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 being the greatest conceivable being.
- If God existed within time, time would limit or confine him.
- A perfect being would be unchanging, but temporal beings change.
- Timelessness can also follow from God creating time.
- If God created time, God cannot himself be inside it.
- An eternal God would not experience time moment by moment like humans do.
- Instead, God apprehends all of time at once, in the ‘eternal present’.
- So, every event is present to God, even if those events happen at different times for us.
AO1: God as within time (everlasting)
- Everlasting is the view that God is a temporal being, existing within time.
- Unlike other temporal beings, God is sempiternal.
- This means God has no beginning or end, but exists at every moment in time.
- God is therefore necessary in existence, but not timeless.
- Swinburne argues this 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 know what is happening ‘now’.
AO1: God as omnipotent
- Voluntarism is the view that things depend on God’s will rather than any separate order.
- Descartes applies this even to logic and mathematics.
- He therefore understands omnipotence as the power to do everything, including the logically impossible.
- For example, God could have made it false that 4+4=8.
- These truths still seem necessary to human reason, because we cannot imagine them being otherwise.
- So, logical truths either depend on God’s will, or are grounded in God beyond human understanding.
- Aquinas gives the mainstream view.
- Omnipotence is the power to bring about any logically possible state of affairs.
- God cannot create something which both exists and does not exist.
- Aquinas argues this is not a real limit on God’s power.
- Logically impossible “things”, like four-sided triangles, are not genuine possibilities at all.
- The self-limitation view agrees that God can only do the logically possible.
- It adds that God chooses not to act in ways that would damage his plan for humanity.
- For example, God does not destroy human free will or the physical order of the universe.
- Unlike Aquinas, self-limitation theorists like Swinburne and Vardy see this restraint as a temporal decision.
- This is because they typically regard God as sempiturna.
- So, God’s non-exercise of power is a free decision within time, not a necessity from eternity.
AO2: The in/coherence of Voluntarism about omnipotence
- Descartes’ argument is that God created everything, including logic.
- Nothing can exist independently of God.
- Logical impossibility limits humans and the universe, but not God.
- Just because we cannot imagine logical impossibilities, that does not prove they are impossible for God.
Counter
- Descartes is criticised for treating logic as if it were a created thing.
- Logical laws are not like physical laws or created beings.
- They are necessary truths.
- If they could be changed, they would not be necessary.
- So, saying God can make contradictions possible destroys the meaning of “possible” and “impossible”.
Evaluation
- Descartes starts with a strong idea: nothing should be independent of God.
- If logic exists apart from God, then God is not truly the source of everything.
- However, Aquinas gives the better answer.
- Logical truths depend on God because they are part of God’s eternal intellect.
- This means logic is not outside God, but it is also not something God freely creates or changes.
- God cannot make contradictions true, but that is not a weakness.
- It is because God cannot change his own perfect nature.
- This is much stronger than Descartes’ view, because it keeps God as the source of logic without turning necessary truths into changeable or meaningless claims.
AO2: eternal vs everlasting & theistic personalism
- The debate over divine self-limitation depends on whether God is eternal or everlasting.
- Classical theists argue that perfection means God cannot change.
- Following Aristotle, change means moving from potentiality to actuality, which implies imperfection.
- God is pure actuality, with no unrealised potential.
- So, God cannot change or enter time.
- Since time measures change, God must exist outside time.
Counter
- However, theistic personalists argue that this misunderstands perfection.
- A perfect being must be capable of genuine relationship and responsiveness.
- This seems to require temporality.
- If God’s will and knowledge are eternally fixed, then God cannot really respond to prayer or history.
- So, Swinburne argues that God may freely self-limit in order to love humans personally.
Evaluation
- However, classical theism gives the stronger view.
- Theistic personalism assumes that God must relate like a human person, through changing mental states.
- Aquinas can deny this.
- God does not need to change for the divine-human relationship to be real.
- Instead, humans change in relation to God through prayer, repentance, rejection, and grace.
- This preserves genuine relationship without making God temporal or changeable.
- If self-limitation reduces God’s knowledge or actuality, it looks like imperfection, not 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 it, then God cannot lift it.
- If God cannot create it, then God cannot create it.
- Either way, there seems to be something God cannot do.
- So, omnipotence seems incoherent.
Counter
- However, this only challenges a crude definition of omnipotence.
- Descartes can say God can do the logically impossible, so God can create and lift the stone.
- Aquinas and Mavrodes argue the stone is contradictory.
- A stone too heavy for an omnipotent being is like a square circle, not a real task.
Evaluation
- Mavrodes’ defence is sometimes criticised for assuming Aquinas’ definition of omnipotence.
- However, this criticism is weak.
- Mavrodes does not need to prove Aquinas’ view completely.
- He only needs to show that Mackie has not created a real paradox for it.
- The stone is only a problem if omnipotence means doing literally anything, including contradictions.
- But sophisticated accounts do not define omnipotence that way.
- Descartes accepts contradictions, while Aquinas and self-limitation views reject them as not genuine tasks.
- So the stone paradox does not refute omnipotence.
- It only refutes a simplistic version of it.
AO1: God as omniscient
- Omniscience means all-knowing.
- Philosophically, knowledge requires truth.
- So, God is omniscient if God knows every true proposition.
- Omniscience also means God cannot be mistaken.
- God therefore knows all true propositions infallibly.
- Aquinas argues that God has direct awareness of everything.
- This is similar to how we directly know our own perceptions.
- He calls this God’s ‘knowledge of vision’.
- However, this is only an analogy, because God’s knowledge is beyond human understanding.
- God’s knowledge is immediate, not based on reasoning or inference like human knowledge.
AO1: Boethius
- Boethius identifies an apparent conflict between divine omniscience and human free will.
- If God knows everything, God must know future human actions.
- Since God cannot be wrong, we cannot do anything other than what God knows we will do.
- This seems to destroy free will.
- It also creates a problem for divine justice, because it seems unfair for God to punish sin if humans are not free.
- Boethius’ solution is based on divine eternity.
- God is outside time and does not experience events 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” our future choices before they happen.
- He eternally sees them as present.
- This means God knows our free choices without forcing them.
- This also explains divine action.
- God does not enter time to make new decisions.
- What seems to us like a new divine action, such as answering prayer or performing a miracle, is really the temporal effect of God’s eternal will.
- God acts eternally, while we experience the results within time.
AO2: Whether divine eternity coherently resolves foreknowledge
- The appeal to divine eternity is criticised as paradoxical.
- Even if God’s eternal knowledge does not force our actions, it still seems to make them necessary.
- If God knows I choose X, I cannot choose Y.
- So future choices known by God seem unable to be otherwise, and therefore not free.
Counter
- Boethius argues this misunderstands necessity.
- Some things are necessary because of free choice.
- For example, if I see someone walking, it is necessary that they are walking while they walk.
- However, they could have chosen not to walk.
- Anselm adds: actions are necessary because they happen; they don’t happen because they are necessary.
Evaluation
- Boethius’ defence is stronger.
- The criticism says God’s knowledge makes our choices set in stone, but it does not explain what sets them in stone.
- Boethius and Anselm answer that the necessity comes from the action itself, not from God forcing it.
- If someone freely chooses X, then once they choose X, it is necessarily true that they choose X.
- God eternally knows that choice, but his knowledge is not the cause of it.
- The cause is still the agent’s free will.
- So divine eternity can preserve omniscience without destroying freedom.
AO1: Anselm’s four dimensionalism
- Anselm develops Boethius’ view of divine eternity to explain how an eternal God can know and act upon temporal events.
- Boethius’ image of God viewing all time from outside can suggest God is distant from time.
- Anselm avoids this while still denying that God is inside time.
- A temporal God would be confined by succession and therefore limited.
- So Anselm argues that God is not in time; rather, all of time is in God.
- This can be understood through four-dimensionalism.
- This is the view that objects and events extend through time as well as space.
- Anselm treats divine eternity as a higher reality than time.
- 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 by being eternally present with them, not by prediction.
- God can also act on particular moments because those moments exist within his eternal present.
- Anselm therefore strengthens Boethius by making eternity 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.
- Temporal events are not all happening in one moment.
- Some events must happen before others, such as my parents’ births before mine.
- So, if God sees all events in one eternal present, God seems to see them wrongly.
- This threatens omniscience.
Counter
- However, Kenny’s objection mainly attacks Boethius.
- Anselm gives a stronger view by treating eternity as a higher dimension.
- Katherine Rogers says Anselm sees eternity as “a kind of 5th dimension”.
- Within time, my birth and my parents’ births are not simultaneous.
- But in eternity, they are present together.
Evaluation
- Anselm gives the stronger answer.
- The criticism assumes that events cannot be both simultaneous and non-simultaneous.
- However, this only works if the same relation is being used in the same way.
- Anselm can deny this.
- Within time, my birth happens after my parents’ births.
- Within eternity, those same events are present together.
- So there is no contradiction.
- T-non-simultaneity and e-simultaneity are different relations in different frames of reality.
- This means God does not see events wrongly.
- Temporal order remains real within time, while all events are eternally present to God.
AO1: Swinburne
- Swinburne rejects the timeless view of God.
- He argues 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 explains divine action in time.
- Unlike Boethius or Anselm, Swinburne thinks God can respond to prayer, perform miracles, and make contingent decisions as history unfolds.
- This makes God’s relationship with humans more personal, because God actively engages with them within 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.
- However, future free choices are not yet settled facts, so they cannot be infallibly known.
- God can predict them, but not know them with 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 knows Judas will betray him and Peter will deny him three times before the cockerel crows.
- This looks like infallible foreknowledge, not prediction.
- That fits Boethius and Anselm better than Swinburne.
Counter
- Swinburne argues that God is everlasting rather than eternal.
- On his view, genuinely free choices cannot be known with certainty before they occur.
- If they were, freedom would be destroyed.
- God therefore knows us like a parent knows a child.
- He can predict future choices, but not know them infallibly.
Evaluation
- Swinburne’s view is weaker because the biblical examples look certain, not probabilistic.
- He weakens God’s omniscience to protect free will.
- However, Boethius and Anselm protect both.
- God does not predict future actions before they happen.
- Instead, God eternally sees them as present.
- This means God’s knowledge depends on what we freely do, rather than causing it.
- So free will is preserved without reducing God’s knowledge to probability.
- Swinburne’s larger limitation of God’s omniscience is unnecessary:
- A perfect God would not give up more omniscience than freedom requires.
AO1: God as supremely good (omnibenevolent)
- Omnibenevolence is the idea that God is perfectly good.
- This has a metaphysical meaning and a moral meaning.
- Metaphysically, goodness is linked with perfection.
- So, God is omnibenevolent because God is a supremely perfect being.
- Morally, perfect goodness means God’s will always aligns with what is good.
- Plato and Augustine connect these two ideas.
- They argue evil has no positive existence in itself.
- It is simply a lack of goodness, called privatio boni.
- So, God’s moral goodness follows from God’s metaphysical perfection.
- Christian theology usually holds that God is both the source and standard of moral value.
AO2: The Euthyphro dilemma vs Divine command theory
- Omnibenevolence defines God as the source of perfect moral goodness.
- The Euthyphro dilemma asks whether God commands things because they are already good, or whether they are good because God commands them.
- The first makes goodness independent of God.
- The second makes morality arbitrary, since God could command cruelty and make it good.
Counter
- Some thinkers, such as W. L. Craig, accept the second horn.
- They argue that if God commanded something like genocide, it would be right.
- However, the stronger response is that goodness comes from God’s nature.
- God’s commands are good because they reflect his omnibenevolent nature, not because they are arbitrary.
Evaluation
- The Euthyphro is still a serious challenge because we can ask what makes God’s nature good.
- Simply saying “God’s nature is good” can seem empty.
- However, Aquinas gives the best answer.
- For Aquinas, goodness is linked to being, actuality and perfection.
- Evil is not a positive thing, but a lack or defect.
- Since God is pure actuality, with no defect or unrealised potential, God is the fullest possible being.
- This means God’s nature can be the final explanation of goodness.
- So the Euthyphro does not show that omnibenevolence is incoherent.