Boethius

• What does Boethius mean by the term timeless present?

  The nature of God's knowing
• How does Anthony Kenny criticise Boethius?

  Absurdities
• What analogy did Nash use to clarify god's relationship with time?

  Hill top analogy
• How could Nash's concept of time and God be criticised (refer to Pike)?

  how can a timeless God act in a temporal world
• Unpack Mascall's Poles?

  God = subjective poll

  Temporal realm= objective pole
• Zagzebski maintains that Boethius' model fails - why?

  To have freewill, we must be able to do otherwise

  If we had the power to do otherwise , we would have to change what God knows. This would require change in the timeless realm

  Therefore we do not have power to be free
• What did Boethius say about the relationship between foreknowledge of all things and freedom of the human will?

  "There seems to be a hopeless conflict between divine foreknowledge of all things and freedom of the human will. For if God sees everything in advance and cannot be deceived in an way, whatever his Providence foresees will happen, must happen."
• what was the initial problem?

  Whatever God foreknows is something that must happen, and whatever must happen does not happen freely; therefore if God foreknows everything we do, we never act freely.
• Boethius states that "the outcome of something known in advance must necessarily take place"
• "Therefore, there can be no freedom in human decisions and actions, since the divine mind, foreseeing everything without possibility of error, determines and forces the outcome of everything that is to happen"
• From Gods perspective outside of time, he sees "all at once as present" before him all of the events in time, those past, present and future.
• Boethius places god in a timeless presence
• Foreknowledge creates conditional necessity not simple necessity. Simple necessity rules out freedom but conditional does not
• The absence of simple necessity does not automatically mean freedom exists.
• "If you know someone is walking, then necessarily he is walking" is a conditional necessity because "whatever is known, must be as it is known to be"
• "All men are mortal" in contrast is a simple necessity. A simple necessity is necessary due to the nature of the thing involved not necessary due to the condition of God's knowing that it is so.
• Anthony Kenny - "the whole concept of a timeless eternity, the whole of which is simultaneous with every part of time, seems to be radically incoherent."
• Mascall suggests that we think of God's act as a subjective timeless pole and an objective temporal pole. An act of God is at its subjective pole timeless, even though at its objective pole it is temporal.
• God timelessly exerts a creative activity towards and upon the whole spatio-temporal fabric of the created universe. This will be experienced as temporal by each creature who observes it and describes it from his own spatio-temporal standpoint, but it no more implies that God is in time... than the fact that i describe God in English means that God is English.