2.1 Ancient Greeks on eternity

Key elements of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic doctrines lie in the background of the traditional Christian atemporalist view. Plato famously stated that the creator and father of the of the universe sought to make the world eternal so far as possible. As it is impossible to bestow eternity in its fulness on a creature, he made it ‘a moving image of eternity […] moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity’ (Timaeus 37d4–6; Plato 1963: 1167). The unity of divine being, which is eternity, stands apart from the realm of motion and becoming as its perfect source and exemplar. Past and future cannot properly be predicated of an eternal being:

[F]or we say that it ‘was’, or ‘is’, or ‘will be’, but the truth is that ‘is’ alone is properly attributed to it, and that the ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same forever cannot become older or younger by time. (Timaeus 38a1–4; Plato 1963: 1167)

It should be noted that Plato’s view does not necessarily result in a notion of eternity that is extradurational. Self-identical sameness is the key to distinguishing eternity from time (Wilberding 2016: 23–31). Plato says time is that which ‘revolves according to a law of number’ (Timaeus 38a1–4; 1963: 1167). For him, ‘[t]ime consists […] of cycles, or cosmic units, and it is unending. In this way too it is like eternity; since it cannot be eternal it exists in everlasting succession’ (Callahan 1948: 191–192).

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) relates time to movement and concludes that the first mover must be unmoved since he is the good which moves all other things as their final cause. Being the ultimate and most perfect good, God has a perfect knowledge and enjoyment of himself. This means that life belongs to him since the actuality of thought is life: ‘God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal […] for this is God’ (Metaphysics XII, 172b26–31; Aristotle 1984: 1695, original emphasis). Per Aristotle, everything in motion is moved towards the good and undergoes change as it seeks to attain the good – the good is that which all seek. It is necessary that the final cause and first mover of this process of change, the good itself, not be a part of the process. Otherwise, he would be susceptible to the causal influence of some still more ultimate good. This would disqualify him as the unmoved mover and first cause of motion.

As for time, Aristotle maintains that it is the measure of motion by numbering the distinction of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Time is continuous because the motion it measures, a body passing through a spatial magnitude, is continuous, but this does not mean ‘that time is to be confounded with motion or magnitude. For time is characterized primarily by the fact that it numbers motion according to prior and posterior’ (Callahan 1948: 194; see also Jocelyn 1961; Elders 1997: 92).

It is the Platonists of late antiquity who first appear to articulate a notion of eternity as durationlessness (Wilberding 2016: 32). Plotinus says the life of ‘the god’ – the Intellect or Real Being – that produces the world is himself eternity. If one can think of a temporal being’s life all at once, compressing together, as it were, the fragmentary bits of otherness and activity, one will begin to approach the notion of eternity. The life of eternity would not be a ‘life that goes from one thing to another but is always the selfsame without extension or interval’. From this it follows, Plotinus says, that:

one sees eternity in seeing a life that abides in the same, and always has the all present to it, not now this, and then again that, but all things at once, and not now some things, and then again others, but a partless completion, as if they were all together in a point [… Eternity] is something which abides in the same in itself and does not change at all but is always in the present, because nothing of it has passed away, nor again is there anything to come into being, but that which it is, it is. (Enneads III.7.3; Plotinus 1967: 303, 305)

This is a unity of absolute simplicity. Nothing comes to or flows away from such a being. In this perfect unity of life, it is uniquely able to impose unity on lower beings, even if they possess such unity in a less perfect manner, as a life scattered over a duration of time.

Plotinus’ understanding of time focuses on the concept of life. He seeks a metaphysically existing time, something more substantial that Aristotle’s notion of time as a numbering relation. For Plotinus, the eternal Soul produces the world of succession though there is no succession within the Soul itself. Callahan explains:

Time is the life of soul, not in itself, but only considered insofar as it is the principle of life and motion for the universe. Time hovers, as it were, between soul and the universe, and has in it prior and posterior only in the sense that the life communicated by soul to the sensible world is received continuously by this lower world and translated into motion, the best manifestation of this continuous communication of life being the uniform motion of the heaven. (Callahan 1948: 120)

This fits nicely within Plotinus’ emanation scheme of causality, in which everything in the hierarchy of being stands in causal dependency to that which is above it. Nevertheless, Plotinus does not explain what bridges the life of the Soul to the world of nature. Unlike the Christians who followed him, he has no doctrine of creation to account for the causal connection between eternity and time.

2.2 Augustine and God’s priority over time

Augustine of Hippo appropriates insights from the Greek philosophers and weds them to his Christian doctrine of creation. While he rejects the philosophers’ notion that time and the world of movement are bidirectional everlasting realities, he endorses their fundamental claims regarding God’s simplicity, perfection, and immutability (see Von Jess 1975; Rogers 1996). As Creator of the world, God is prior to it. Yet this cannot be a temporal priority since all temporality exists within the world itself, comprised as it is of mutable creatures whose motion time measures (West 2001; Ravicz 1959: 542–543; Callahan 1948: 150). Consequently, it is not legitimate to ask what God was doing when the world was not:

If […] there was no time before heaven and earth came to be, how can anyone ask what you were doing then? There was no such thing as ‘then’ when there was no time. (Confessions XI, 13; Augustine of Hippo 1997: 294–295)

Perhaps one of the more surprising implications of this is that God must be eternally creating: ‘There was therefore never any time when you had not made anything, because you made time itself’ (Confessions XI, 14: Augustine of Hippo 1997: 295; see also Quinn 1999: 319; Wilberding 2016: 46). God did not move from idleness to suddenly conceiving the idea of creation as though his will were causally changed (City of God XI, 4; Augustine of Hippo 1950: 347–349). Willing to create, which just is God’s act of creating, is not a novel activity that emerges from a preceding period of rest. Rather, as atemporal, God is both at rest and wholly active, the beatitude of rest following from his eternal inner activity. ‘In His leisure’, Augustine states, ‘is no laziness, indolence, or inactivity; as in His work is no labour, effort, industry. He can act while He reposes, and repose while He acts’ (City of God XII, 17; Augustine of Hippo 1950: 400). Given this active life of rest, Augustine says to God:

Your years do not come and go. […] Your years are a single day, and this day of yours is not a daily occurrence, but a simple ‘Today’, because your Today does not give way to tomorrow, nor follow yesterday. Your Today is eternity. (Confessions XI, 13; Augustine of Hippo 1997: 295)

God’s life is a dynamic ‘standing now’. His immutable ‘today’ means that the world would not be coeternal with him even if it had no beginning and were bidirectionally everlasting, since it would still be marked by change and the passage of successive moments while God’s eternity transcends such vicissitudes (Callahan 1948: 182).

2.3 Medieval theologians and the unbounded God

The traditional Christian formulation of divine eternity is provided by the sixth-century philosopher and theologian Boethius (c. 480–524), in his Consolation of Philosophy V, 6: ‘Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous and perfect [tota simul et perfecta] possession of boundless life [interminabilis vitae]’ (Boethius 1973: 423). Unlike a being whose life is bounded by the hedges of its nonexistent future and past, the eternal being neither awaits a future it lacks nor loses any aspect of its life into a past that is no more. Temporal subjects, in contrast, never possess the whole of their lives at any time, living only in a transitory moment. Even if a thing’s life were ‘drawn out with the infinity of time, yet it is not such that it may rightly be believed to be eternal (aeternum)’ (Boethius 1973: 423). For Boethius, God’s life is wholly possessed in the simplicity of his present. In this same simple present, he holds ‘as present the infinity of moving time’ and considers all ‘infinite spaces of the future and the past […] as though they were now going on’ (Boethius 1973: 425, 427). Scholars disagree on whether Boethius endorses the concept of divine eternity as atemporal duration (Stump and Kretzmann 1981; Leftow 1991a: 112–146) or as wholly non-durational (Helm 2009; Rogers 1994; Sorabji 1983: 119–120; Khamara 1974).

Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109) recapitulates many of the perspectives of Augustine and Boethius. His argument is grounded, as theirs, in his commitment to divine simplicity, sometimes expressed by the aphorism, ‘all that is in God is God’. All things composed of parts depend on what is not themselves (as parts are not wholes) to be in some fashion. A composite entity’s life is possessed bit by bit, so to speak. It has its life built up from moments, none of which is its life or being in its entirety. God, says Anselm, is all that he is through himself and not through another – such as passing moments, distinct properties, or principles – so that he should depend on what is not God to be God. He confesses to God, ‘you are the very life by which you live, the wisdom by which you are wise, and the very goodness by which you are good’ (Proslogion 12; Anselm 2007: 88). In God is no distinction between quid est and quo est, that which is and that by which it is (Burrell 1984: 390). This gets at the inner structure – or more accurately, non-structure – of God’s unboundedness. God is not that which is causally determined by a principle of being distinct from himself; neither does he receive or contract in himself his life, wisdom, goodness, and so forth. God is intrinsically unbounded because of his simple fulness of being.

As touching the question of his eternality, God’s simplicity means that his eternity, like himself, cannot be composed of, or bounded by, parts: ‘it follows that no part of you or of your eternity exists at a certain place or time. Instead, you exist as a whole everywhere, and your eternity exists as a whole always’ (Proslogion 18; Anselm 2007: 92). This ‘always’ cannot be the perdurance of God passing from yesterday through today and on to tomorrow. Rather, Anselm declares,

you are in an unqualified sense, outside time altogether. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are merely in time. But you, although nothing exists without you, do not exist in a place or a time; rather, all things exist in you. For nothing contains you, but you contain all things. (Proslogion 19; Anselm 2007: 92)

Some scholars contend that the Anselmian doctrine of God’s relation to time entails spacetime four-dimensionalism or eternalism (Yates 1990: 218; Rogers 2007b; 2009), others that it yields a presentist view of time (Leftow 2009; Visser and Williams 2009: 100–105), and yet still others contend both conclusions are underdetermined by Anselm’s texts (Bobier 2021).

John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308), the late-medieval Franciscan theologian, denies succession in God’s life, based on his primal causality, ultimate finality, supreme perfection, and necessity of being. Divine aseity appears to Scotus incompatible with divine temporalism. He says to God,

You are uncaused in any way and therefore incapable of becoming or perishing [ingenerabilis et incorruptibilis]; […] For there can be no succession save in what is being continually caused or at least in what is dependent for its existence upon another, and this dependence is a far cry from what has necessary being of itself. (De primo principio 4.84; Duns Scotus 1966: 142; see also Cross 1997)

Lest it be thought that medieval Christian belief was entirely homogeneous in denying extension and parts to God’s eternity, it should be noted that John Philoponus (c. 490–570), though proscribing ‘movement of a temporal interval’ to eternal things, nevertheless maintains that ‘eternity should not be a single point, but a kind of plane or extension’ and so divine eternity should be thought of as ‘a kind of self-uniform extension’ (cited in Wilberding 2016: 47). Eternity, in Philoponus’ conception, ‘is a sort of unsegmented time’ (Sorabji 1983: 117). This is offered as an alternative to Augustine in answering the old question of what God was doing before the creation of the world and why God did not create earlier than he did.

2.4 Thomas Aquinas and God as purely actual first cause

The thirteenth-century Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274), articulates the doctrine of divine eternity in light of God as the first cause of all that comes to be (Shanley 1997b). For Aquinas, the outstanding entailment of God’s absolute primal causality is his pure actuality and its negative corollary, divine simplicity (Aquinas, Summa Theologica [ST] I, q. 3; White 2022; Dolezal 2023: 253–255). To be the absolute first cause it must be the case that God is not himself reducible to causes of his own being, as all composites must be. Things that come to be or to change are necessarily composed of principles of act (that which causes a thing to be existentially at all, or to be formally this way or that) and of passive potency (that which receives and contracts the principle of act). These principles are both real in the thing that ‘becomes’ as its formal and material causes, and yet they are irreducible to each other. Act is not passive potency or vice versa; and the entity composed of them is not identical with these real principles, even as wholes are not identical with the parts upon which they depend. The first cause of all cannot be reduced to principles of being more fundamental than itself. Rather, it must be pure act:

the being that made all things actual, and itself proceeds from no other being, must be the first actual being without any admixture of potentiality. For were it in any way in potentiality, there would be need of another previous being to make it actual. (De potentia Dei, q. 7, a. 1; Thomas Aquinas 1932: 3 [vol. 3])

Absolutely considered, act precedes passive potency. Pure act is pure just insomuch as it is not contracted to a corresponding principle of potency. This is why Aquinas will say that God does not have existence, but rather just is existence itself subsisting (ipsum esse subsistens).

An entity that exists in time is necessarily composed of act and passive potency and so could not be the first cause of all that comes to be. Aquinas follows Aristotle in holding that time is the measure or number of movement from ‘before’ to ‘after’. All movement or change is a process in which passive potency is reduced to actuality. He who is simple pure act, as God must be, could not exist within such an order of becoming. There is no movement in him and so no time: ‘in a thing bereft of movement, which is always the same, there is no before or after’ (ST I, q. 10, a. 1; Thomas Aquinas 2012: 80; see also SCG I, ch. 15, no. 3; Thomas Aquinas 1955: 98 [vol. 1]). Divine immutability looms large in Thomas’s account: ‘The idea of eternity follows immutability, as the idea of time follows movement […]. Hence, as God is supremely immutable, it supremely belongs to Him to be eternal’ (ST I, q. 10, a. 2; Thomas Aquinas 2012: 81; see also Leftow 2012: 176–184; Wierenga 1989: 173). Leo Elders observes:

If there is no change, we have to do with a being which is always the same. In this way one can conceive in opposition to the nunc fluens (flowing now) a nunc semper stans which knows no before and after. (Elders 1997: 93; see also Aquinas, In IV Physics, lesson 18, no. 586)

God’s life, on this account, is not lived across a series of evanescent time-points coming to be and flowing away just as quickly as they arrive. Also, the ‘ever standing now’ of Thomism is not, as Swinburne portrays it, an ‘instant of time that lasts for ever’ (1993: 223). Temporal instants are necessarily realized by a thing’s movement from passive potency to act; they exist between the before and after (see Stump and Kretzmann 1981: 434).

As for creation, Aquinas’s doctrine of God as pure act disallows any notion that God moves from a state of not-creating to creating, like the argument put forth by Augustine. God’s act of creating, inasmuch as it is in him as the agent, is nothing other than his eternal (free) will for creation. As his will is just himself, per divine simplicity, Thomas concludes that ‘[c]reation signified actively means the divine action, which is God’s essence, with a relation to the creature’ (ST I, q. 45, a. 3, ad 1; Thomas Aquinas 2012: 463). James Anderson notes that for Thomas the act of creation is not an accident in God that presupposes a preexisting subject. That is how volitional action is in finite and composite agents. In a simple God the act of volition ‘is identical with the substance of the agent’ (Anderson 1952: 28; see also Thibault 1970: 59; Te Velde 2006: 69). Consequently, God’s act of creation produces its effect immediately without the intervention of a motive power between his act of will and his effects, the way the swinging of the bat, for example, must intervene between the batter’s intention to hit the ball and the ball’s being hit.

Critics of Aquinas sometimes charge that his view entails the absolute necessity and eternity of the world. This is sometimes styled ‘modal collapse’ (see Mullins 2016: 137–143, 188–189). An eternal action identical with an eternal being yields an absolutely necessary and eternal effect. Thomas denies this follows:

just as the intellect determines every other condition of the thing made, so does it prescribe the time of its making; for art determines not only that this thing is to be such and such, but that it is to be at this particular time. (SCG II, ch. 35, no. 3; Thomas Aquinas 1955: 102–103 [vol. 2])

As for the necessity of the effects, given that existence and essence are not identical in them, one cannot say they are naturally necessary. And since God does not require them for the complete enjoyment of his own goodness, it must be said that he wills them freely since he has no natural need of them. Their existence is at most suppositionally necessary, given that God freely wills them to be. Many Thomists claim that the operation of eternal free choice in a simple God is incomprehensible to humans (Dodds 2008: 179–180; Dolezal 2011: 201–212).

2.5 Protestant orthodoxy

Protestant theologians through the nineteenth century tack closely to Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, and through them to some of the pertinent insights of the Greek philosophers. Francis Turretin (1623–1687) affirms the Boethian formula and indicates that God’s eternity should be thought of as a nunc stans (standing now) and not as the ‘now’ of time, a nunc fluens (flowing now). ‘Present’ and ‘now’ are not said univocally of God and creatures. The moments which humans possess dividedly through succession, God has all at once. ‘Hence’, says Turretin, ‘philosophers have well said that neither the future nor the past (he will be or was), but only the present (he is) can properly be applied to him’ (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.10.6; Turretin 1992: 203).

Many Protestant theologians echo Aquinas in denying to God the three ingredients of time: (1) a term from which (terminus a quo); (2) a term to which (terminus ad quem); and (3) movement between them (see ST I, q. 10, a. 4). The Lutheran scholastic Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) insists only God is properly eternal ‘because He has neither beginning nor succession nor end’. Like Aquinas and Scotus, Gerhard roots his doctrine of divine atemporality in God’s pure actuality and simplicity:

This pure and perfect act is free from every passive potential, every succession, every composition. His being [esse] is always a standing being [ens], which never progresses to [become] a flowing being. His simple essence excludes every succession of before and after, past and future. (Gerhard 2007: 139)

Reformed theologians agree. John Norton (1606–1663) states: ‘Eternity is God without beginning, without end, and without all manner of succession; there is nothing past, nor to come’ (1657: 7). Stephen Charnock (1628–1680) writes: ‘All other things pass from one state to another; from their original to their eclipse and destruction; but God possesses his being in one indivisible point, having neither beginning, end, nor middle’ (1979: 284 [vol. 1]). As with Aquinas and Gerhard, Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) grounds God’s atemporal eternity in his simplicity and immutability: ‘There can be no chronology within the Being of God since his Being is simple and immutable. […] God’s being is eternity and eternity is God’s being’ (1992: 92). Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) provides a crisp summary of the classical Protestant viewpoint: ‘One who says “time” says motion, change, measurability, computability, limitation, finiteness, creature’ (2004: 163).

2.6 Biblical arguments for atemporality

Atemporalists appeal to various sorts of biblical evidence for support. First, some passages of scripture seem to indicate that God exists and acts beyond the temporally indexed flow of the world. Ps 102:25–27 states that though God produces changes in earth and heaven, he himself is not among the things changed by his operation; rather, he is ever the same and his ‘years have no end’. Job 36:26 says that ‘the number of his years is unsearchable’, indicating he is beyond the enumeration of movement. Ps 90:2 says that he is God ‘from everlasting to everlasting’, ironically signifying the fulness of life that belongs to him ‘before’ he brought forth the world. His identity and life are not derived from the world he has made. 2 Tim 1:9 and Titus 1:2 speak of God’s volitional activity ‘before the ages began’ or ‘above times eternal’ (pro chronōn aiōniōn). Whatever this means, it cannot refer to something God does chronologically prior to chronology itself. God is not older or younger than the world; he simply does not exist in a single, contrastive order of being with it, but transcends it altogether.

Second, passages that teach God’s immutability, perfection, and self-sufficiency are said to support God’s atemporal eternity. In Mal 3:6 God says, ‘I the Lord do not change’, and in James 1:17 he is called ‘the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’. Such a being has no motion to measure and so is beyond time. Job 35:5–8 indicates that even the good and evil things humans do cannot touch him and that he receives nothing from our hand, neither weal nor woe. Like the clouds above, he is not involved in a mutualistic give-and-take with humans. Moreover, his perfection and self-sufficiency are indicated in passages where he is called the first and the last (Isa 48:12), the Alpha and Omega (Rev 1:8). If he were to pass successively through moments he would exist somewhere between a beginning and an end, a being yet progressing onward toward an omega-point. Many atemporalists also appeal to the existential fulness signified in Exod 3:14–15 by his name as ‘I AM’. To undergo change, they argue, a temporal God would require some paucity of being, an ‘I AM NOT’, so to speak, that would place a boundary on his actuality.

Third, appeal is made to biblical passages that reveal God as the first cause of all things and Creator of the world ex nihilo (e.g. John 1:3; Rom 4:17; 11:36; 1 Cor 8:6; 11:12; Col 1:16; Heb 2:10; Rev 4:11). A God who changes over time, even accidentally, would be subject to causes of being somehow more basic than himself and so not the absolute first cause of all the comes to be. Something distinct from God would be required to account for the new actuality that came to be in him.

Atemporalists tend to read all temporal terms and modalities ascribed to God in scripture as metaphorical depictions meant to accommodate the ordinary time-bound perspective of the human authors and readers (Aquinas, ST I, q. 10, a. 1, ad 4; Brakel 1992: 92; Tomkinson 1982; Dolezal 2017: 19–21, 84–87). God reveals the infinite under the form of the finite, but in himself he infinitely exceeds the finite manner of his own condescended revelation. The finite and temporal are in the manner of his revelation to us, not in the manner of his being in se (in itself). Paul Helm remarks that ‘in much if not most of Bible the contexts do not provide the data from which it is possible to construct a metaphysical view about God’s relation to time’ (2010: 6).

3.1 ET-simultaneity

Stump and Kretzmann, in their famous 1981 article ‘Eternity’, maintain that the most natural way to understand Boethian illimitability ‘is that the existence in question is infinite duration, unlimited in either “direction”’ (1981: 432). They take Boethian illimitability ‘to mean that the life of an eternal entity is characterized by beginningless, endless, infinite duration’ (1981: 433). For them, duration is a necessary ingredient in any mode of existence we call life. Yet for an eternal being this duration will not be temporal. God, in contrast to temporal beings, has complete possession of his life all at once. This is not the all-at-once of a temporal present which knows no extension. Such a non-extended all-at-once is more like a point than a line, and a point – since it lacks all extension – is too impoverished a notion to depict the fulness of the divine life (Stump and Kretzmann 1981: 433, 437; see also Nelson 1987: 13). ‘The eternal present is by definition an infinitely extended, pastless, futureless duration’ (1981: 435). This notion is fundamental to their proposed strategy for explaining God’s eternal presence to time and time’s presence to God – a theory they denominate ET-simultaneity.

Stump and Kretzmann propose two distinct species of simultaneity for time and eternity. Temporal simultaneity (T-simultaneity) indicates ‘existence or occurrence at one and the same time’. Eternal simultaneity (E-simultaneity) denotes ‘existence or occurrence at one and the same eternal present’ (1981: 435). What is needed to account for the eternal God’s presence to time and time’s presence to God is a simultaneity relationship between the two relata (related terms), one temporal the other eternal – to wit, ET-simultaneity. It is very difficult to characterize such a third species of simultaneity. Unlike T-simultaneity it cannot be at the same time, since one of the relata is timelessly eternal, or at one and the same eternal present, since the other relatum is temporal. There seems to be a blank in the definition of ET-simultaneity: existence or occurrence ‘at one and the same ____’ (Stump and Kretzmann 1981: 436). To achieve simultaneity between time and eternity would require one to specify ‘a single mode of existence in which the two relata occur or exist together’. Yet, Stump and Kretzmann reply, ‘on the view we are explaining and defending, it is theoretically impossible to specify a single mode of existence for two relata of which one is eternal and the other temporal’ (1981: 436). To reduce the temporal to the eternal would make time illusory, and to reduce the eternal to the temporal would make eternity illusory. There is no third mode of existence besides these two. As a solution to this dilemma Stump and Kretzmann propose to abandon filling in the blank, since no single mode of existence would be adequate for the purpose of defining ET-simultaneity. Eternity and time are both real and both co-exist, ‘but not within the same mode of existence’ (1981: 436).

Given that they are dealing with two irreducible modes of existence, Stump and Kretzmann propose a definition for ET-simultaneity in terms of two reference frames (which are non-symmetrical and non-transitive) and two observers. Their characterization draws on certain features of relativity theory:

Let ‘x’ and ‘y’ range over entities and events. Then:

(ET) For every x and for every y, x and y are ET-simultaneous iff

(i) either x is eternal and y is temporal, or vice versa; and

(ii) for some observer, A, in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present—i.e., either x is eternally present and y is observed as temporally present, or vice versa; and

(iii) for some observer, B, in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present i.e., either x is observed as eternally present and y is temporally present, or vice versa. (Stump and Kretzmann 1981: 439)

The fact that time and eternity are both extended durations (albeit of different species) appears indispensable to any establishing of simultaneity between them. Stump and Kretzmann offer the following spatial analogy:

two infinite parallel horizontal lines, the upper one of which, representing eternity, is, entirely and uniformly, a strip of light (where light represents the present), while the lower one, representing time, is dark everywhere except for a dot of light moving steadily along it. If the misleading representation of eternity as a line can be tolerated, the light, in the representations of eternity and of time, should be interpreted as an indivisible present. For any instant of time as that instant is present, the whole of eternity is present at once; the infinitely enduring, indivisible eternal present is simultaneous with each temporal instant as it is the present instant. (1987: 219)

Several criticisms have been levelled against ET-simultaneity (see Ganssle 2024; Deng 2023; Lewis 1984; Fitzgerald 1985; Nelson 1987; Leftow 1988: 205–212; Leftow 1991b; Rogers 1994; Goris 1996: 249) and Stump and Kretzmann have published substantive responses (1987; 1992).

3.2 Quasi-temporal eternality

Brian Leftow holds that God’s life is an extended duration that is co-present to time by being ‘stretched out’ alongside it (1991a: 117). He calls this ‘Quasi-Temporal Eternality’ (1991a: 120). God’s life consists of many discreet and sequentially-ordered points that relate to each other as before and after. Yet, Leftow contends, this coheres with divine simplicity insomuch as points are not parts just as points within a line segment do not relate to it as parts of the line (1991a: 137–143). In this divine life no time passes, and no change occurs. It is, as Boethius said, all-at-once (totum simul). Yet God’s life shares many features with temporality. While God does not have a ‘no longer’ and a ‘not yet’, he does have a ‘now’ and a ‘when’, an ‘earlier’ and a ‘later’, since these terms simply designate the location of an event whether as a temporal location or a timeless location. Leftow calls these features that God shares with temporal being ‘typically temporal properties’ (TTPs; 2002: 22). They are properties that typically help to make things temporal but are not necessarily temporal in themselves and so can be possessed by non-temporal entities. ‘Duration’ would thus be a TTP.

Stump and Kretzmann state: ‘Because an eternal entity is atemporal, there is no past or future, no earlier or later, within its life; that is, the events constituting its life cannot be ordered sequentially from the standpoint of eternity’ (1981: 434, original emphasis). Leftow is concerned that this denial of a sequential earlier and later in God’s life renders his life ‘a non-enduring, point-like mode of being’ and his eternity ‘not even much like a duration’ (1991a: 134). This lacks the ‘extension’ Leftow believes is requisite to maintain the Boethian viewpoint.

3.3 Timelessness without duration

Katherin Rogers maintains that Stump and Kretzmann and Leftow have misinterpreted Boethius with respect to the notion of atemporal duration and extension (1994: 2–6). Eternity is not properly a duration or extension. In those texts where medieval scholars use durational terms of God’s eternity, they may simply be describing how eternity looks from our temporal perspective (quoad nos) and not how it is in itself (in se). Rogers offers several reasons for interpreting the medievals as holding non-durational eternity. Boethius and Aquinas both liken God’s knowledge of the world to that of someone who views an extended landscape (time) from the highest point (eternity). Aquinas uses the analogy of one who sees an entire stretch of road from a single vantage point high above the road while the travellers all along the road do not see those before and behind them. God does not view the stretch of road (time) from a parallel road stretched out beside it (1994: 4). Augustine uses the term ‘present’ to describe eternity and insomuch as even the human present lacks extension – present time ‘cannot be extended’ (longum se esse non posse; cited in Rogers 1994: 4) – the analogical use of the term would seem more indicative of an extensionless point than a stretched-out line. Boethius and Aquinas prefer Plotinus’s analogy of a point that is equally related to the circumference of a circle over against the extended line analogy deployed by Stump and Kretzmann and Leftow. A centre-point, lacking all extension, is equally present at once to all locations on the circle’s circumference, while those locations are not equally present to each other. Aquinas says: ‘Something can be present to what is eternal only by being present to the whole of it, since the eternal does not have the duration of succession’ (SCG I, ch. 66, no. 7; Thomas Aquinas 1955: 219 [vol. 1]). Rogers concludes:

If ancient and medieval thinkers often use the analogy of the centre point of a circle to represent eternity and never suggest that eternity may be like a line, they probably do not see divine timelessness as in any way ‘stretched out’. (Rogers 1994: 5)

Finally, Rogers argues that the medievals, again following Plotinus, would have regarded extension as a weakness or limitation that comes from the fulness of undivided unity. Even as unity is the source of plurality in the number series, the ‘extended must depend upon the unextended as its source’ (Rogers 1994: 6) and so be inferior to it.

Rogers also charges that atemporal duration is incoherent. First, the parallel line analogy conjures up an image of a piecemeal eternity and seems to suggest that points on the temporal line are more or less distant from points on the eternity line (Rogers 1994: 8–9). Second, for God a moment of his life must be synonymous with experience of (or consciousness of) that moment. For God, as a perfectly conscious being, to live is to experience. Thus, the manner of his living and the manner of his knowledge of his living must be identical. If his life is lived in moments related to each other as earlier and later – as Leftow claims – then there must be an earlier and later in his conscious experience as well. But this flouts the tota simul affirmed by Leftow. Rogers writes, ‘God cannot “have” earlier and later mental acts which He “enjoys […] in one and the same eternal now”, unless there is some radical distinction between “to have” a mental act, and “to enjoy it”’ (Rogers 1994: 10). For her, the least inadequate analogy is that of the temporal ‘present’ since it is durationless, though God’s present does not come into being or pass away as does the temporal present (Rogers 1994: 14–16).

4.1 Everlasting and temporal, not timelessly eternal

Divine temporalists maintain that a God who creates and interacts with his changing creatures must undergo some sort of movement. Free agency and the capacity for change are presupposed in such interaction (Schwöbel 1992: 53). Scripture describes God as an actor whose many productions follow one after another in time. They do not always appear together and so their presence or absence constitutes a change on the time-strand of their producer. It is not simply that the effects change over time; there must be a corresponding sequence of activity on the part of the agent producing the changes. Things change when God changes his productive activity, first producing one thing and then another. The ‘and then’ must lie within the intrinsic operation of God himself in order to have direct and meaningful contact with his effects. ‘It seems obvious’, writes Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘that God’s actions as described by the biblical writers stands in temporal-order relations to all the other events in our own time-array’. One concludes that such a God is ‘fundamentally non-eternal’ (Wolterstorff 2010: 145).

One might attempt to sidestep the challenge of temporal agency by arguing that a single causal action can bring about a temporally-ordered series of distinct effects without requiring a temporal series of corresponding causal actions in the agent. Aquinas appears to make this move. Yet the sempiternalist notes that there is still an intractable problem of knowledge for the atemporalist. It would seem God could not know the past, present, or future, since such knowledge requires the knower to be positioned somewhere in time. The God of the Bible is aware of all that is going on at any given moment. But, on the assumption that not all times coexist (contra four-dimensionalism), this requires that he know what time it is right now in the fleeting, transient present. The only way to know the ‘now’ of such a moment is to be somehow in that momentary ‘now’. One cannot know a present event until it begins, and it can only be known as happening at the moment it actually is happening. Knowledge of present events means the act of knowing ‘is infected by the temporality’ of the events (Wolterstorff 2010: 150). Memory and prescience of temporal events are likewise infected by temporality. All remembering, of necessity, must take place after an event has occurred. God could not remember unless he stood in a temporally-ordered relation with other things that preceded his remembrance of them. In fact, for this reason the specific act of remembrance cannot even be everlasting but must begin in God at a punctiliar moment. Likewise, all planning must be temporally prior to the thing planned, otherwise, it just would not be a case of planning. Wolterstorff concludes:

If God were eternal, God could not be aware, concerning any temporal event, that it is occurring nor aware that it was occurring nor aware that it will be occurring; nor could God remember that it has occurred; nor could God plan to bring it about and do so. But all of such actions are presupposed by, and essential to, the biblical presentation of God as a redeeming God. Hence God as presented by the biblical writers is fundamentally non-eternal. (Wolterstorff 2010: 152)

Another major argument sometimes put forth by divine temporalists concerns the freedom of God and of his creatures. Freedom requires spontaneity and novelty. A God whose intentions are fixed from all eternity would be ‘a very lifeless thing; not a person who reacts to men with sympathy or anger, pardoning or chastening because he chooses to there and then’ (Swinburne 1993: 221). A timeless God cannot interact meaningfully with free creatures because he would be unable to freely adapt himself to the novelty of their free choices. ‘His course of action being fixed by his past choices, he would not be perfectly free’ (Swinburne 1993: 222). Since free creatures present God with new knowledge by changing the circumstances in which he works, it must be acknowledged, at least in some limited sense, that God ‘can be changed from without’ (Ward 1982: 152). Some sempiternalists, such as the open theists, acknowledge that creaturely freedom means that God occasionally may be surprised by his creatures, though his knowledge of all present and past states and causes ensure that this is rare. And even when free creatures surprise him, the surprises ‘come by invitation, not by force – and they continue for such periods of time as God chooses that they shall’ (Swinburne 1994: 143).

It is easy to imagine the atemporalist charging that any notion of God as coming to possess new knowledge and undertake new activity results in a forfeiture of his infinite perfection. Process theologians have countered that God’s completeness and happiness are bound up with an experience he has of the world; an experience that actualizes his concrete goodness and life over time. Lewis Ford queries: ‘Should adventure, the quest for new perfections, be a joy God cannot share with his creatures?’ (1975: 121) There seems to be more perfection in becoming than in mere being. Charles Hartshorne insists it is a greater perfection for God to receive contributions from his creatures than to be locked in a static and immobile completeness, cut off from our contributions to his life. Unlike the atemporal deity of classical theism, the sempiternal God of the process theist is, as Hartshorne puts it, ‘not conceited or envious; […] he has no motive for wishing to escape or deny this indebtedness [to his creatures]’ (1948: 47). It should be noted that many divine temporalists reject process theism as an implicate of their position.

4.2 Mixed positions

Some sempiternalists retain a place for divine timelessness in their conception of God (Craig 2000a; 2001a: 247–280; 2001b; Padgett 1992; 2001; 2011). Unlike many other contemporary adherents to divine temporality, William Lane Craig does not reject divine atemporality as an impossible or incoherent notion. In fact, he says that God is timeless without the world and temporal with it. Genesis 1:1 seems to present time as beginning with the world, and since God did not begin to exist at the moment of creation, he must have existed before the world. ‘God, at least “before” creation, must therefore be atemporal’ (Craig 2001a: 132). Once God creates, he begins to be temporal. Creation draws him into a real relation with the created universe and God enters time (Craig 2001a: 156). To avoid the charge that this makes timelessness itself a temporally indexed past state of being – something absurd on its face – Craig proposes thinking of timelessness and temporality as two distinct phases of God’s life that ‘are not related to each other as earlier and later’ (2001b: 159).

Alan Padgett says God transcends physical time (that which measures matter in motion) and so is aptly called timeless with respect to it. This is a ‘relative timelessness’ since Padgett believes God does exist in ‘metaphysical time’, a time through which God passed prior to his creation of spacetime. Garrett DeWeese advances a similar view that he calls ‘omnitemporality’ (DeWeese 2004). God’s metaphysical time can go by without change but also allows for God to begin to undertake new activities such as creation, and thus be changed. Padgett seems committed to an absolute view of time since it exists even when there is no movement to measure, ‘just a pure duration, pure being without change’ (2011: 124; see also Shoemaker 1969). One might ask what such absolute time measures, or if time – as with Newton’s notion of absolute time – is not necessarily the measure of anything. Padgett rejects Craig’s view that God is timeless without the world and temporal with it since he believes that all change requires time and if God changes from not-creating to creating he must have been temporal as a precondition to this alteration in his life. The metaphysical time that belongs to God without the universe Padgett calls ‘the dimension of the possibility of change’. Thus, he concludes: ‘For all eternity God is in some way temporal’ (2011: 124–125). Between Craig and Padgett, Craig’s seems to be the more genuinely mixed approach to divine timelessness and temporality, but also the more enigmatic.

4.3 Biblical arguments for sempiternity

Divine temporalists can appeal to a vast number of biblical texts to support their view (see Peckham 2021: 95–97; Padgett 1992: 23–37; Wolterstorff 2001) and atemporalists generally concede that the Bible ordinarily speaks of God’s relation to creatures in temporally indexed ways (McCann 2003: 218). One kind of biblical proof for divine temporality appeals to passages that portray God as enduring over time: Ps 90:2, ‘from everlasting to everlasting you are God’; Ps 103:17, ‘but the loving-kindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting’; and Ps 102:25, 27, ‘[o]f old You founded the earth […] you are the same and your years will not come to an end’. In Amos 2:10 God says to Israel: ‘It was I who brought you up out of the land of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness’. These passages appear to indicate past and continuous divine action as well as endurance over time.

Another proof is adduced from texts that speak of God’s existence or operation ‘before’ the world began. In John 17:5 Jesus speaks of the glory he had with the Father ‘before the world existed’. Later in the same chapter (17:24), Jesus says that the Father loved him ‘before the foundation of the world’. The Son (Christ) is said to be ‘before all things’ (Col 1:17) and God chose a people in Christ ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1:4). These seem most plausibly read as denoting some sort of divine temporal antecedence to the world.

Some sempiternalists point to the Incarnation of the divine Logos as proof that God is both mutable and temporal. John 1:14 declares that ‘the Word became flesh’. The apostle Paul says that God sent forth his Son ‘when the fulness of time had come’ (Gal 4:4). R. T. Mullins states: ‘The incarnation seems to be a clear example of God the Son undergoing a change, and thus being temporal’. He concludes ‘a timeless God cannot become incarnate’ and that ‘one must pick either divine timelessness or the incarnation’ (Mullins 2016: 157, 189, 194; see also Peckham 2021: 102–103; Senor 2002; see also Jesus Preexistence and Incarnation).

Finally, there are verses that speak of God’s future. For instance, Zeph 3:17 seems to speak of future actions God will perform: ‘the Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing’. Isa 65:19 uses similar language: ‘I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people’. Rev 21:3–4 says that God will dwell with his people, be their God, and wipe every tear from their eyes. Insomuch as this is an eschatological promise that has not yet taken place, we should maintain that God himself is awaiting his own future with his people.

These are a small sampling of the kinds of arguments and passages appealed to by divine temporalists. Many more could be added. Sempiternalists are not unaware that their atemporalist counterparts reject the literal interpretation of such passages, at least as far as bears upon the modality of divine being and operation. They just are not convinced the atemporalists have furnished sufficient arguments to defeat the straightforward temporalist read of the biblical text (Peckham 2021: 97–99, 104).

5.1 Coexistence and real relation

The all-at-once presence of every part of time to a timeless God seems incoherent in two respects. First is the problem of transitivity, such that if all times are present at once to God, then all times are present at once to each other and thus are simultaneously coexistent. If B and C are simultaneously present to A, then B and C must be simultaneous with each other. Anthony Kenny has famously remarked that ‘on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on’ (Kenny 1979: 38–39; see also Hasker 1989: 162–170). Four-dimensionalism is one strategy for deflecting this concern (see Rogers 2007a; 2009), but many atemporalists, including Augustine and Aquinas, appear to support a presentist view of time and thus are faced with the challenge: how can God and the world coexist without sharing a temporal point of contact?

Second is the problem of God’s relation the world. If the world exists in time, then God too must exist and live in time to be really related to it as its Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer. If God is related to the world and the world to God, as Christians believe, then he must experience changes in himself when changes occur in the world. Mullins brings this to bear on Thomism in particular:

The present co-exists with eternity, and God knows the present by knowledge of vision. One may wonder how Thomists can maintain that God is immutable. Since the present is constantly changing, new moments of time are constantly coming into being and co-existing with eternity, then no longer co-existing with eternity as they cease to exist. (Mullins 2016: 95; see also Craig 2000a)

It seems reasonable to conclude that time and atemporal eternity are incommensurable and that the timelessly eternal is hopelessly sterile (Lovejoy 1909: 490).

Many timelessness adherents – notably, Thomists and Scotists – respond by denying that creating, sustaining, and redeeming – all of which God certainly does for creatures – requires God to exist in a real relation to the world (Yates 1990: 175–189; Goris 1996: 24–28; McWhorter 2013; Cross 1997: 9–11). Aquinas states, ‘in God relation to the creature is not a real relation, but only a relation of reason; whereas the relation of the creature to God is a real relation’ (ST I, q. 45, a. 3, ad 1; Thomas Aquinas 2012: 463–464; see also De potentia Dei, q. 3, a. 3; SCG II, ch. 12). As pure act, God does not derive any aspect of his being from without and neither is his being naturally ordered to another. Otherwise, he would need that other just to be fully himself. To be the first cause and Creator of all, God can be neither needy nor dependent; and he cannot undergo a change in creating. A real relation would give to God being that he lacked in and of himself. Far from being a liability, it is argued that God’s lack of a real relation to the world is what enables him to be so perfectly near to it in his creative and redemptive action (Mascall 1971: 168; Weinandy 1985: 88–98). His nearness to us is not mediated through an acquired accident. Only a being who is pure act can be maximally related to his creatures. All the creature has and is derives immediately from all that God is and so God must be constantly present to the creature in the unbounded fulness of his being. Yates writes: ‘Only a being who is not in time can be so essentially present in a relationship of undiluted super-generosity’ (1990: 184; see also Duby 2017).

As for the new relations we attribute to him, these are due to new real relations which creatures come to possess with respect to him. In the creature, this real relation is that of utter dependency upon him. New relational names can be attributed God denoting the creature’s newfound dependency on him without requiring something new begin to inhere in the divine substance. In modern parlance these newly attributed relations are merely ‘Cambridge properties’ (see Leftow 1991a: 309–311; Page 2023: 177); they make no real difference to God. Critics nevertheless are concerned that this undercuts any genuine causal bond between God and creatures. William Lane Craig distils the concern:

The question […] is whether our predicating of God at the moment of creation the relational property of sustaining the world is merely conceptual or ascribes a real property to Him. ‘Sustaining’ clearly describes a relation which is founded on something’s intrinsic properties concerning its causal activity, and therefore sustaining the world ought to be regarded as a real property acquired by God at the moment of creation. I must confess that I find Aquinas’s position, that this property is not really possessed by God, but that the relevant real, relational property is being sustained by God, which is possessed by the world, to be quite incredible. […] Thomism denies that God is literally the cause of the world, though the world is the effect of God – which seems contradictory or meaningless. (Craig 2000b: 99, 102)

5.2 Divine activity

Some divine temporalists also argue that in the production of new effects God himself must temporally precede those effects and undergo a change of agency in himself in order to bring them about. If creation comes to be in time, God must be temporally prior to it and experience a change in himself as he begins to create. If he calls Abram and then later speaks to Moses and even later still parts the waters of the Red Sea, he must exist as a temporal agent. ‘A being who does different things at different times is a being in time’ (Morris 1991: 131). Some activities such as planning, answering prayer, sitting in judgement, and so forth, seem to be ‘meaningless except in a temporal context’ (Davies 1983: 38–39). Such actions require the one performing them to exist in relations of anteriority or posteriority to the things planned or responded to (Swinburne 1994: 139–140).

For God to bring about the world ex nihilo it is claimed he himself must undergo a change in agency. As Padgett writes,

Bringing all of the cosmos into existence at or soon after the first change is a decisive event in the history of God and of all existence. In order for this to happen, something has to change. For all eternity past, even before all creation, God is at least capable of changing in order to make reality be in the first place. This change cannot be attributed to the world, for the world did not yet exist back then. (Padgett 2011: 123)

Some (Sorabji 1983: 257; Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 2002: 103–104) insist that willing is necessarily a temporal action and that God’s intentional action must necessarily occur at a time. All volition is temporally prior to that which the will purposes. Indeed: ‘To act purposefully is to act with thought of what will come about after the beginning of the action’ (Kneale 1961: 99). There can be no ‘before’ and ‘after’ relation in a timeless God and so the timeless God cannot plan or act to create the world.

In response to the underlying supposition that all efficacious causes are temporally prior to their effects, it has been argued this simply is not so (Brier 1972; note that not all critics endorse this supposition). One might imagine a ball sitting on a pillow and causing an indentation in it. In that event there is no temporal priority in the cause as cause or temporal posteriority in the effect. Causation is simply an effect-realizing action. W. Norris Clarke notes that the temporal-sequence theory of causality forces a false choice ‘between a God who is cause of the world, and therefore immersed in time, and a God who is outside of time, and therefore cannot be the cause of the world’ (1961: 145). Even if empirical observations of the universe appear to disclose temporal succession between physical causes and their effects, this is not sufficient for an ontological theory of causation. Causal actions are only truly efficacious when joined immediately to their effects without an intervening timelapse. Clarke elaborates:

Causal action taken properly and strictly as such is […] either one single ontological event linking two beings (or two distinct elements within one being) in an indivisible relational unity, or else it cannot take place at all and is a strictly unintelligible myth when applied to the real order. It can be nothing less than the real dynamic union of cause and effect in the order of action […] constituted by the active presence or imminence of the cause and its immediate effect, and lasting as long as the causal action endures. The myth of action as some kind of entity which passes or travels through space and time from the cause to the effect must be exorcized uncompromisingly; it destroys the specific intelligibility of what it is trying to explain. (Clarke 1961: 150, original emphasis)

Clarke does not deny that causal activity in the world is bound up with temporal processes but rather wonders where we are to situate the temporal sequences that accompany the causal activities we experience. The succession could be located within the cause, the effect, or both; but not between them, and it could well be that a timeless cause immediately produces a temporal effect (see Thibault 1970: 53–57). Clarke brings this to bear on the question of God’s timelessness as Creator:

If a cause possessed all the power required for the production of a given effect and a total, completely available actuality, concentrated in a single indivisible point or center, no successive phases would be required within the cause for unfolding its causal action, hence there would be no temporal process. The cause would then remain perfectly motionless and unchanging internally, though the effect on its part might be such that its emergence could or would have to occur in successive stages. In this case time would unroll within the effect, though not within the cause. (Clarke 1961: 152)

Closely related to this denial of a temporal sequence between causes and their effects is the assertion that agents, as agents, are not changed by their acts of agency. Aquinas observes: ‘The agent, as agent, does not receive anything’ (ST I-II, q. 51, a. 2, ad 1; Thomas Aquinas 2012: 456; see also McWilliams 1952; Clarke 1961: 146; Yates 1990: 132). Agency is properly conceived as the activity by which one entity influences the being of another. An agent surely changes and begins to exist in a new manner when beginning anew to intend or to undertake an action, but it is not changed as agent. One’s acts of agency can only change the agent as patient. If God acts to create or redeem, though the effects may be new, there is nothing in his agency as such that requires newness in God. It is only on the assumption that all agents must also be patients (composed of act and passive potency) that one would draw that conclusion, and that is precisely what is debated by the atemporalist and temporalist.

Classical theists are broadly committed to the notion that God does not begin to create but rather that creation begins to be (Helm 2010: 234–250; Mascall 1943: 62). If by ‘creation’ is meant the intrinsic act by which God brings about the world, it is eternal. If ‘creation’ indicates the things brought about, it begins with time and is not eternal. Creation as an intrinsic divine act is not ‘earlier’ than the existence of the world. Neither is it ‘at the same time’ as the world or the things in it. It stands outside of any competitive and comparative order with the world as its complete and sufficient cause (McCabe 1987: 6).

5.3 Divine knowledge

A final concern raised by divine temporalists touches on God’s knowledge. It seems that God could not be both timeless and omniscient (Prior 1962; Pike 1970: 87–96; Hasker 1989: 158–162). If only the present is real, then only the present can be known as happening right now. But timelessness adherents claim that all times are equally present to God. For anyone to know what time it is, one must know that time as it is happening. For God to be omniscient, his knowledge of the present must be temporally indexed and mutable in order to keep pace with the ever-changing present. A timeless knower could not make the requisite changes to keep up with the flow of time and so could not be omniscient. Robert Coburn puts the concern succinctly:

[I]f a being is omniscient then presumably it follows that this being knows everything which (logically) can be known. But it is easy to see that an eternal being could not know everything which (logically) can be known, and this because some of the facts which (logically) can be known, are knowable only by temporal beings, by beings who occupy some position (or positions) in time. (Coburn 1963: 155)

Can God use temporal indicator words, as in the statement ‘today is August 25, 2023’? Coburn insists that a condition of using such words is being an occupant of time. God’s alleged eternity is thus incompatible with his alleged omniscience (1963: 156). Knowing what time it is right now is something knowable, and an omniscient God cannot lack knowledge. Yet he must, if he is timeless.

Atemporalists offer various responses to this concern. Some, such as adherents to four-dimensionalism, or the ‘block universe’ concept of spacetime, deflate the problem by denying that there is a ‘now’ that is more real than the past and future, and so God’s omniscience would not require his knowledge change or be temporally indexed. Moreover, atemporalists, both those holding to the static and dynamic views of time, insist that the temporalist’s univocism regarding the mode of knowledge is unwarranted. The omniscience problem is generated by reading a human mode of knowing onto God. God does not know by observation, properly speaking, and does not derive his knowledge of the world from the world. The world exists because he knows it, he does not know it because it exists (Augustine, City of God XI, 10; see also Aquinas, ST I, q. 14, a. 8). Furthermore, what is known exists in the knower in accord with the natural mode of the knower, and thus ‘divine knowledge does not exist in God after the mode of created knowledge’ (ST I, q. 14, a. 1, ad 3: Thomas Aquinas 2012: 147). In God, knowledge is purely actual and eternal, just as he is. Critics of atemporalism might object on the grounds that timeless knowledge still fails to distinguish the real present from the unreal past and future and so still renders a timeless knower deficient in some knowledge. Humans know what time it is right now, but God does not. Yates believes this is basically correct, meaning that God’s knowledge is not itself indexed to the passing present, but that this does not result in a knowledge deficit in God (Yates 1990: 230; see also Sorabji 1983: 258–260).

God knows all the present moments through which creatures pass, not by existing within those moments but by timelessly causing them. If a thing is known best when known in its causes, and God is the first cause of all things, events, and processes, then God’s lack of temporally indexed states of knowledge does nothing to keep him from knowing all temporal indexicals. All times are perfectly known and present to him in his eternal act of willing to create. Charnock writes: ‘he is his own light by which he sees, his own glass wherein he sees; beholding himself, he beholds all things’ (1979: 285 [vol. 1]; see also Aquinas, SCG II, ch. 66, nos. 6–7; Shanley 1997a; Dolezal 2023: 263–267). Some atemporalists contend that temporally indexed knowledge is a less perfect way of knowing, insomuch as it is caused, dependent, and mutable. What God lacks by not possessing temporal knowledge of the present is the deficiency and imperfection of such knowledge. That is, he lacks the lack that attends all such created modes of knowing, and it is hard to see how that counts against his omniscience.

One might still wonder if this adequately accounts for the all-at-once ‘presence’ of all times to God, or the ‘presence’ of God to all times, as it seems to flout the ordinary sense of ‘present to’ (see Staley 2006: 13–14). Harm Goris suggests that adherents to timelessness will have to be content with inscrutability on this score:

It is clear that talking about temporal, esp. future things ‘being present-to-eternity’ is an awkward way of talking and that it is beyond our imagination: no metaphor can picture adequately how time relates to the eternal God. But that is a consequence (and an expression) of God’s mode of being, which is unlike anything we can talk about or know of. (Goris 1996: 254)

Critics of divine timelessness are ordinarily not content with such appeals to divine incomprehensibility. Mullins insists that ‘human persons can engage in meaningful discourse about God’ and thus ‘that the doctrine of ineffability, or unknowability, of God is false’ (Mullins 2016: 6).