Swinburne and Divine Temporality.

Year 2005, Volume: 46 Issue: 2, 231 - 257, 01.08.2005

Engin Erdem

https://doi.org/10.1501/Ilhfak_0000000026

Cited By: 2

Abstract

Swinburne and Divine Temporality. In the tradition of philosophy and theology God’s eternityhas been interpreted in two ways. According to the first view, God’s eternity means that He is outsideof time or timeless. As for the rival view, God is not a timeless being but he has an existence whichpersists through an infinite time. In this paper, I examine Swinburne’s views, who is a prominentdefender of the second thesis, on God and time. He argues that a timeless God can not interact witha temporal world and creatures. Time has no beginning or end, and God must be in every period oftime. But it seems that there are some problems arising from his interpretation of Divine eternity.Firstly, if time has no beginnig and God is temporal, it is very difficult to say that God is the Creatorof time. Secondly, God, as a temporal being, can not know everything in the world but only knowswhat is happening “now”. Lastly, and more importantly, in his thesis, there is no essential differencebetween God’s nature and of the temporal creatures with respect to being limited by time

Keywords

God, Time, Eternity, Temporality, Everlasting, Knowledge, Tense, Creation.

Swinburne ve İlâhi Zamansallık

Abstract