I've heard this line more than once.

How then can God perform any action when action implies the passing of time?

I haven't read his detail work on this but Craig maintains that God is timeless before creation but is "in time" after creation.

That still implies action without passage of time, surely?

Otherwise "before creation" is meaningless.

I should use "without creation" or some other timeless preposition.

I'm going to have to ask you to elaborate as to how you're avoiding the problem.

Try to think of it like a digital character attempting to conceive of you and I in the "real" world. That's what's happening when you try to think of God acting outside of time.

God doesn't perform any action. God doesnt do anything - yet there would be nothing without him and nothing would happen.

I agree with Hardball47 - the problem is that we are probably incapable of conceiving of a non-temporal being. Our language certainly isnt up to the task of talking about one - you can't say anything about God without imputing a tense (which doesn't apply).

If we are incapable of even conceiving that this makes any sense then why should we believe that it is true?

I meant incapable of conceiving what it would be like to exist a-temporally, not incapable of seeing that it makes sense. (We can know about 4 dimensional objects despite being incapable of visualising them).

Nonetheless, I don't think you should believe that it's true, so I don't really know how to respond to your question.

Stop thinking about time and start thinking about space-time. Every observer has thier own view of space-time. If all of space-time were a loaf a bread, your view would amount to a single slice. God's view is a little different. God can see the entire loaf(or the sum of all the slices) of our space-time all at once.

And before and after. Oh, the head crunch...

Having read your posts in other threads I'm sure this isn't your intention, but what you seem to be doing here is simply dismissing the problem.

What you say there is precisely the issue - we can't conceive of a non-temporal being. I would argue that this simply means we can't conceive of a feasible God. It's simply a concept that cannot work.

You can't say God doesn't do anything whilst maintaining that he consciously chose to bring about the universe.

If actual input to this thread were a loaf of bread, yours would be the gaps between the slices. There is nothing of any substance here that I can discern.

How can God act without the passage of time is the question. Changing the wording to include "space-time" doesn't solve anything.

Better understanding what time is does help answer the question.

Suppose there is an alien living on a planet 10 billion light years away...lets name him Alf. Suppose you at this moment are sitting on a couch in your home and Alf is sitting on a couch in his home. For the sake of argument lets pretend you and Alf are not moving relative to each other. Now given the parameters of this senario the space-time loaf of bread is sliced up in an identical manner. What is now for you is now for him.

Suppose Alf gets up from his couch and hops into his car and drives at 10 mph directly away from you. Now that you are in relative motion to each other you are no longer observing the same slice of space-time. You and him no longer share the same present. What is now for him is about 150 years in your past. If Alf turns around in his car and drive toward you at 10 mph, suddenly what is now for him is 150 years in your future. If Alf turns his car around again and moves away from your back in his past. Before Alf began his little car trip you and he were contemporaries, then you weren't yet born, then you died, then weren't yet born again.

Since we are all moving relative to each other your time is independent from my time and vice versa. Because we are so close to each other and moving so slowly relative to each other there isn't much discrepancy between what is now for you and what is now for me. For all intents and purposes we are in the same now. But thats not really the case....you just have the be a great distance or moving extremely fast to see it.

Erm...yes, that's very nice that my time is different to your time.

But we're trying to talk about the absurdity of action WITHOUT time.

Sort of like we do with illustrations like this, except for real.

Are you talking about the notion of "before" and "after"?

I'm talking about the notion of independence from time.

Sounds like that view would mess with omniscience. I know you didn’t study this in detail, but do you have any ideas for how to reconcile them?

I think you're a very good poster, and it puzzles me how you write stuff like the above and still find "God" to be a useful construct. You can replace "God" with "some unknown energy" or "nature" or "all that is" or "the great unknown" or whatever, and it has the same meaning. Actually, it has perhaps more meaning because it doesn't impose a bunch of anthropomorphic and religious baggage that the concept of "God" entails.

I've argued before that it is nonsensical to talk about God being independent of reality. If thats what you mean then I agree with you.

However I see no reason God can't be independent of our space-time. His own reality might have something timesque(there probabily is some notion of before and after) but I don't think it has the look like our space-time.

Not really. The question doesn't interest me for some reason. It does interest Craig - he has several advanced articles on his website and has written a few entire books on the subject.

I'm kinda in the Augustinian school. I know what time is until you ask me to explain it.

One of the better visual analogies I've heard, describes God as an ocean and all that exists as the waves. The waves have real existence relative to one another but they lack real subsistence (existing as things in themselves) sans the ocean. Pre-creation, there was just the perfectly flat, eternal ocean and through the act of creation the waves emerge. The ocean is still the ocean (it exists independently of time and things), yet it is in each and all the waves all the time (omnipresent & omniscient).

I agree again - I don't think God concsiously chose to bring about the universe. We are using our language and our understanding of existence and attempting to describe something we don't understand. I'm not dismissing the problem (Jibninjas said the same thing and I find that puzzling) I'm acknowledging it - to just blithely continue speaking about God as if he is temporal seems to be dismissing the problem (or at least ignoring it).

I think a better understanding of creation is that God allows the universe to exist by dint of will. That he is the reason that things actually exist and happen. (Even that has a present tense, but again - it's impossible to speak in a timeless fasion).

I'm only recently beginning to aritculate it, but I have begun to realise that I use God very differently from most theists. (I always knew my beliefs were different, but it's only just dawning that the whole concept of what purpose God serves in my worldview is different). Broadly - I don't consider God an explanation of anything really. There's a "God explains..." thread where I'm trying to discern in what ways theists consider God to be an explanation - in my mind though that's not the linguistic purpose of the term God (if I can put it in that convoluted way to be clear I'm speaking of my purpose for using the word, not some ultimate meaning of life).

As a consequence I think complaining that the religious term "God" doesnt have any real scientific or verifiable use is analogous in my opinion to labelling poetry a waste of time since nobody actually shares many characteristics to a summer's day. Basically, I don't think religious claims are statements of fact - I think there is quite a substantial qualitative difference between the two beliefs:

"The universe came about due to God" and
"The universe came about due to the Big Bang"

I no longer think it is a necessary endeavor to frame my religious views in terms which are consistent with my scientific beliefs, since I suspect if there's any conflict between those fields, one of them has overstepped the mark.* I don't fret too much if my spiritual language is full of culturally biased or anthropomorphic language, since I'm not striving for the same objectivity as I am when I speak of scientific or rational claims. I'm of the view that my religion is almost definitely incorrect anyhow - the "use" I get from God is purely a subjectively evaluated framework for me to analyse and interpret my spiritual experiences and as such 'nature', 'energy' or the other alternatives you suggest just don't do it for me.

It's all a bit early for me to be very articulate on it (and I may well change my mind). I recognise that people do make scientific claims on the basis of religious beliefs and I think that is an error. The reverse also happens I think - my father is very big on implicitly assuming that because we've encountered nothing we can't eventurally explain through science, everything is therefore explainable through science. Whilst I don't expect him to drop his extreme empiricism at the first puzzle, I do sometimes wish he'd at least allow that a non-scientific question may actually exist.

EDIT * I hope it's clear that I don't mean it wouldnt matter if I had religiously derived beliefs which contradicted scientifically derived beliefs. What I mean is that I don't think the two fields are trying to answer the same questions. Consequently, I can't see how any answers are really going to be problematic - provided one doesn't use them incorrectly.

I am going to defend the theists here somewhat. Time has a somewhat different meaning in physics than it does to ordinary people. In the way we use it, it refers to the units that run off at a constant rate which we use to measure events. This poker hand took 38 seconds, bill clinton was born 64 years ago, etc. To be outside of that sort of time doesn't make a lot of sense.

But in Einsteinian physics, time is not constant. It can speed up, slow down, warp (at near light speed), begin, end, relate to space, etc. And physicists use these concepts to help explain how our universe functions and what its history is.

The thing is, Einsteinian time is a more elusive concept, and one that probably would allow us to say that some force, or cause, or law of the universe is not contingent on it. In that sense, such a phenomenon might be 'outside of time', that is, not subject to relativity, outside of the space-time contiuum entirely.

Of course, I am not saying such a phenomenon exists. I am simply saying that modern physics does give us the language to describe something as independent of time.