OCR
Philosophy

AO1: God as timeless (eternal)

God as timeless is the view that God is atemporal, existing outside of time.
Philosophers like Anselm argue this follows from God’s status as the greatest conceivable being, or simply from his omnipotence.
To exist within time would limit or confine God to being within time.
A perfect being would be unchanging, yet temporal beings are subject to change.
Timelessness is also thought to follow from God as creator of time. If God created time, God cannot himself exist within it.
An eternal God would not perceive time unfolding moment by moment like temporal beings do.
Instead, God apprehends all of time at once, in the ‘eternal present’.
This is expressed through the distinction between temporal (T-) and eternal (E-) simultaneity.
Events may be temporally successive, but all events are eternally simultaneous with God.
Thus, God is E-simultaneous with every event, even if those events are not simultaneous within time.

AO1: God as within time (everlasting)

Everlasting is the view that God is a temporal being, existing within time.
Unlike other temporal beings, however, God is sempiturnal: God has no beginning or end, but exists at every moment in time.
God is therefore necessary in existence, but not timeless.
Swinburne argues that this view better explains God’s interaction with the world.
If God exists in time, it is easier to understand how God can respond to prayers, perform miracles, and act within temporal sequences.
It also allows God to have knowledge of tensed propositions, such as what is happening ‘now’, which a timeless being may struggle to account for.
An everlasting God experiences time as a succession of moments, with changing relations to events as they occur.

AO1: God as omnipotent

Voluntarism is the view that things depend on God’s will rather than any separate order. Descartes extends this even to logical and mathematical truths.
He therefore understands omnipotence as the power to do everything, even apparent ‘non-things’ such as the logically impossible.
Descartes illustrates this by claiming that God could have made it false that 4+4=8.
Such truths still appear absolutely necessary to human reason, since we cannot conceive them otherwise.
This has been interpreted in two ways: either logical truths are contingent on God’s will, or they remain necessary for human reason while still being grounded in God in a way that exceeds human understanding.
Aquinas represents the mainstream view, that omnipotence is the power to bring about any logically possible state of affairs.
He illustrates that God cannot create something which both exists and does not exist.
Aquinas insists this is not a limitation or defect in God’s power.
Logically impossible “things”, such as four-sided triangles, are not real possibilities at all, but lack the nature of a ‘feasible thing’.
The self-limitation view agrees that God can only do the logically possible, and that God refrains from acts injurious to his plan for humanity (those that would destroy human free will or the physical order of the universe).
It diverges from Aquinas regarding the mechanism involved in God’s non-exercise of power in such cases.
For Aquinas, it’s an atemporal necessary expression of God’s perfect nature.
Self-limitation theorists typically reject Aquinas’ account of God’s will as atemporal and necessary, holding instead that God is everlasting (Polkinghorne), or fully temporal (Moltmann).
God’s non-exercise of power cannot then be regarded as a necessity from eternity, but a temporal and contingent decision of restraint.

AO2: The in/coherence of Voluntarism about omnipotence

Descartes’ argument for voluntarism about omnipotence is that God created everything, including logic.
Nothing can exist which does not depend on God, because of God’s “immensity”.
Logical impossibility is a limitation for humans and the universe, but not for God.
Logical impossibilities are inconceivable, but we should not assume our imagination marks the limit of God’s power.

Counter

Descartes is criticised for misunderstanding logic as a created thing which could be otherwise.
Logical laws are not contingent features of creation, like natural beings or physical laws.
They are necessary truths; if they could be otherwise, they would cease to be what they are.
So, to claim that God can make the logically impossible possible is self-defeating, because it dissolves the very distinction the claim depends on.

Evaluation

Descartes begins from a powerful premise, yet the conclusion he draws from it is paradoxical.
He’s right that separating logical necessity from God’s will implies God is not the source of all.
However, Aquinas’ proposal absorbs this premise while also avoiding Descartes’ paradoxical conclusion.
He proposes that logical truths are necessary features of God’s eternal intellect, the source of all being and intelligibility.
This synthesis allows logic to be uncreated, but not independent of God.
It avoids both the paradox of treating logical necessity as contingent on God’s will, as though necessary truths could have been otherwise, and the opposite paradox of treating logic as independent of God, as though it lay beyond his intellect and control.
Logical truths cannot be otherwise, since God is perfect and unchangeable.
God cannot change logic, but that’s because he cannot change himself.
That’s no more a limitation than God’s inability to cease to be necessary.
This shows that logic can depend on God without being created and changeable, avoiding paradox and the resort to the pseudo-explanation of divine mystery.

AO2: The validity of Aquinas’ ‘perfection’ grounding

Aquinas argues that God’s attributes must be understood as a function of God’s perfection.
He follows Augustinian privatio boni, claiming that imperfect actions reflect an absence of power.
They are symptoms of defects rather than positive abilities.
E.g., sin is an absence of self-control which implies weakness, not strength.
Once we understand omnipotence as the power of a perfect being, it’s coherent that God cannot do those actions which reflect imperfection and thus weakness.

Counter

Mackie counters that evil can be a positive expression of agency, not merely defect.
Choosing evil isn’t always giving in to temptation; it can involve positive intentional traits like courage.
When evil is premeditated, it can involve intelligence, creativity and strategy.
On this view, God cannot be restricted only to rational and good actions without incoherently casting divine autonomy as less than human autonomy.

Evaluation

However, we can defend Aquinas.
Positive abilities like intelligence are only instrumentally engaged in the execution of an evil action once the will has already been distorted by privation.
Privation remains the foundational root of the action.
This is where Mackie’s account becomes superficial.
Mackie measures power by the range of actions a person can perform, but this overlooks whether those actions arise from self-control or from temptation and weakness.
This points us to the deeper question of the relation between power and agency.
Power to do what one wants is not complete unless it includes power over one’s wants, i.e., over oneself.
So, power is only complete where agency is complete, i.e. where there is rational self-government.
Since sinful action reflects defective self-control, it is not an ability or an ‘extra power’ at all.
Divine inability to sin is therefore not a lack of power, but the absence of defect in the divine will, and so is not just compatible with but defining of omnipotence.

AO2: eternal vs everlasting & theistic personalism

The debate over divine self-limitation typically revolves around whether God is eternal or everlasting, and the implications of this for God’s will and relationship to human beings.
Classical theists argue that perfection entails immutability and thus atemporality.
Following Aristotelian metaphysics, change means moving from potentiality to actuality, which implies imperfection.
God, as pure actuality with no unrealised potential, cannot change and so cannot self-limit by entering temporality.
Since time measures change, God must exist outside time.
Anselm reaches a similar conclusion: a temporal being is limited by succession, whereas a maximally perfect being must possess its whole life at once.
So, on the classical view, God’s will and knowledge are eternal and not subject to contingent development.

Counter

However, theistic personalists argue that this rests on a faulty view of perfection.
A perfect being, they claim, must be capable of genuine relationship and responsiveness, which requires temporality.
If God’s will and knowledge are eternally fixed, then God cannot respond contingently to prayer or history, nor know free choices in a dynamic personal way.
So Swinburne argues that divine perfection may require cognitive self-limitation, freely accepting temporal succession, in order to enter genuine loving relationship with human beings.

Evaluation

However, this fails to show that self-limitation is necessary for genuine love.
Their argument assumes that God must relate as a human person does, through temporal succession and changing mental states.
Aquinas can deny this. The divine-human relationship can still be dynamic without change in God, because creatures change in relation to God through prayer, repentance, rejection, and grace.
So the relational goods Swinburne wants self-limitation to secure can be preserved without God surrendering immutability or atemporality.
Indeed, if self-limitation involves reduced actuality or knowledge, it may imply imperfection rather than perfection.
Classical theism is therefore more coherent.

AO2: The paradox of the stone

Mackie’s omnipotence paradox asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it.
If God can create the stone, then there is something he cannot do, namely lift it. If he cannot create it, then there is something he cannot do, namely create it. Either way, there seems to be at least one thing God cannot do.
The idea of an omnipotent being as one able to do absolutely anything therefore seems nonsensical.

Counter

However, Christian philosophers usually refine the concept of omnipotence beyond the crude claim that God can do literally anything.
Descartes’ definition does not face the problem, because if God can do the logically impossible then God can both create the stone and lift it.
Aquinas’ definition is defended by Mavrodes, who argues that the stone is not a genuine possible object.
It is not merely a very heavy stone, but a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift, which is contradictory because such a being could lift any stone..
So Aquinas can say that God cannot create it for the same reason that God cannot create a square circle.
Self-limitation views can also reject the paradox, since they share Aquinas’ premise that contradictions are not genuine tasks.

Evaluation

Mavrodes is sometimes criticised for begging the question, since he seems to assume an Aquinas-style definition of omnipotence in order to dismiss the stone as impossible.
However, this objection is limited.
He need not prove Aquinas’ definition true from scratch, only show that Mackie has failed to make it paradoxical on its own terms.
More broadly, Mackie’s paradox is not decisive against omnipotence as such, because the main accounts can all survive it in different ways: Descartes accepts the contradiction, while Aquinas and self-limitation views deny that the task is genuinely possible.
So the stone paradox does not refute any of the more sophisticated accounts of omnipotence.

AO1: God as omniscient

Omniscience means all-knowing.
Philosophically, truth is generally considered a necessary condition of knowledge.
So we can define omniscience like so:
S is omniscient if for every true proposition p, if p is true then S knows p.
Omniscience also involves the impossibility of being mistaken. So, God knows all true propositions infallibly
Aquinas’ analogy: God has direct awareness of everything, analogous to the way we have direct awareness of our perceptions. He calls this God’s ‘knowledge of vision’. This is just meant to be an analogy, ultimately omniscience is beyond our comprehension.
Aquinas thinks God knows propositions and concepts, but only because he knows all things by knowing himself as their cause.
I.e., God perfectly knows the essence of our power of intelligence, such that God knows every thought, concept or proposition that could possibly be formed by it.
God’s knowledge is therefore non-discursive and immediate, rather than dependent on inference from propositions as in human knowledge.
God’s knowledge functions through infallible direct awareness.

AO1: Boethius

Boethius identifies an apparent conflict between divine omniscience and human free will.
If God knows everything, that seems to include future human actions.
Since God cannot be wrong, then we cannot do anything other than what God knows us to do, which destroys free will.
This also creates a problem for divine justice and omnibenevolence: if humans lack free will, it seems unfair for God to punish sin.
Boethius’ solution appeals to divine eternity.
He defines eternity as the “simultaneously whole and perfect possession of interminable life.”
God is outside time and does not experience events unfolding moment by moment as we do.
Instead, God sees all of time at once in one eternal present as if from a ‘lofty peak’.
So God does not “foresee” future choices before they occur; he eternally apprehends them as present.
This allows the solution that God eternally knows the results of our free choices, without forcing or determining them.
This shapes Boethius’ account of divine action.
God does not move in and out of time, making new decisions or interventions.
What appears to us as a new divine action, such as answering prayer or performing a miracle, is the temporal effect of God’s eternal will.
God acts eternally, while we experience the results of that action within time.
So God’s knowledge and action are eternal, but human choices and divine effects are experienced temporally.

AO2: Whether divine eternity coherently resolves foreknowledge

The appeal to divine eternity to explain foreknowledge is criticised as paradoxical.
Even if God’s eternal apprehension does not determine our actions, it still seems to make them necessary:
If God cannot be wrong and knows I choose X, I cannot be free to choose Y.
So, eternal knowledge of future free choices appears incoherent, since they could not be otherwise nor therefore free.

Counter

Boethius responds that foreknowledge entails a special type of necessity which doesn’t undermine free will but depends on it.
‘Conditional’ necessity is when something is made necessary by free choice.
He illustrates by imagining seeing someone walking.
It’s necessary that they are walking, but they could have chosen not to walk, in which case it would not have become necessary.
Anselm refines this with the notion of ‘following from’ necessity; actions are necessary because they happen, they don’t happen because they are necessary.

Evaluation

This defence works by exploiting an underdevelopment in the criticism.
The critic admits that God’s omniscience does not force our action, but insists it still entails that our action is set in stone.
This leaves something unexplained: what sets it in stone?
Boethius and Anselm answer by distinguishing the source of conditional necessity from an event’s source
Presentness grants conditional necessity to events occurring in it (e.g., someone walking), since what is happening must be happening while it happens.
This applies whether an event arises in the temporal present or is eternally present to God.
Yet what explains why events occur depends wholly on their cause.
For free actions, that explanation is the agent’s free will.
God’s knowledge does entail that our future actions are set in stone, but it is not what sets them in stone.
Their necessity is not externally imposed but follows from the agent’s free exercise of will.

AO1: Anselm’s four dimensionalism

Anselm develops Boethius’ view of divine eternity to explain more clearly how an eternal God can know and act upon temporal events.
Boethius’ image of God viewing all time from outside can suggest distance from time.
Anselm avoids this while still denying that God is inside time, since a temporal God would be confined by succession and therefore limited.
So Anselm concludes that God is not in time; rather, all of time is in God.
This can be understood through four-dimensionalism: the view that objects and events extend through time as well as space.
Just as physical objects occupy three-dimensional space, their lives and movements extend through the fourth dimension of time.
Anselm then treats divine eternity as a still higher reality.
All three-dimensional space is contained within moments of four-dimensional time, and all moments of time are contained within the one eternal present of God.
This means God does not merely observe time from a distance.
God is eternally present with every temporal event because all of time exists within divine eternity.
So God knows future actions not by prediction, but by being eternally present with them.
It also explains divine action: God’s eternal power can operate on particular moments because those moments exist within God’s eternal present.
Anselm therefore strengthens Boethius by making eternity not merely a perspective on time, but the higher reality within which time is contained.

AO2: The coherence of an eternal present

Kenny argues that the eternal view of God is incoherent because temporal events are not all happening in one moment.
Some events necessarily happen before others, e.g., my parents’ births before mine.
So if God sees all events in one eternal present, he seems to see them incorrectly which threatens omniscience.

Counter

However, Kenny’s objection bites hardest against the crude Boethian picture where God just ‘looks down’ on all times, seeing everything as if simultaneous.
Anselm refines this by recasting eternity from mere divine viewpoint into an ontologically distinct dimension where everything really is eternally simultaneous.
Katherine Rogers interprets Anselm as thinking eternity is “a kind of 5th dimension”.
All three-dimensional space is contained in four-dimensional moments of time, and all those moments are contained within one moment in eternity.
Within time, my birth and my parents’ births are temporally non-simultaneous.
Yet those same events always happen at once in eternity (e-simultaneity).
This grounds e-simultaneity in reality rather than merely in God’s perspective.
God is not seeing events incorrectly, because all temporal events do in fact happen at once within the higher dimension of eternity.

Evaluation

So, Anselm’s use of dimensions gives him the resources to answer Kenny.
Critics might still press that my birth and my parents’ births cannot both be simultaneous and non-simultaneous.
However, this assumes the same relation is being predicated in the same respect.
The same event can have different relational properties depending on which dimension we consider it from.
Within the fourth dimension of time, my birth is after my parents’ births.
Within eternity, those same events are all present together.
So the contradiction dissolves: t-non-simultaneity and e-simultaneity are not contradictory, but different relations applying in different frames of reality.
This is because within time events begin and end, while in eternity those same events, and all events, always happen.

AO1: Swinburne

Swinburne rejects the timeless view of God, arguing that an eternal God would be too static and “lifeless” for genuine loving relationship.
Relationships require two-way interaction, response, and communication, so God must be everlasting: existing through all time without beginning or end.
This also explains divine action in time.
Unlike Boethius or Anselm, Swinburne thinks God can act through temporal sequence, responding to prayer, performing miracles, and making contingent decisions as history unfolds.
This makes God’s relationship with humans more personal, because God actively engages with creatures within time rather than eternally willing all events from outside time.
To preserve free will, Swinburne argues that God accepts cognitive self-limitation.
God knows all past and present events, and any future events that are physically determined.
This is cognitive in outcome, since it limits foreknowledge.
However, it is metaphysical in basis, since the world God chose to create is one where future free choices are not yet settled facts, and therefore cannot be infallibly known.
So God’s knowledge of future free actions is limited to probabilistic prediction rather than certainty.
This does not undermine omniscience, because omniscience means knowing everything logically possible to know.

AO2: eternal vs everlasting on the bible and foreknowledge

The Bible seems to support the eternal view because God and Jesus know future human actions with certainty:
Jesus’ knowledge that Judas would betray him and that Peter would deny him three times before the cockerel crowed.

Counter

Swinburne rejects this and argues that God is everlasting rather than eternal.
On his view, genuine free choices cannot be known with infallible certainty before they occur, because that would destroy freedom.
He draws the analogy that God knows us as a parent knows a child, allowing probabilistic judgement but not certainty.
So God’s knowledge of future free choices is self-limited to inductive prediction rather than infallible awareness.

Evaluation

Swinburne’s account struggles because biblical foreknowledge is presented as certain, not probabilistic.
He thinks we are forced into this interpretation because infallible foreknowledge would undermine free will if it functioned as prediction prior to the action.
However, Boethius and Anselm show there is another way to preserve certainty, avoiding both Swinburne’s philosophical critique and his strained biblical interpretation.
For them, God’s knowledge is not ‘prior’ to future actions but eternally present with them, so it is technically not ‘fore’-knowledge at all.
Crucially, this makes God’s knowledge logically dependent on our free choices:
God knows what we will do only because, in eternity, he apprehends what we always do.
Interestingly, both views concede that creating free creatures requires some concession in how omniscience is understood.
Boethius and Anselm preserve certainty by making God’s knowledge logically dependent on those choices.
Swinburne’s account is less convincing because it makes the larger concession by limiting God’s certainty about future free choices.
A perfect God would not gratuitously surrender more omniscience than the good of freedom requires.

AO1: God as supremely good (omnibenevolent)

Omnibenevolence is the idea that God is perfectly good.
One aspect is metaphysical, that goodness is identified with perfection.
So, to say God is omnibenevolent is to say something about God’s metaphysical status; that God is a supremely perfect being.
Another aspect is moral, where perfectly good means that the will (intention) is always in alignment with what is morally good.
Plato & Augustine connect these two senses of goodness.
They argue evil, or immorality has no ‘positive’ existence in itself, it is simply a lack of goodness ‘privatio boni’. Augustine illustrated with blindness which is not a thing, but simply the absence of sight.
God’s moral perfection is bound up with his metaphysically perfect status:
God’s will always aligns with what’s good (God is perfectly moral) because God is metaphysically perfect.
Christian theology typically holds that God’s omnibenevolence means God is both the source of and standard for moral value and rightness.

AO2: The Euthyphro dilemma vs Divine command theory

Omnibenevolence defines God as the source of perfect moral goodness.
The Euthyphro dilemma challenges this by asking: is what God commands good because it is already good, or is it good because God commands it?
The first horn implies that goodness is independent of God, so God is not its ultimate source.
The second implies morality is arbitrary, since God could in principle command murder or cruelty and thereby make them good.

Counter

Some thinkers, such as W. L. Craig, are willing to accept the second horn, arguing that if God commanded something like genocide, it would be right because God commanded it.
However, a stronger response is to argue that the dilemma is false, because it misses a third option: what God commands is good because it reflects God’s omnibenevolent nature.
This avoids both arbitrariness and goodness being external to God.
It avoids reducing goodness to whatever God happens to command, which risks making “God is good” collapse into empty tautology.

Evaluation

We can press the Euthyphro as a deeper challenge about what could finally ground goodness at all.
Appealing to God’s nature may only relocate the danger of explanatory emptiness, so the question just becomes what makes God’s nature good?
However, thomistic metaphysics can answer this:
For Aquinas, being and goodness are convertible, so whatever has being is good insofar as it has actuality and perfection rather than defect or privation.
Since God is pure actuality, lacking all defect or unrealised potential, God’s nature is the fullest possible being and can therefore function as the explanatory terminus of goodness.
Since the Euthyphro aims to show that omnibenevolence is incoherent, the logical possibility of Aquinas’ account is sufficient to defeat it: God’s nature could function as the explanatory terminus of goodness through his wider metaphysics of being and perfection.

Logical problem of evil paragraph – relevant to general questions, omnibenevolence questions (and technically omnipotence too).

Question preparation

Key paragraphs:

Aquinas’ view of omnipotence (limited by logical possibility)
Descartes’ view of omnipotence (not limited by logical possibility)
Vardy’s Self-limitation
Boethius’ view on omniscience, free will, omnibenevolence & time (eternity)
Anselm’s view on omniscience, free will, omnibenevolence & time (eternity)
Swinburne’s view on omniscience, free will, omnibenevolence & time (everlasting)
The logical problem of evil – omnipotence, omnibenevolence (and even omniscience) are inconsistent with evil.

Question types:

Scholar focused questions could be on:

Boethius
Anselm
Swinburne

E.g.,:
Does Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach adequately explain divine action in time? [40]
Focused question – on Anselm’s four-dimensionalist explanation of divine action in time

Boethius (minimal AO1)
- Intro sentence: Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach is a development of Boethius’ theory of God’s eternity, which sought to explain the relationship between God and time in a way that avoided conflict with free will.

Anselm (Full AO1)
Swinburne (minimal AO1 – but full detail of his critique of the eternal view)
- Intro sentence: Swinburne rejects Boethius’ and Anselm’s concept of divine eternity because he thinks the issues of divine action in time can be better explained by an everlasting God.

Omnipotence questions: whether it is:

Logically coherent
Defined as the ability to do the logically impossible (Descartes’ view)
Defined by self-limitation
Subject to the limits of logical possibility

Questions about Omniscience, free will, omnibenevolence/justice or time (eternal/everlasting) are essentially about the debates between Boethius, Anselm & Swinburne.

Questions on omnibenevolence:

Boethius
Anselm
Either Swinburne OR the logical problem of evil
If you’ve learned about the Euthyphro dilemma it could be used for an omnibenevolence focused questions

Weirdly worded questions:

Is it possible to resolve inconsistencies between the divine attributes? [40]

General question

NOT about the definitions of omnipotence debate, since that only involves paradoxes inherent to one divine attribute, rather than potential inconsistencies ‘between’ divine attributes (plural).
This question involves Boethius, Anselm & Swinburne – their attempt to resolve the apparent conflict Boethius identified between omniscience and omnibenevolence/justice over the issue of free will).
You could use the logical problem of evil for this – since it proposes a conflict between omnipotence and omnibenevolence (and omniscience on some versions) over the existence of evil.

Is it necessary to resolve the apparent inconsistencies between the divine attributes? [40]
General question

Boethius, Anselm & Swinburne (and responders to the logical problem of evil) – think the inconsistencies need resolving, and attempt to do so.
If they fail, that would mean the inconsistencies still need resolving – or perhaps it means they can’t be resolved, and therefore God is incoherent and thus doesn’t exist – which shows the importance of the failure to resolve inconsistencies.
It could be worth mentioning something about Karl Barth’s view (influenced by Augustine) that we shouldn’t be using human reason to try and determine anything about God’s infinite divine nature, since that is beyond the corrupted understanding of fallen humans.

Is omniscience subject to self-limitation? [40]
Focused question – on the self-limitation view

Swinburne thinks omniscience is subject to self limitation – to solve the free will issue.
Boethius/Anselm could be brought up as solutions to the free will issue that don’t require self-limitation of omniscience.
The logical problem of evil claims one attribute (e.g., omniscience) needs to go to explain evil – though self-limitation of an attribute may be sufficient.
Augustine/Hick would say there is no need for God’s attributes to be limited because of evil, since evil is deserved punishment or soul-making.

Does free will conflict with omnipotence? [40]
Focused question – on the interaction between omnipotence and free will

All three theories of omnipotence would argue that their version of omnipotence is the best and doesn’t conflict with free will – evaluate which version really is the best and whether it conflicts with free will or not.

Does God have divine foreknowledge? [40] (Foreknowledge is knowing what we’re going to do before we do it)
General question

Boethius & Anselm: God doesn’t have divine foreknowledge, he has eternal knowledge. God’s knowledge is not temporal, so it does not exist ‘before’ our action.
Swinburne: God doesn’t have divine foreknowledge as he self-limits his omniscience to enable out free will.