Nature of God

• Augustine says God’s reasons and justice are beyond our understanding (cop out?)
• Eternal refers to timelessness, as per Boethius.
• God is outside of time, according to Boethius.
• Wolterstorff argues that timeless good is not just from classical philosophy, but also timeless god has to be different from human experience of life in the physical world.
• Boethius states that God does not experience past, present, future.
• For god, time is in a simultaneous present.
• Augustine supports the notion of a timeless God, stating that the bible created day and night, and he is separate from this.
• Aquinas supports the idea of a timeless God, stating that time is linear for us but God sees It as a whole.
• Anselm’s 4 Dimensionalist argues that God is not limited by space and time like we are, therefore he can be in the past, present and future at once.
• Time and space is part of God, It is in God- God is not in time/space.
• God can see all of our past/ present still.
• Wolterstoff argues that god is “Freed from the bondage of temporality”.
• Swinburne finds the notion of time being simultaneously present to God incoherent, stating that he could not “make much sense of this”.
• Love involves a 2 way process and ability to respond.
• How can a timeless God respone to people’s prayers?
• Helm argues that God, considered as timeless, cannot have temporal relations with any of his creation.
• Aquinas argues that since God is perfect he cannot change, as any change for a perfect being would necessarily be a change from perfection.
• Swinburne argues that an eternal God could not respond to people’s prayers, since that would require acting within time.
• The Logical Problem of Evil is an a priori argument that Evil and the God of Classical theism cannot exist together.
• Augustine would have to say that its God’s Justice for a child to get cancer and that God is still omnibenevolent despite allowing it, which is logically inconsistent with God being Omnibenevolent.
• It still seems unfair because its not our fault we have original sin.
• Jesus knows that Judas and peter would betray him, indicating that God/ Jesus knows future actions.
• Walterstoff argued that God being omniscient doesn’t include knowledge of the future.
• Arguably, God knows what were going to do next like a parent knows what their child will do next, because they know them really well but they cannot predict this for sure.
• Origional sin violates Moral responsibility because it is not fair for all of humanity to be blamed for the actions of Adam and Eve, suggesting an indefensible view of moral responsibility.
• Augustine responds that Humanity is not being punished for original sin, but Adams loins became infected with original sin which caused beings to be born sinful.
• Augustine argues that God allows evil because we deserve it.
• Biblical evidence for everlasting View includes the ten plagues of Egypt where God sent the first plague, waited to see if the Pharoah would let the Jews go, he didn’t, so God sent the second plague and so on until plague number 10.
• Language that suggests God acting personally in the bible reflects people of the time encountering God.
• Wiles argues that God does not literally act in this world, stating that God loves us all through the gift of creation.
• Aquinas argues that prayers should not be for requests.
• The concept of an everlasting God is supported by Wolterstoff, stating that the only way to understand some of God’s actions in bible is to see them as responses to human’s free choices.
• Wolterstoff argues that you cannot criticise an everlasting God for not knowing the events of the future because God’s omniscience only includes what has happened.
• Descartes argues that God can do anything, even the impossible.
• God created the laws of nature, logic and physics and he can break them.
• Mackie argues that something being “logically impossible” is oxymoronic and doesn’t make sense, stating that either God can do something because be is God or it is impossible.
• By definition, an omnipotent being could lift any stone so it it a logically impossible thing to do and does not detract from Aquinas’ definition.
• God is still all powerful because only God can limit his own power.
• Descartes would avoid this problem by offering a logically impossible solution: That God would create a stone too heavy for him to life, and then lift it.
• Vardy: God’s omnipotence is limited.