First Word

Full title: William Lane Craig. Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2001).

The Argument of the Book

Craig’s thesis is that God must have been timelessly eternal “before” creation; but “after” creation, he is temporal.

The basic arguments can be listed.

1. The traditional view of God being eternal would follow from his alleged attribute of immutability; but that attribute is questionable.
2. For God to be related to a temporal world, he must be temporal.
3. The only way to defeat (2) is to posit the “B theory” of time (see brief introduction here); but the arguments against the B theory are legion, and the only strong argument for it, the special theory of relativity (STR), does not have the B theory as its only explanation.
4. On the other hand, both Scripture and one’s sense of divine perfection implies that God must be eternal in some sense or other.

Combining these four insights leads Craig to make the proposal given above.

The nub of Craig’s issue with the traditional view seems to be contained in these two problems:

1. Indexical propositions, and God’s knowledge thereof.
2. Even “Cambridge change” is still change, so if God relates to a world that changes, then God must change.

Let’s unpack these a bit more.

Indexical propositions

By this is meant propositions that use a term like “now.” The content of such expressions is indexed to the time and place of the one asserting. For example, “I am writing this now.” That is true at the moment uttered, if in fact I am writing at that moment.

But, says Craig, if God is not in time, then he could never know such a proposition to be true, because it would never be “now” for God. But then, there would exist true propositions that God could not know to be true; and this is an unacceptable limitation of his omniscience.

Various ways to deal with this are considered and rejected.

The strongest response to the problem is to say, “God exhaustively knows everything that is means for Tim to say ‘it is now 10:00’,” without God needing to have personal indexical knowledge of “now.” To most Christians, such a lack of the personal “now” would not seem to be a shrinking of omniscience, but a statement of one way that God’s knowledge transcends ours. Craig, however, argues that only the “now” actually exists. To not know the “now” means to not know anything about the existent universe.

Here is where STR enters. STR presents a problem for Craig’s metaphysics, because STR teaches that “now” is not even univocal between two creatures. For “now” to be univocal, it would mean that if I describe the state of the universe that obtains at some time t, then every other creature (Einstein’s “observer”) should be able to describe the state of the universe in his reference frame at that same time, and those two “states” should be identical.

STR shows that this is not true.

Indeed, if we substitute “now” for “time t,” STR shows it is not even a meaningful project; because “now” is supposed to encompass everything simultaneous, and this is a problematic notion.

For example, I say “lightning struck at the same time that the clock started to chime,” while another observer in a frame moving relative to mine says, “no, the clock started to chime before the lightning struck.”

Craig attacks this conclusion along two main lines.

First, he writes STR off as based on “verificationism.” This refers to Einstein’s method (at least at the time of STR) of declaring that simultaneity has no meaning apart from specifying how it would be determined (or “verified,” hence WLC’s term).

Part of Craig’s critique seems to confuse verificationism with logical positivism. But the the former does not entail the latter necessarily. (Einstein, for example, does not seem to have been a logical positivist in the metaphysical sense. His famous phrase “God does not play dice with the universe” is making a metaphysical point, even if the subject is not exactly that of monotheistic orthodoxy.)

The rest of Craig’s critique is to show that verificationism is not accepted by most philosophers today.

But (I say) what others believe does not prove anything, and in particular, it may be that some concepts can only be defined operationally, even if that principle does not apply to everything.

Craig suggests that the pre-Einsteinian Lorentz equation solves the Physics without the metaphysical baggage of Einstein. We can simply say, “objects shrink when in motion.”

But how does that rescue an intuitive space-time ontology? Is the object shrunken or not?

Second, Craig suggests that the “frame” occupied by God is eo ipso the absolute frame, and all other frames get their event coordinates by rational transformation from the absolute one.

However, this robs with the left hand what the right hand gives. For, it undercuts the very premise that started the whole train of thought, namely, that the indexical “now” must have univocal meaning. Moreover, is it not a gross violation of the Creature/creature distinction to speak of a frame in which God resides?

We can attack this problem without using STR at all. Paul Helm, in his Eternal God, points out that no one accepts a parallel argument that could be made in spatial terms. Namely, we say, “God is here.” We also say, “God is there.” Following Craig, we should say, therefore, either there is no difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’, or God does not know the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Since neither of those is acceptable, it must be that God is spatially located.

No one that buys that conclusion.

Cambridge change

The second major premise Craig hangs his hat on is that if the world changes, and only exists now (the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist), then God must change by virtue of his relation to this changing world. This kind of “change” is known as an external or relative change, which someone dubbed a “merely Cambridge change” for reasons I’m sure philosphers understand.

For example, I become shorter than my son, not by undergoing an intrinsic change in my height, but by being related to him as he undergoes intrinsic change in his height. I change extrinsically from being taller than John to being shorter than John becuase he is growing. (p. 31 n.2)

For starters, we must point out that the orthodox divines such as Charnock and Turretin were fully on board with a changing world, to which God related, without conceding Craig’s conclusion. At some level, there is a mystery here. But theology embraces a conclusion if its rejection leads to disaster. Instead, we must say that the change is in the world, not in God.

Craig would do well to reflect on the situation if God created a world without temporal development.

Let the situation of God without his world be called “A,” and the situation of God with his world be called “B.”

By hypothesis, there is no temporal development in the timeless world as created, in B. So God is not “forced” to become temporal by virtue of the “relating to something that is changing” argument.

Yet there certainly seems to be a difference between A and B.

(Note also that Craig’s own formulation can’t escape “before” and “after” terminology, even when describing the situation of God’s eternity. Our attempts to describe the situation cannot escape this, as Wittgenstein observed.)

Is this change merely “Cambridge”? Even so, it is a change (or so it seems). It would therefore seem like Craig, on his premises, should consider whether his logic would not require a temporal God, just because he creates, and not because the world is temporal. The implications of this might be more far-reaching than Craig has pondered.

Craig’s Kenotic Theory

By suggesting that God causes a transition in Himself from eternal to temporal, he is proposing a new form of the kenotic heresy.

It supposes that God absent creation had attributes that were actual yet contingent. His eternity was actualized yet contingent, in that it could become not the case.

But this presupposes that God is contained in an environment in which “attributes” have meaning apart from Himself, that therefore might apply or not apply. At the end of the day, it is a theology of brute fact. To that extent, is it not pagan?