I ran across an interesting article by theologian Jack Cottrell: Understanding God: God and Time
The article speculates about God’s relation to time, and the nature and extent of his foreknowledge. Is God timeless (outside of time)? Or does God experience time in some sense (everlasting)? Cottrell argues that God does experience time, but that he is metatemporal – God experiences his own time, and also created our time.
Relating to God’s foreknowledge of our universe, Cottrell argues for something that he calls the noetic “big bang”. God foreknew what would happen in our universe when he decided to created it, but not before.
Just as the universe (supposedly) began at a single point of space and almost instantaneously exploded to form the massive universe we now observe, so did God’s foreknowledge of the entire history of the universe begin at a single point of time and then expand in a kind of noetic “big bang.” This noetic “big bang” or explosion of foreknowledge was an event in the life of God, an event that occupied “X” amount of time. Before this event, God had no knowledge of this actual world; after this event he knows its entire history. Since the knowledge occurs prior to the actual creation of the world, it is true foreknowledge.
We should stress that what God foreknows is not the unfolding history of a self-contained universe, with God himself being just an observer of what created causal forces (e.g., free will) will bring about. Rather, this is the time when God makes his decisions and plans regarding his own intervention into the unfolding historical process, or else regarding his deliberate permission to allow the created causal forces to proceed unhindered. The history that unfolds in God’s mind is not just the world’s history; it is his own history too.
In this event of the noetic “big bang,” as God is determining when and how he will intervene in our history, in a sense he is thinking more new thoughts, i.e., making new decisions concerning his own actions. In another sense they are not really new, since from all eternity he has had a complete knowledge of all possible worlds and all possible contingencies, and has eternally known his own potential responses to whatever contingencies will ever arise. So during the “big bang” process God does not have to ponder or weigh possible.
So Cottrell largely agrees with the Open Theist – that God exists in time, but also with the Classical Theist – that God has exhaustive foreknowledge of the world he created.
This approach seems to me to fly in the face of God’s aseity. I don’t believe we can relate to the how of God’s knowing, because we do not live as other than creatures.
The concept of God and time has only been on the periphery of my thoughts before.
I don’t know if I agree with all of Dr. Cottrell’s conclusions (I think I’ll need to read it 2 or 3 more times just to grasp them…), but it is definitely mind-bending ;)
I think he did a good job of explaining God’s self-existence (aseity) by describing time as an attribute, although I don’t know if that is warranted.
This subject of God’s relation to time is one of the few areas where I think an appeal to mystery is ultimately legitimate.
I agree, an appeal to mystery is valid here. :)
No one taking these passages seriously can embrace currently fashionable libertarian revisionism which denies God s sovereignty over the contingent events of history. Some of these effects God desired unconditionally and so wills positively that they occur but others He does not unconditionally desire but nevertheless permits due to His overriding desire to allow creaturely freedom and knowing that even these sinful acts will fit into the overall scheme of things so that God s ultimate ends in human history will be accomplished. For example if the miracles occur at a momentous time say a man s leprosy vanishing when Jesus speaks the words Be clean! and do not recur regularly in history and if the miracles are numerous and various then the chances of their being the result of some unknown natural causes are reduced.
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Wouldn’t this view of God’s foreknowledge indicate that God, since he could have chosen not to create, would have a possibly different knowledge than He does in fact have? If this is the case, how then can we say that he is in fact omniscient, or that God’s omniscience is dependent upon his will to create.
Hi Sam. With the simple foreknowledge view, God’s would have a different foreknowledge if he decided not to create. Not all Arminians hold to SF, but I lean towards that view. See this post here for my thoughts on the matter. http://wesleyanarminian.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/an-explanation-of-simple-foreknowledge/