Two Kinds of Atheistic Argument

There are many good arguments against various arguments for the existence of God. Lamentably enough, for the atheist, good arguments against the existence of God are few and far between. Many recent arguments from evil or hiddenness, for example, are far from persuasive. In fact, some offerings – particularly at the popular level – are almost laughably weak. Sometimes arguments rely on rather spurious subjective value judgments, or even little more than pure guesswork, as tends to happen with arguments of the form: observation X is “expected” on naturalism, but “surprising” on theism; therefore observation X is evidence for naturalism over theism. Other arguments rest on highly dubious noseeum inferences; or worse, claims about what God would or wouldn’t do if He existed. Few of these evidential offerings amount to much, interesting though they are.

There is also a second family of atheistic arguments, not quite so popular but common enough. These arguments are not evidential in nature, but rather attack the coherence of the idea of God. I want in this article to discuss one of the more popular ones, an argument which runs along these lines:

1. God is a “timeless person.”
2. If a being is timeless, then it does not possess properties X, Y, & Z.
3. If a being does not possess properties X, Y & Z, then it is not personal.
4. Therefore, a being cannot be timeless and personal.
5. Therefore, God (a “timeless person”) does not exist.

In his book Believing Bullshit, atheist philosopher Stephen Law puts this point succinctly: “the idea of a nontemporal agent seems to make scarcely more sense than the idea of a nonspatial mountain.”

Upon examining arguments from this family we find just how difficult it is to construct viable versions. This is largely down to the fact that theologians enjoy considerable flexibility in constructing coherent accounts of God’s attributes. In this connection, consider three main positions concerning the eternal mode of God’s existence:

A. “Absolute divine timelessness”: in which God exists timelessly by necessity.

B. “Absolute divine temporality”: in which God exists in time from infinity past (and if our own time began a finite time ago, then God existed alone in some other time stream).

C. “Creation dependent temporality”: in which God exists timelessly in the absence of creation, but temporally with the existence of creation.

From this (far too brief) survey it is clear that the objection to the existence of God from the supposed incoherence of the concept of a timeless person does not apply to all conceptions of God’s eternity. Option B above is immune to this criticism. The atheist advancing this sort of objection would therefore have to rule out B as implausible (and thus reckon with arguments from philosophers such as Swinburne, Davis & Wolterstorff who defend some version of it). Of course, he could attempt to do just that (and my sympathies lie with him). B raises all sorts of problems. Firstly, it raises infinite regress issues. Secondly, there is a myriad of philosophical problems concerning how God’s time relates to ours (which is probably not infinite). Thirdly, there is an intriguing objection raised by Leibniz: why didn’t God create the world sooner? God does not appear to have any reason to create at one time rather than another. This objection is an interesting (and, I think, formidable) one. Unfortunately I have no time to expound it here, so must leave it to the reader as homework.

So, eliminating B, the timeless person objection emerges. Is it a good objection? I certainly don’t think so.

There are two ways for the theist to rebut the argument. Firstly, the theist could argue that some stated necessary conditions for personhood are not in fact necessary at all. Alternatively, he or she could accept the stated necessary conditions for personhood, but attempt to show how a being existing timelessly can meet them. The argument therefore hangs on the criteria set down for personhood. There are numerous candidates touted in the literature. It isn’t possible to survey the whole terrain here, but it seems to me that the best candidate for the position of necessary condition of personhood is self-consciousness. JR Lucus reckons if God possesses consciousness then He cannot also be timeless, since, says Lucas, time is inextricably linked with consciousness.

Lucas is correct that if God’s mind is a succession of contents of consciousness then we would indeed have a temporal series. However, what if God’s mental life is unchanging, containing no stream of consciousness? God’s consciousness could well be composed of tenselessly true beliefs, which He never gains nor loses. Such a state of consciousness would be changeless, and thus timeless (at least on relational views of time). Lucas needs to show more than consciousness – as we experience it – is a temporally elongated process. He needs to show that this is an essential property of consciousness. Take, for instance, the activity of knowing. If God is timeless, then, on a relational conception of time, His consciousness would be an unchanging knowledge of tenseless truths, lacking the property of being temporally extended. The works of philosophers such as Paul Helm, Nelson Pike and Brian Leftow has revealed that knowing is not necessarily an activity which need take time. If knowing does not necessarily take time, then knowing oneself – self-consciousness – need not take time, and thus there appears little reason to think a timeless being cannot be self-conscious.

Unpacified, Robert Coburn reckons a being cannot be personal unless it is capable of things such as: “remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, intending, and acting intentionally.”

Now, even if Coburn is correct that the capacity for such things is necessary for personhood, it would not follow that a timeless being cannot be a person unless we assume that timelessness is an essential property of a timeless being. On option C above God is contingently timeless. If timelessness is a contingent property of God, then He might well be capable of doing things such as “remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, intending, and acting intentionally,” even though it would be the case that if He should engage in such activities He would then be temporal, not timeless. By refraining from such activities he remains timeless, though capable of becoming temporal by so engaging in them.

I would go even further and argue that a being does not even have to be capable of these things in order to be considered, as God is supposed to be, a perfect person; and thus those who think timelessness is a necessary attribute of God can take some heart. Let’s look briefly at the things Coburn mentions.

Firstly, consider the act of remembering. Why should remembering be a criterion for personhood? True enough, humans who do not remember are in some way mentally deficient, but they are still persons. Is the idea then that God – a perfect person – would be somehow deficient if He cannot engage in remembering? Surely the act of remembering is not essential to divine cognitive perfection. The reason is rather simple – a timeless individual has no past to remember, and never forgets anything. If God, being omniscient, is a perfect knower, then there is no reason to think his perfect personhood would require memory. Something similar holds for the act of anticipating. A timeless individual has no future and thus nothing to anticipate. It seems that remembering and anticipating are only attributes a perfect person must have if he or she exists temporally.

What then of reflecting and deliberating? Such activities are only essential for beings who are not omniscient. God, by contrast, is omniscient – an infallible knower – cognitively most excellent. He does not need to reflect on a matter or deliberate with a view to finding the best answer or the truth – he already knows these things innately. Whether God is temporal or timeless He has no need of reflection and deliberation by virtue of omniscience, and there is no reason to think an omniscient being cannot be a person (arguably, omniscience entails it).

Lastly, intending, or acting intentionally, does not seem to be a necessary condition for personhood even with respect to humans, since there are moments in our own lives when we do not act intentionally, and thus wouldn’t be persons if we applied this criterion. Moreover, if we modify the criterion to say that a being must have the capacity for intentional activities, then a timeless God could possess such a capacity even if it were the case that should God exercise it He would then be temporal.

In any event, are intentionality and volition necessarily future-orientated? It strikes me as rather easy to think of counter-examples. For instance, a man trapped under water wills to hold his breath for as long as possible. A man gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel intends his present experience of aesthetic delight. A tourist on a beach on the Costa del Sol desires his feelings of rest and relaxation which he is currently enjoying.

If, then, there is nothing about intentionality and will that makes them inherently future orientated in the lives of human beings, why cannot we say of God that He wills and intends what He does timelessly? God, for example, wills and desires His own goodness – an activity that does not require time. Existing in the absence of creation God may will and intend to refrain from creating. In such a possible world God would exist atemporally with an eternal intention to refrain from creating.

Therefore, even if we concede that intentionality is a necessary criterion for personhood, there is no reason to think it is necessarily the case that if God is timeless then He does not exemplify intentionality. Ultimately where I think Coburn and others go wrong is in taking common properties of human persons – who exist temporally – and making them essential properties of personhood simpliciter.

From our survey of supposed necessary criteria for personhood it appears that the objections to the coherence of the concept of a “timeless person” are unsuccessful. It is either the case that the criteria offered are not in fact necessary for personhood, or else even if they are there is no reason to think a timeless being cannot fulfil them.

If an atheist could construct a good argument from this second family of arguments, the theist may well be in all kinds of trouble. However, as I hope I have helped to show, constructing such an argument is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Stephen J Graham

The Incompleteness of Temporal Life & God’s Eternal Existence

“Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” [Psalm 90:2].

“To the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all time and now and forever.” [Jude 25]

The Psalmist was a poet, Jude was writing an exultation; neither writer was a philosopher, and neither spell out for us an account of God’s eternal existence. So, just precisely what is the eternal mode of God’s existence? At the very least to be eternal means to be without beginning or end. In other words God did not come into existence and will not go out of existence. However, theologians have debated precisely what this amounts to. There are two broad conceptions of God’s eternal existence: interestingly each reflected in one of the verses cited above.

1. Omnitemporality. This view is that God exists in time. At any point in time stretching into infinity past we will find that God exists and at every point in the future God will exist. God therefore exists at every point in time. God existed 30 million years ago. He exists now. He will exist in 1000 years. This is the sense of everlastingness that is perhaps captured by the Psalmist.

2. Timelessness. On this view God exists outside of time altogether. So, God exists but he doesn’t exist “now.” God transcends time, having neither past nor future. This is perhaps what Jude means when he says “before all time,” (though Jude complicates it somewhat by then speaking of “now” and “forever!”).

In any event the biblical data on God’s eternal existence is generally regarded as under-determinative on just how God exists in relation to time. It is therefore to philosophical arguments that we must turn.

In this article I want to examine just one popular argument in favour of divine timelessness: the argument from the incompleteness of temporal life.

Advocates of divine timelessness – such as Brian Leftow and Eleonore Stump – seek to show that temporal existence is in some way an incomplete mode of being. Our past has gone, never to be relived, whilst the future is constantly just outside our grasp. In fact, our only hold on existence is this brief and fleeting present, which is continually passing us by and carrying us to our inevitable death. As temporal beings this is the only hold on existence we possess. Advocates of divine timelessness think such a mode of existence is in some way incompatible with God being the most perfect being.

Is this a good argument? I don’t think it’s half as good as its advocates think. Of course, it’s true enough that we find as we get older that our days slip away from us never to be lived again. Our past is gone – forever. William Lane Craig, who isn’t an advocate of God’s essential timelessness despite expressing sympathy with this argument, writes: “Time has a savage way of gnawing away at existence, making our claim upon existence tenuous and fleeting.” In a very real way being temporal beings harms us.

But must a perfect being – as God is supposed to be – possess his life all at once, such that it never passes away and is never yet to come?

I don’t think so. In fact the argument is rather anthropomorphic, resting on a human experience of time’s passage rather than temporal passing in and of itself. Human beings are indeed ravaged by time’s passing; our grip on existence is indeed tenuous. But such is not the case with respect to a being whose existence is of a different order to ours in a number of very significant ways. Why is time so savage to us? Because we age, we lose memory of the past, we weaken as we move into the future, and ultimately we will waste away and die with all the loss of opportunity, sadness, worry and pain that this often entails. We grow anxious and uncertain about the future. We regret many things we have done in the past and can no longer fix, or else we regret not doing things we no longer have the health for.

However, God doesn’t exist in the same way. Firstly, being omniscient, God does not forget his past. He can remember and relive it vividly at will. God’s mental faculties do not decrease as the years go by. Moreover, he knows the future just as fully as he knows the past and the present. Secondly, as an omnipotent being, his powers and abilities do not weaken with age. He does not get slower, he loses not an iota of his competency, and his strength is the same now as it was 50,000 years ago. Time does not weary Him, nor do the years condemn. Thirdly, his omnipresence allows Him to be aware of and causally active at every point of space. He thus misses no opportunities; there is no point of reality He misses out on. Lastly, though temporal he would still exist necessarily – meaning he did not come into existence and cannot go out of existence. Therefore, to describe His temporal existence as “fleeting” or “tenuous” neglects one of His core attributes: necessity.

For such a being the passage of time would not at all be the melancholic affair it inevitably is for finite and contingent beings like us. The argument from the incompleteness of temporal life rest chiefly on very strong intuitions about the loss experienced as time passes, but such intuitions are – alas – all too human ones. The problem is really with finite existence, not temporal existence.

We could leave the matter there, but we can go even further by presenting a positive case: stating why the life of a perfect being doesn’t necessarily imply a timeless existence, but rather that a temporal existence may well be preferable in a number of ways. I will briefly mention three:

(1) Even from our human point of view we experience that the flow of time can be a wonderful thing: as when we watch a play or listen to a piece of music. Many pleasures may well require a temporal existence to enjoy.

(2) A timeless being would not, it seems to me, be capable of interacting with his creation. Such a being wouldn’t be able to do anything at all: he couldn’t act or react and would be completely unrelated to us. In fact, could such a being really be a creator in the true sense of that word and remain timeless? I have my doubts. It would appear, then, that such a mode of existence is not obviously perfect.

(3) If God is timeless then he doesn’t know tensed facts – such as, “Stephen Graham posted a blog article today,” or “Bob was born 36 years ago,” or “there is currently an uprising in Ukraine.” A tensed fact concerns the relationship of an event to the present moment. However, in order to know a temporal fact a being must be temporally located. If God is a perfect being then he is omniscient – maximally cognitively excellent. If God is maximally cognitively excellent then he knows all tensed facts, and if he knows all tensed facts then he is temporal. Therefore, not only is temporal existence compatible with perfect being it might even be entailed by it.

It is fair, then, to conclude that it is not at all obvious that a perfect being would necessarily exist timelessly. There are, of course, other arguments for divine timelessness but this very popular one turns out to be less than persuasive. I’d say that its popularity is due more to its intuitive appeal than to any real cogency it possesses. In the final analysis it confuses temporal existence with finite existence.

Stephen J Graham