God, the "eternal" agent?

Originally posted by Una
God in His eternalness has no beginning and no end. Time of course is irrelevant to Him. I would say that yes, all is present to Him since He is outside of time. As temporal creatures we have no way to understand, we can only tag the term eternal and offer a less than adequate explanation.

This explains the statement, "the lamb slain at the foundation of t er He can declare the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end since He is present in both.

So, if I understand you, you are saying that God's eternality consists in at least 2 things: (1) He "has no beginning and no end" (2) He is outside time (which you also think implies "all is present to Him" ). Is that correct?

By the way, what is your reasoning for thinking that one's being outside time implies that all is present to him? If you are correct in that, then it would seem that one of the two properties Plantinga outlined is redundant (his second one implies his first one).

Originally posted by LemonJello
Thanks, that description seems relatively clear to me.

Here would be my initial thought regarding it (and otherwise I am still trying to sort out what I make of it). Let's suppose something like this is the case. I agree with you that this would represent a case where God can be causally active and get stuff done and yet appear timeless from our pe ral relations altogether. Do you agree?

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Apologies for late reply...Yes I agree with you on the points you made and have to confess that it wasn't my intention to provide a full reconciliation of the system proposed (rejected?) by Plantinga. More I was attempting to provide my best approximation to it (where from the perspective of theists who make such claims it would as you say, appear as though this entity exists independently of that which can be described in terms of temporality)

Unfortunately I don't hold much hope that the base problem you pose can be reconciled satisfactorily. Moreover, like many claims made about this supernatural entity "God" and it's supernatural dwellings; I am of the belief that (assuming for sake of argument some god exists) they are just wild extrapolations from holy books and limited by, as Vistesd points out, the pitfalls of our language.

Originally posted by LemonJello
[b]If God is atemporal, then his timeline is orthogonal to ours, so he is atemporal to us and we are atemporal to him.
Does this rule out any 'cause - effect' type interactions?

Picking up with that, let's suppose we have a view of causation where the causal relata (cause and effect) are both in the category of event. So, in other words, we have ...[text shortened]... onally oriented timeline? Of course the causal relata are related, but how must they relate?[/b]

If I understand you I'd say no, it does not hinder our interaction with each
other. I think God operates in the now with us, but isn't limited to it by
anything that hinders Him, it is just that He sets up the rules and time is
part of the package. God chooses to interact with us in the 'now' and He
stresses that throughout scripture, we tend to want to interact with God
in some time in the future which means, just not now.

Going back to the is "now" timeless, if it is then we have the only point
where our interactions are on the same page so to speak.
Kelly

Originally posted by vistesd
Okay, gotcha. I was far too general--careless, in fact. All my usages expressed action.

For the case of the “inadvertent slip” in narration…I would say that the sentence is not grammatically well-formed, but that it is still possible to understand that the event is being recalled from the past. There are cases, however, in which a sentence can be

Again, thank you, old friend, for working with me on this--and straightening me out![/b]

This has moved too far into philosophy for me to handle. My only point is that tense and time should be decoupled and on those grounds at least it is not necessarily contradictory to say God sees and maintain that God is timeless.

I think perhaps though that we are caught up in a constrictive cognitive view of religious language; we are forgetting why a theist might say "God sees". Probably the theist simply wants to indicate the inevitability of retribution for wrong-doing (I can imagine a homilist saying, "God sees, turn away from your sin."😉 So we should probably not interpret the sentence "God sees" according to normal syntactic and semantic rules.

Originally posted by Conrau K
This has moved to far into philosophy for me to handle. My only point is that tense and time should be decoupled and on those grounds at least it is not necessarily contradictory to say God sees and maintain that God is timeless.

I think perhaps though that we are caught up in a constrictive cognitive view of religious language; we are forgetting why a ...[text shortened]... ly not interpret the sentence "God sees" according to normal syntactic and semantic rules.

Yeah, me too.... Besides, Lord Shark recalled your "noncognitive" approach in the other thread (I don't recall that being your word there, though), in which a number of us found agreement. Maybe we should just abide there...