Coherence of God

• Four Divine attributes of God

  Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence, and Eternal/Everlasting
• Omniscience


  All-Knowing, God has perfect knowledge and knows everything that is logically possible for him to know
• Omnipotence


  All-Powerful, God is Perfectly powerful and cannot contradict. He can do all that is logically possible for him to do

  for example he cannot make a triangle with four sides
• Omnibenevolence

  God is perfectly good and never does anything evil, he only does what is morally good
• Eternal - Traditional


  God exists outside of time

  • this view has support from the bible in Genesis, if God created the universe he must have existed outside of it to create it
  • God is immutable and unchangeable, so he must be atemporal as a temporal being would be changable
  • God sees all of time simultaneously
• Everlasting


  God exists within time.

  • he was there at the beginning of time and will continue to exist forever
  • God interacting with the world is an essential tenet of Christianity, therefore God must be temporal
• Eternity as an incoherent concept


  • if god exists timelessly, he would know all events at once without experiencing them in a sequence
  • God could see the burning of Rome and a modern event simultaneously
  • this is absurd because the past, present and future cannot be simultaneous with one another
  • this shows how the classical conception of eternity is incoherent
• Atemporal vs Temporal beings regarding simultaneity

  What is simultaneous for God, an atemporal being, is different from what is simultaneous for human beings, temporal beings

  • T-Simultaneity: applies to temporal beings, like humans that can perceive two things happening simultaneously in the present moment only
  • E-simultaneity: applies to atemporal beings like God, which can perceive things happening simultaneously at all times