A discussion about God and time

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with God's relationship to time. In the first chapter of this thesis I first provide a historical account, in the next two chapters I critique two contemporary accounts and, in the last chapter I provide my own account. I have two main theses that I attempt to support: (1) God fails to be related to creation on the accounts that I critique and (2) God is related to creation if He is in time. In my introductory chapter I consider the history of the progression of thought about God and His relationship to time. There are four tasks that I want to complete in the introductory chapter: (1) to show that some of the Church Fathers depended upon Greek philosophers such as Plato, Plutarch, and Plotinus for their beliefs about God and time, (2) to show the Church Fathers' academic interdependence on each other, (3) to show that Thomas Aquinas summarizes and synthesizes many of the best arguments from his predecessors and, (4) to show that Aquinas states that since God is simple, He does not have real relations with His temporal creation. Contrary to Aquinas, it seems like God is really related to creation and there are some contemporary scholars who want to show that God can be both really relational with creation and also simple. I focus on the persons who utilize the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) to show that God can really be related to creation-namely Stump and Kretzmann's account and Brian Leftow's account. I demonstrate that these atemporal theories that depend on STR (either forthrightly or heuristically) fail. Instead, I propose that God is in immeasurable ontological time both prior to creation and after creation. In this way He can be really related to His creation.