God and Time Essays on the Divine Nature

by Ganssle, Gregory E.; Woodruff, David M.

• ISBN13: 9780195129656
• ISBN10: 0195129652
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Throughout the history of philosophical theology, scholars have reflected on the relationship between God and time. In the Western religious tradition, God has been thought to be eternal, in the sense that God is outside time. But many thinkers today hold that while God is everlasting, in that there was no beginning to God's existence nor will he ever cease existing, God exists within Time. In God and Time , Gregory E. Ganssle and David Woodruff have brought together 12 previously unpublished essays from leading philosophers on God's relation to time. Including work from today's most prominent thinkers in this fascinating field, God and Time represents the current state of the discussion between those who believe God to be atemporal (experiencing everything in the "eternal now") and those who believe God to be temporal (experiencing events sequentially, somewhat as we do). This collection highlights such issues as how the nature of time is relevant to the question of whether God is temporal and how God's other attributes are compatible with his mode of temporal being. By focusing on the metaphysical aspects of time and temporal existence, God and Time makes a unique contribution to the current resurgence of interest in philosophical theology in the analytic tradition.

Author Biography

Gregory E. Ganssle is on the faculty of Rivendell Institute for Christian Thought and Learning in New Haven, Connecticut. He has taught philosophy at Syracuse University and the International School of Theology in California, and has served as a Teaching Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University. He has published articles in International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Modern Schoolman, Philosophia Christi and other journals.
David Woodruff is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Huntington College. He previously taught at Syracuse University, Northern Illinois University, and Westmont College. He has published papers in Teaching Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and other journals.

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
Introduction	3	(18)
Gregory E. Ganssle
Part I God's Eternal Nature
The Eternal Present	21	(28)
Brian Leftow
Atemporal, Sempiternal, or Omnitemporal: God's Temporal Mode of Being	49	(16)
Garrett DeWeese
Part II God, Time, and Creation
Divine Foreknowledge and the Arrow of Time: On the Impossibility or Retrocausation	65	(10)
Alan G. Padgett
God inside Time and before Creation	75	(20)
Dean W. Zimmerman
Time Was Created by a Timeless Point: An Atheist Explanation of Spacetime	95	(34)
Quentin Smith
The Elimination of Absolute Time by the Special Theory of Relativity	129	(24)
William Lane Craig
Part III The Nature of Divine Knowledge
Timelessness out of Mind: On the Alleged Incoherence of Divine Timelessness	153	(12)
Edward R. Wierenga
Direct Awareness and God's Experience of a Temporal Now	165	(17)
Gregory E. Ganssle
The Absence of a Timeless God	182	(25)
William Hasker
Part IV God's Relation to the World
The Problem of Dialogue	207	(13)
Paul Helm
Incarnation, Timelessness, and Leibniz's Law Problems	220	(16)
Thomas D. Senor
On the Incarnation of a Timeless God	236	(13)
Douglas K. Blount
Index	249