God, Eternity and Freewill

• Eternity - the idea of timelessness - time does not affect the eternal
• Everlasting existence - existence without end
• Atemporality - The state of being outside the timeprocess.
• For Boethius, God is eternal - outside time and unaffected by it. For God, everything is now
• Your action in the future is still free, God knows about it but doesn't intervene.
• God is knowing, he does not have the same constraints in time that we have.

  God doesn't have a past, present or future - his knowledge transcends all temporal change and abides in his immediacy of his presence.
• God looks down on us 'as though from a lofty peak above' but doesn't intervene
• All events occur simultaneously for God, in his eternal presence
• God cannot be blamed for original sin or the birth of dictators because he doesn't know what they would do in the 'future', as there is no future for him.

  All time happens simultaneously.
• Free Will - Boethius


  God sees free choice being made.

  He knows them, but his observance of them doesn't make them necessary, even though they are future to us.
• Divine Foreknowledge


  God doesn't have foreknowledge because there is no 'fore' for him .

  God observes yet preserves the status of having knowledge as opposed to opinion about what is coming, which preserves his omniscience.
• "not a knowledge of things in the future but a knowledge of an unchanging present."
• God doesn't have a linear experience of time, it is simultaneous
• Eternal - "The simultaneous possession of boundless life which is made clearer by comparison with temporal things."
• "who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy" - Book of Isaiah
• Aquinas - God & Time


  When we speak of God, we use analogical language.

  God isn't like us , we have no words to describe how God experiences time so everything we say is just comparing similar things but not actually the reality of God.
• Anselm - God’s eternity followed from the definition of God as ‘that than which none greater may be conceived’.
• “That he is not in place or time, but all times and places are in him” – Anselm
•  Anselm - Although God is not in time, God still has some relationship to time. All of time is in God.
• Anselm, God and time

  For God, all the moments of time, (past, present or future), are equally and eternally present.

  All of time always exists in divine eternity. God is eternally present with all moments of time and everything that happens within time.
• Consequences of Anselm's theory

  God learns our future actions by being with them in eternity.

  God doesn’t know our future actions through predicting them since free choices are unpredictable.

  He knows our future actions through apprehending them by being simultaneous with them in eternity.

  This seems to conflict with omniscience.

  If he learned our future actions, then before he learned them he didn’t know them.

  It is incoherent to suggest that an omniscient being could learn.
• Anselm - God is impassible - not capable of being affected by that which is outside himself.