Found on Facebook page of Subdeacon Charles Michael
I am a science fiction and fantasy fan, along with being an animé fan. In fact currently I am reading/listening (audiobook) a steampunk book set in Victorian England. Well, I should say anchored in Victorian England, but there is some travel involved, don’t you know. As a matter of fact, the heroine’s steam powered dirigible has just arrived at the “etheric” port of the Island of Malta. Know this book is a multi-genre book in that it has werewolves, vampires, metanaturals, slowly unraveling ghosts, and any of several other oddities.
One of the issues that interests me in the area of science fiction is the concept of time travel. This may surprise you, but I actually took a graduate class in the philosophical concept of time as part of my very secular Master of Arts in Philosophy. It was quite a surprise to me that Saint Augustine was one of the people that was read. It was even more surprising to find out that he was one of the first persons to seriously spend time thinking about the nature of time. In part he did this because he was interested in the nature of God. If God has foreknowledge, how does this apply to time?
How does God have foreknowledge? Does he have foreknowledge because he has decreed all that is about to happen? Some types of Calvinism argue this. That is, it is not that God has foreknowledge but that God’s sovereignty is expressed through his one decree in which al which is to come is set in motion. That one decree includes double-predestination, that is some are predestined to life and some to death. Do realize that many Calvinists do not agree with the one decree and with double-predestination.
Or does God have foreknowledge because he knows all things that will happen? In a more Armenian vein, one could argue that it is not simply that God knows the future, but rather that God knows all possible futures, which would be one expression of the thought that God is omniscient (all-knowing). In this version, God knows all potential futures. Because he does and because of his power, he can nudge events in such a way that the potential future that he desires will be the potential future that comes about. This actually allows him to only intervene in human history at key points where a nudge is needed. This also preserves human free-will in that almost all decisions are made by humans, while incredibly small nudges come from God. Think of the saying:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the battle was lost;
For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—
All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.
That saying would mean that God would only need to ensure the “want of a nail” in order to guide the course of entire kingdoms. In one sense, this is a variation of the more modern “butterfly” analogy (which uses one version of quantum theory), in which a butterfly flapping its wings on one continent may end up being the cause of a storm on another continent. Yes, I quite well realize that this analogy has been rather well torn apart, but on a bigger scale (such as the one in the saying about the nail) could still have some significant truth.
What Saint Augustine and the Greek fathers argued is that God had to be outside of time. They argued it because they argued that God is changeless and that if God were in time, then he would change from moment to moment, therefore he could not be in time. We would argue the same, but for perhaps a different reason. Space-time is a concept that requires anyone who is part of this universe to be subject to the strictures of space-time. But, since we say that God created the universe, and matter is part of space-time, then this means that God must be outside of space-time.
Yet, I do not agree with Saint Augustine’s conclusion that God sees all of our motions in time as being equally present to him. That is, if you are going to make this argument, which is actually the most common argument about time and God, then then you have to argue that somehow God cannot really fully differentiate where you are in our time experience. I have heard people explain this as saying that God sees your birth, growth, maturity, death, and resurrection, as an equally present event to him. But, I would argue that this has more to do with Saint Augustine’s conception of God’s sovereignty than it has to do with sound logical sense. Mind you, to object to Saint Augustine on this matter is a Ph.D thesis, so I will not go on at length. But …
In Jesus Christ, God subjected himself to finiteness and to space-time. If it is true that he is outside space-time, it is equally true that in Christ he has chosen to be in space-time. I am convinced that God is aware, and has always been aware, of the passage of our space-time. I also think that Saint Augustine is wrong. He does not see our birth as somehow being equally present to him as our death. Rather his “observational platform” is utterly different, and utterly alien, to the way in which we view time, and yet the future is still the future. I tend to think of God as foreknowing all that will happen because he knows all the places in which he will nudge history in order to ensure that all will take place according to his plan. We are elected because he foreknows us. He foreknows us because he knows all the nudges that will guide this history to conform to his desires. Because he nudges history, he does elect.
Finally, the Greeks and the West thought that God was impassive, without passions. They thought this because to have passions is to imply a change from one state to another. Since God is perfect, how could he possibly change from one state to another? This is a neo-Platonist conception. Any change is proof that he is imperfect because you cannot change from perfection to perfection. You can only change from perfection to imperfection. But, we do not have to agree to that. Rather, various people, such as J.I. Packer have made statements such as, “A totally impassive God would be a horror, and not the God of Calvary at all. He might belong in Islam; he has no place in Christianity.”
So, I follow J.I. Packer. Our God is not impassive in the classical sense. This means that he can be aware of the space-time stream which automatically means that his is not unchanging. I believe that we have a God who is outside our space-time stream, who can observe our space-time stream, and who is aware of in what point in our space-time stream we are existing. I do not think that he sees our whole existence as being all co-present to him. Rather, I believe that he can discern the past from the present from the future, while being outside our space-time continuum as God and in our space-time continuum as Jesus. No, I cannot explain it. It is just another mystery to me, but a mystery that fits better than the way in which the Greek neo-Platonists have explained it.
Nice improvisation/extemporation on Romans 1:20. And along the way were you tempted to mention Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe? lol
The answer is 42.
I had forgotten that! Over thirty years since I read the books. Thanks for the refresher!
As with all discussions of God, but especially in this arena, I feel we have to start with the caveat that anything we can conceive will of necessity be an incomplete and imperfect description. That’s the transcendent reality of God.
So with that disclaimer stated, I’ll then disregard it and dive in. 😉
Saying God is “outside” of time or any other part of creation seems to imply that there’s something that has some sort of existence apart from God. And while God certainly transcends and is greater than creation, God is also ‘all in all’. Creation has no separate existence apart from God. So it’s perhaps more accurate to say that time and all creation exist within and as a part of God. Of course, there’s then also the discussion of how God withdraws enough so that his creation (including humanity) can have the freedom of distinct existence without withdrawing so much that creation ceases to exist, but that’s not the main focus of this post.
Like you, I have a problem with the idea of God as the outside observer with perfect knowledge as though ‘time’ and creation were somehow static and fixed. I’ve said elsewhere that I tend to agree with Hawking over Laplace and the same sentiment extends into the theological realm. Rather than a fixed a static thing, I tend to think of creation more as a rich and bubbling stew developing and changing over time. Of course, parts of it are self-willed ingredients, so the analogy is not necessarily a great one. But to the extent that God is separated from creation, the image of the chef creating and molding strikes me as somewhat better than the impassive and unmoved observer of a static sculpture.
How does foreknowledge work its way into the picture while allowing space for human will and freedom? That’s complicated and I wouldn’t claim to have an answer (being somewhat less than God myself). But I do have several thoughts and an analogy I find helpful.
First, while we often imagine ourselves completely free and self-willed autonomous beings, the reality is that our freedom is often sharply constrained by forces outside of us. That’s generally recognized even in a non-theistic sense in the social sciences. While we have rather more freedom of choice afforded to us by societal wealth here in the US, in most situations our choices are still constrained. We don’t have unlimited options with unlimited outcomes. We actually face just a few choices with a few possible outcomes. Many times, through the actions of others or our circumstances, we may effectively have no choices at all. We are “swept along” by events.
While we can imagine different paths and foresee some consequences, our knowledge is always limited. God’s is not. He sees not only our circumstances and choices, but those of everyone else, natural events, and the ways they all correlate. And from that knowledge, he can know all possible outcomes. In many senses they are almost foreordained. There was a Nicolas Cage movie years ago that captured a human scale version of what I imagine here. (The movie was Next. No particular recommendation for the movie, but it’s an interesting concept and the execution of the idea wasn’t bad.) He could only see the outcome of his own path and influence it. God sees the knows the whole, ever-bubbling picture.
As Christians, of course, we also believe God leaves us such freedom as our lives and circumstances allow. Love never seeks its own way or forces itself upon another. It’s a “limit” on God that springs from his nature. It allows evil, but it also allows great good. Still, I think those are the results, not the motivation or the reason. I think God allows his creation freedom and a distinct existence simply because God is love.
Still, those limits are not really limits for God. With perfect knowledge, many acts are still possible. It could be as little as the perception of a pause and a moment of clarity to consider an action you are about to take. At times, it could take the form of a sign or wonder, though I get the sense that God is sparing with those as too many could become coercion. Most importantly, of course, God joined his nature with humanity’s in Christ. We could not ascend to God, so out of love he descended to us. That is then the center of reality, the locus of all time, the basis for our reality.
Not sure if any of my ramblings are helpful, but hopefully some piece might be.
Saint Augustine spent time (pun intended) on the subject of time because he realized that it impinged on our image of God. There is no easy answer, only centuries of debate, even among secular philosophers. But, I agree with J.I. Packer enough to say that any conception of time and of God that changes the picture of God presented in Scripture is a conception that we cannot hold. Thus, frankly, some of the arguments about God’s impassibility often owe more to secular Greek philosophy than to a God who is pictured as an expressive God. He mourns over his lost children, he snorts in anger, he loves in an overflowing fashion. To say that these types of statements are merely human analogies for something indescribable is a half-truth.
Indeed, we agree on that point in case I wasn’t clear. I was discussing the necessary inadequacy we face with our analogies of how God views time. Mostly because we are limited in ways that God is not.
As far as any classical sense of impassibility goes, it’s always been my sense that the incarnation itself discredits the idea. God joined his nature to mankind’s in Christ without the divine overwhelming the human. It’s harder to imagine a greater change.
At which point, I’d expect a kitchen sink to get thrown into the mix around Page 200.
Like the trait of Utopian Perfect Soceities like North Korea and ISIS — since The System is by definition Perfect in Every Way, any change would be for the worse and Must Be Stamped Out.
You know, I had not thought of that. But, it is true that the more Utopian the society, the more that they oppose, and even resent, change.
Because once you have achieved Perfection, any change would be Imperfection.
In a long-ago back-and-forth about SF societies, it was my reason why Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Man showed absolutely NO change for 12 to 40 thousand years, from its establishment to the time of C’mell and Jestecost.