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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/14/2001 9:27 AM (GMT -6) |   | I’m just finishing up William Lane Craig’s latest book Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time” (Crossway Books).
Doc, Craig’s explanation of Einstein’s special and general thories of relativity is excellent (which might not be saying much given my lack of scientific background). He argues (as several did here not too long ago) that Einstein’s theory applies to finite observers. Really good.
Interestingly, Craig argues that God is temporal from the creation onwards, but that God is timeless previous to creation, i.e. timelessness and temporality are both contingent attributes of God. His reasons for arguing that God is/was timeless previous to creation are:
1. The impossibility of an actual infinite.
and
2. The impossibility of God’s delaying creation for eternity.
In arguing #1 Craig makes interesting use of “Hibert’s Hotel.” First time I heard that one. Interesting.
My main reason for believing in the infinitude of the past was the impossibility of atemporal personhood. But Craig seems to think this is not a problem. But I think he’s a little weak here.
A very interesting read.
Anybody else read it yet?
Tom
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n/a
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 218
| Posted 12/14/2001 2:00 PM (GMT -6) | | I might be recieving a copy from a friend who goes to talbot (where craig teaches). It looks interesting. I think Doc touched on the time view in Satan and the Poblem with evil--around page 140. I have read only that part of Satan and the Problem With Evil, so I don't know if he touched on it elsewhere in the book.
Blessings
Paul
Our natural greatness is seen as part of God's image, and that natural greatness has been conferred on us to enable us to achieve our supernatural destiny:to be related to God and to obey him freely.---Diogenes Allen | | Back to Top | | |
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GregBoyd
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 1818
| Posted 12/14/2001 9:09 PM (GMT -6) | | I haven't read this book by Craig, but it sounds like he's using arguments he's used elsewhere (e.g. his stuff on the kalem argument). A few questions:
* What is the meaning of saying that God is atemporal BEFORE the creation of the world???
* Why can't there be an actual infinity? Indeed, assuming that Craig affirms that God is actual (of course he does), wouldn't this logic lead him to deny that God is infinite? Would he not be embracing a FINITE GOD (ironic since he has accused me of this).?
Doc
"Three is the magic number, oh yes it is, it's the Magic Number" - De La Soul | | Back to Top | | |
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writerdad
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Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 448
| Posted 12/14/2001 9:24 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: you should read God and Time: Four Views. In it Craig explains his view in greater detail, contrasting it with the other views. What they do in that book which I wish they would have done in Divine Foreknowledge is that the three authors get to respond to your work and then you respond to their responses.
Craig may be too high for me. I found his work in the book the hardest to grasp. I have Time And Eternity, but I wanted to start reading this Satan and the Problem book by some "regional" author everybody keeps harping about. I suspect Craig's book might be one I'll have to wade through. Harold
Oh Craig feels that those who argument from a time line before creation should change to a point...and that before creation God literally had no foreknowledge because, he not being in time, there was no future to foreknow. Just some of the highlights of his 20, 30 pages in the book. But to distill him is hard for me. Most of it I have to think over several times. But he is good, particularly in his responses to the other authors. I thought he torched Helm and the timeless view.
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Jewgrass
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Date Joined Sep 2001
Total Posts : 113
| Posted 12/21/2001 6:40 AM (GMT -6) | | I've read the first couple chapters of Craig's book and found it very interesting but over my head. I'm currently working on DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE. For a classical theist, the problem with a temporal God is that how could a God "in time", so to speak, know the future to any certainty? Open-theists don't have any problem with this. I haven't finished the book and would be interested in how Craig's molinism handles it.
Has anyone read THE ONLY WISE GOD by Craig?
--Jewgrass
"If we only love those who agree with us, we are in fact not loving others at all; we are only loving the assumed rightness of our own ideas." --Greg Boyd | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 12/29/2001 3:13 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
I haven't read this book by Craig, but it sounds like he's using arguments he's used elsewhere (e.g. his stuff on the kalem argument). A few questions:
* What is the meaning of saying that God is atemporal BEFORE the creation of the world???
Right, Doc. Craig admits in this book that if God is timeless in the absense of a physical universe, then there's no sense in speaking of what God was like "before God created." In the book he tends to speak of what God is like "in the absense of a physical universe" and not what God "was like prior to creation."
quote:
* Why can't there be an actual infinity? Indeed, assuming that Craig affirms that God is actual (of course he does), wouldn't this logic lead him to deny that God is infinite? Would he not be embracing a FINITE GOD (ironic since he has accused me of this).?
Good question. His arguements for God's timelessness in the absense of creation were two:
a) the impossibility of an actual infinity (which you address), and
b) the impossibility of explaining why, if God is temporal prior to creation, he waited so long to create.
After reading the whole book, these seemed to be there only two reasons Craig has for maintianing timelessness in the absense of creation. But listen, when it comes to arguing for God being a temporal being after creation Craig is reeeeally good. He does really well with Einstein's GR and SR, arguing that relativity applies only to finite, localized observers.
I saw that Finberg in No One Like Him also argues for God's temporality prior to and following creation. And he's a Calvinist!
One of the arguments I think strongly suggests that God is eternally temporal is the impossibility of atemporal personhood. But Craig denies this impossibility, arguing that whatever attributes are essential to personhood can be possessed by God "potentially" in timeless existence. It wasn't too convincing.
Tom
Edited by - TGB on 12/29/2001 8:14:02 PM | | Back to Top | | |
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