with a collection of moments that are totally causally disconnected from each other, with nothing to explain why one leads to another. There must be something entirely outside the flow of time that causes the flow of time: an unmoved mover.
This argument was modernized by Rob Koons (2023) and can be formulated as follows:
16. Change is the movement from potentiality to actuality. (premise)
17. A potential can only be actualized at a time by something that is actual at the same time and in the same way or by something that is actual and atemporal. (premise)
18. Therefore, nothing that is actual at t0 can actualize a potential at t1. (from 16-17)
19. Therefore, nothing at t0 can explain the actuality of anything at t1. (from 18)
20. There are actual things at both t0 and t1. (premise)
21. If there are contingent actual things at t1, something explains the actuality of the things at t1. (Principle of Sufficient Reason)
22. Therefore, something explains the actuality of the things at t1. (from 20-21)
23. Therefore, the actuality of the things at t1 is explained by something that is actual and atemporal. (from 17-22)
No one will want to deny premise 20, that things exist at different times; and most philosophical theists won’t want to deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The most easily attacked premises will be 16 and 17, which are basic tenets of the Aristotelian metaphysical framework. I can’t fully defend this framework here, but suffice it to say that the metaphysics of actuality and potentiality are necessary for the existence of change, so an objector will only be able to deny them at the expense of denying that change happens. (For an elaboration, see Edward Feser’s book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.)
This set of arguments provides us with good (but defeasible) reasons to accept DT, the claim that God doesn’t undergo any temporal succession. It appears that saying God undergoes temporal succession leads to contradiction (if it’s not essential to him), or to several paradoxes about actual infinities (if it’s essential to him). Furthermore, because God is the most perfect possible being, he must know the past directly, which means he can’t be temporal. Finally, in order to explain the flow of time, there must be something entirely atemporal that creates the flow of time. It’s also worth noting that other classical attributes of God (pure actuality, simplicity, immutability) entail timelessness, though this won’t be convincing to non-classical theists. But is DT even coherent? What does it mean for God to be timeless?
The Coherence of Divine Timelessness
How we conceive of divine timelessness depends on how we conceive of time itself. For the most part, the debate over the nature of time is divided between presentism (the view that the present moment has some kind of ontological priority) and eternalism (the view that past, present, and future moments all equally exist). The arguments above don’t depend on one of these views being true (actually, the last argument uses eternalist language – that things exist “at both t0 and t1” – but this could be reformulated in a presentist way).
I’m a presentist, because if all moments of time exist equally (on an ontological par) then it’s very difficult to explain the passage of time and the existence of change. However, eternalism has grown in popularity over the 20th century, largely due to the theory of special relativity, which shows that there are no physical facts about the world that can determine an absolute temporal frame of reference. Presentism requires that there is a real present moment, and so events can be absolutely simultaneous, which seems to conflict with special relativity. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth debate about this, but the basic presentist response is that even if there’s no such thing as absolute physical simultaneity, there is absolute metaphysical simultaneity which can be known (not by physical facts but) by analysis of change and the passage of time (Kidd 2021). I will grant that eternalism may be correct, but my conception of DT will likely be different from an eternalist’s.
At first glance, presentism may seem incompatible with DT. If the present moment is all that exists, how can God know everything – or even exist – without undergoing temporal succession? The solution is to reformulate presentism so that it doesn’t say that the present moment is all that exists, but merely that a present moment is all that exists. There could then be two time streams that both exist without being temporally related, so that each moment in one time stream exists alongside every moment in the other, even though within each time stream, its present is all that exists. If the first time stream is only a single moment long, so that nothing in it undergoes temporal succession but it exists alongside every moment in the second time stream, then we have a model for presentist divine timelessness. The early Christian scholastic Boethius referred to this as God’s “eternal present” (cf. Aquinas, ST 1.14.13).
A representation of the relationship between two non-temporally-related time streams, one without temporal succession and one with it. “existsU1” and “existsU2” refer to existence within the first and second time streams, respectively, and “EXISTS” refers to existence alongside a time stream.
This model doesn’t show what God’s timeless life is like, but it does show that divine timelessness is conceivable and possible. We can use the model to answer several objections against DT. First, there’s the worry that if God is timeless, he can’t know what’s happening now – e.g., that it’s now 9:34 PM – since his knowledge doesn’t change with the passage of time; and if God doesn’t know what’s happening now, then he’s not omniscient. But this misunderstands DT. From God’s perspective, all moments in this time stream exist equally alongside him, and for him it’s false that it’s now 9:34 PM. It doesn’t challenge God’s omniscience if he fails to know a falsehood. However, he does know tenseless facts (such as the fact that I write this paragraph at 9:34 PM) without damaging his timelessness.
Another objection to DT is that the effects of God’s action change over time – he goes from parting the Red Sea to not parting the Red Sea, and from not creating me to creating me – therefore God himself must undergo temporal succession. But once again, this misunderstands DT; because God isn’t temporally related to this time stream, his action can have different effects at different times without God himself undergoing change. A related concern is that if the effect of God’s timeless action is simultaneous with t0 and also simultaneous with t1 (as we have to say if God sustains the universe at all times), then t0 must be simultaneous with t1 (by the transitivity of simultaneity), which means that all times collapse into the same moment (clearly false). But God’s action isn’t temporally related to this time stream, so the action itself isn’t simultaneous with (or before, or after) any moment in our time, even though the effects of his single action are.
Brian Leftow (2018) points out that these objections to DT presuppose a principle that he calls Time’s Way: the assumption that the way things are in time must be the way they are for God. Things happen now for us, so they must also happen now for God. The effects of God’s action change over time, so God’s action itself must change over time. But Time’s Way is precisely what DT rejects, so the conclusion against DT is baked into these objections from the start.
There is one substantive objection to DT that doesn’t rely on Time’s Way, and that’s the argument that God can’t be personal if he’s timeless. The things we associate with personality seem to require temporal succession: people have changing states of consciousness; people form intentions and then act on them; people form relationships with other people over time. Even though Time’s Way isn’t part of this objection, a similar assumption looms in this argument, namely that God must be personal in the same way that we’re personal. Classical theists deny that “personal” is a univocal term that implies the same thing in all cases; it applies to God analogically, and in a more perfect way than in us. God knows and wills all things in a single, perfect act, so his personality doesn’t need temporal succession.
Conclusion
In this post, I’ve given several reasons to believe that God is timeless, provided a model that shows this to be conceivable and possible, and answered a few objections to this view. But what does this mean for us in practical terms? First, pursuing knowledge about God is part of loving him with all our mind (Mark 12:28-30). Therefore, to think philosophically about God isn’t pointless or mere idle speculation as some people suggest. Second, this doctrine helps us to understand God’s transcendence and immanence (e.g., Acts 17:24-27; Eph. 4:6), since he exists outside of time but produces effects within time. Finally, knowing that God is timeless gives us a solid philosophical foundation for accepting that his plan and character toward us will not change (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Ps. 33:11; 102:25-27; Mal. 3:6; Heb. 6:16-18; Jas. 1:17), and for prioritizing those passages over the ones that seem to describe God changing his mind (e.g., Gen. 6:6; Exod. 32:14; 2 Sam. 24:16; Jer. 18:8; Jon. 3:10).
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