I’ve been thinking a lot this semester, in connection with my Philosophy of Time seminar, about whether the A-theory of time—the view that there is an objective present—can be made consistent with classical theism. I am now thinking there are two main problems here.
God’s vision of reality is a meticulous conscious vision, and hence if reality is different at different times, God’s consciousness is different at different times, contrary to a correct understanding of immutability.
One can only know p when p is true; one can only know p when one exists; thus, if p is true only at a time, one can only know p if one is in time. On an A-theory of time, there are propositions that are only true in time (such as that presently I am sitting), and hence an omniscient God has to be in time. Briefly: if all times are the same to God, God can’t know time-variable truths.
I stand by the first argument.
However, there may be a way out of (2).
Start with this. God exists at the actual world. Some classical theists will balk at this, saying that this denies divine transcendence. But there is an argument somewhat parallel to (2) here. If all worlds are the same to God, God can’t know world-variable truths, i.e., contingent truths.
Moreover, we can add something positive about what it is for God to exist at world w: God exists at w just in case God actualizes w. There is clearly nothing contrary to divine transcendence in God’s existing at a world in the sense of actualizing it. And of course it is only the actual world that God actualizes (though it is true at a non-actual world w′ that God actualizes w′; but all sorts of false things are true at non-actual worlds).
But given the A-theory, reality itself includes changing truths, including the truth about what it is now. If worlds are ways that all reality is, then on A-theory worlds are “tensed worlds”. Given a time t, say that a t-world is a world where t is present. Argument (2) requires God to exist at a t-world in order for God to know something that is true only at a t-world (say, to know that t is present).
Now suppose we have an A-theory that isn’t presentism, i.e., we have growing block or moving spotlight. Then one does not need to exist at t in order to exist at a t-world: on both growing block and moving spotlight our 2025-world has dinosaurs existing at it, but not in 2025, of course. But if one does not need to exist at t in order to exist at a t-world, it is not clear that one needs to exist in time at all in order to exist at a t-world. The t-world can have a “locus” (not a place, not a time) that is atemporal, and a being that exists at that atemporal locus can still know that t is present and all the other A-propositions true at that t-world.
Next suppose presentism, perhaps the most popular A-theory. Then everything that exists at a t-world exists at t. But that God exists at the t-world still only consists in God’s actualizing the t-world. This does not seem to threaten divine transcendence, aseity, simplicity, immutability, or anything else the classical theist should care about. It does make God exist at t, and hence makes God in time, but since God’s existing in time consists in God’s actualizing a t-world, this kind of existence in time does not make God dependent on time.
I still have some worries about these models. And we still have (1), which I think is decisive.
4 comments:
Your two worries trade on anthropomorphic assumptions about divine cognition and on an equivocation in the temporal adverb “when.” A classical theist denies at the outset that God’s knowledge is a sequence of occurrent mental states that come and go with the creaturely present. The divine intellect is identical with the divine essence; it is not composed of discrete episodes or attentional phases. To say that God “sees” Adam sinless and then “sees” Adam sinful is, at best, a metaphor translated from our temporal standpoint. What it picks out in reality is one and the same eternal act of understanding, by which God knows, in their proper created modes, both Adam’s innocence and his fall. The difference lies entirely on the side of the effect and its truthmakers, not as an intrinsic alteration in God. If one reifies the metaphor and speaks of a change in God’s “conscious state,” one has already abandoned divine simplicity and immutability and smuggled into God the very temporal structure at issue.
The extrinsic denomination account was never a trick for dodging change; it is the formal expression of simplicity. Because God is pure act, no accident accrues to Him; every predicate that seems to vary with the world—Creator, Lord, Judge—varies by a relation whose real foundation is in creatures. That some truths become true in the temporal order does not entail that God acquires a new cognitive feature. It entails that temporal states of affairs now obtain, and that those states of affairs stand in a new relation of dependence and manifestation to the one divine act that grounds them. Calling that a change in God’s “consciousness” simply redescribes a Cambridge change as if it were intrinsic, and so begs the question against immutability. Nor does this reduce God’s knowledge to something “unconscious” or less than vision-like. The tradition ascribes to God intuitive, non-discursive, self-identical knowledge: it is more vivid than our vision precisely because it is not parceled out in successive attentional moments.
Your second argument hinges on the maxim that one can only know p when p is true and that, if p is true only “at a time,” the knower must be in time. The adverb “when” is here misleading. For us, to know p requires that p be true; it does not require that the knower’s act be temporally simultaneous with the truthmaker. In God there is no “now” that advances; His single, timeless act is present to all temporal truthmakers. Tensed propositions can be regimented without importing temporality into the knower. Either we paraphrase the tensed content tenselessly with an explicit temporal index—“that at t, Socrates sits”—or we treat truth as time-relative and say that the pair ⟨p, t⟩ has value true. In both treatments, the condition for the truth of the item is anchored in the creaturely order at t, while the divine act by which it is known is not located at t or any time. To insist that the knower must be found at the same temporal coordinate as the truthmaker confuses conditions on the object of knowledge with conditions on the subject’s mode of being.
The proposed escape via “existence at a t-world” retains the confusion in modal dress. On a classical account, talk of “worlds” is heuristic: possibilities are grounded in the divine ideas; actuality is the order God freely wills. To say that “God exists at w iff God actualizes w” is at best a façon de parler and at worst a category mistake: it swaps the causal dependence of a complete temporal order on God for God’s supposed location within that order. Presentism does not alter this. If all that exists is what is present, then all that exists is present by dependence on God’s timeless causality; it simply does not follow that God exists in time because He gives being to the present. Nor does moving-spotlight or growing-block help, for the same reason: the meticulousness of providence does not require the partitioning of the divine act into temporal “loci.”
Your worry “beyond metaphysical immutability” presses that even if the difference in God’s knowing is extrinsically constituted, the divine “conscious state” would still change. But the grammar of “state” presupposes precisely what simplicity excludes. In created intellects, knowledge is a perfection inhering in a subject by forms, species, and acts that come to be and cease; attention can be shifted and intensified; occurrent and standing knowledge alternate. In God, the intellect is not a receptive power perfected by added forms; it is subsistent act. There are not many acts of understanding, nor a sequence of attentional foci; there is one simple, infinite act identical with God. The Fathers’ denial of change in God’s “heart” or “mind” is perfectly at home here: what changes, when we repent or sin, is our relation to the one immutable God and the creaturely order He sustains. That is why they could affirm simultaneously divine impassibility and God’s real knowledge of temporals without imagining a flux of inner divine episodes.
The appeal to Malachi, read as forbidding any “difference in conscious state,” does not defeat the extrinsic denomination account; it presupposes the same analogical discipline. “I the Lord do not change” is precisely the denial that God’s perfections ebb and flow with events. To infer that God’s knowledge must acquire new internal features whenever a creaturely present shifts is to turn a revealed negation of change into an argument against the very doctrine that grounds it. And importing a modern psychology of consciousness into God only compounds the error. A non-physical, simple intellect cannot be parceled into successive phenomenal states; if one insists on describing divine knowledge as “conscious,” one must immediately add that it is consciousness without succession, without attention-shift, without new occurrents—an infinite intensity that is numerically one.
Your remarks on omniscience extend the same anthropomorphism. It is unobjectionable to append “with certainty” to “knows all truths,” since the divine act is infallible. But it is not coherent to require that an omniscient being “always be attending to every piece of that knowledge to a maximal degree” and that all knowledge be “occurrent.” “Attention” is a created remedy for finitude; it presupposes limitation and trade-offs in cognitive power. In God, there is no divided field to be scanned, no background store to be activated, no competition among contents. If one asks whether God has standing knowledge or occurrent knowledge, the correct reply is that these are temporal modes and do not bear on a timeless act. If one insists on “maximal attention,” one must concede that it cannot vary in God; and if it cannot vary, it cannot supply the premiss needed to generate change.
The thought experiment meant to show that a being might be “in time” and yet possess Boethian eternity misconstrues eternity as a pattern of distribution rather than a mode of being. Multilocation across times, or a rotation that moves variation from the temporal to a spatial axis, still leaves intact the metaphysical structure of succession. A life “wholly present at every time” by duplication is not “all at once”; it is multiply instantiated within a manifold that is still measured by before and after. Boethius and his scholastic heirs do not characterize eternity by epistemic breadth or ubiquity but by the absence of temporal division: totum simul as the measure proper to what is without succession. A being whose “rich and changing mental life” is merely reindexed along x rather than t is not thereby eternal; it remains intrinsically divided by variation and thus falls short of the undividedness of the divine act.
You also pressed a disanalogy between cross-world and cross-time predications about God and conclude that we can tolerate extrinsic differences across possible worlds but not across times. Classical theism need not grant even the appearance of a cross-world “difference in conscious state.” If only one world is actual, there is nothing real across which God differs; there is the single, simple act whereby He knows and wills this order. Possible orders introduce no real plurality in God; they signify the fecundity of the divine ideas—which are God Himself—not a shelf of alternative mental episodes. That we can say “in w God knows p, in w′ God knows ¬p” is a harmless semantic convenience; it does not posit a multiform inner life in God any more than the fact that we can predicate “Creator” of God in a world with creatures and not in a world without implies intrinsic alteration in Him.
The upshot is that your “decisive” first argument assumes what a Thomist denies: that omniscience must be cashed out as a temporally variegated stream of conscious states matching the world’s successive present. If, instead, one begins from simplicity, immutability, and eternity, and then disciplines one’s semantics accordingly, the appearance of conflict with an A-theory dissolves. A presentist may still say truly that only present things exist; a growing-block or spotlight theorist may locate the present differently; in every case, the present’s being is received from the timeless cause, and the truths that are true-at-t are known by the same timeless act as true-at-t. Nothing in that requires God to be in time, and nothing in that introduces a change of state in Him. The dispute between A- and B-theorists may need to be settled on independent grounds, but it does not force the classical theist to choose between omniscience and immutability. The choice arises only if one first exchanges the divine intellect for a creaturely psychology and then reasons from the exchange to a foregone conclusion.
'Either we paraphrase the tensed content tenselessly with an explicit temporal index—“that at t, Socrates sits”—or we treat truth as time-relative and say that the pair ⟨p, t⟩ has value true. In both treatments, the condition for the truth of the item is anchored in the creaturely order at t, while the divine act by which it is known is not located at t or any time.'
This is basically what I want to say since I am a B-theorist. But I don't think an A-theorist can say it. An A-theorist thinks that statements like "It is presently raining" are *absolutely* true, not just true relative to a time or a temporal index. It is of the very essence of A-theory to deny that knowing that it is raining at t1 misses out some of the information in knowing that it is presently raining, even if t1 is the present time.
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