Reddit mentions of God and Time: Four Views (Spectrum Multiview Book)

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but you hold the B-theory of time: time, as a whole, is static. The past, present and future are all equally "real". There is no real "coming to be" of events. Events exist alongside each other, but do not actually "occur" in the way they seem to from our point of view.

That sounds strange to me.

> The strength of my view is that it allows for an actual state of affairs in which God exists without creation.

The idea of God changing states is a problem.

> He is a temporal being.

I'm pretty sure I don't understand you properly but this seems like blasphemy.

> I still cannot understand a sense of the word "exist" in which God does not "exist". It seems to me that whatever "is" must also "exist".

I think we can deal with that, though maybe not right this minute.

> it seems pantheistic to say that God is all of reality.

Yes! I hope to never say such a thing. What I do say is that reality has its being in God, not vice versa. He contains it--it does not contain him, though of course he fills it. He is its environment or habitat. The ground of its being. He does not have an environment or habitat.

It's easier to think of it in terms of space, probably because we're more used to thinking of divine omnipresence. God created space. It has its being in him, not vice versa. It does not contain him yet he fills it. Same with time and every other created thing. And every other thing apart from God himself is created.

I just re-listened to this lecture from the author I recommended earlier. Great stuff. He defends the classical doctrine of divine eternity against Craig's and several related views. Highly recommended!

I got this book a week or two ago. I don't know whether I'll ever read it but Craig is one of the contributors and it might interest you.

Blessings!

> So I gather. The only recent stuff I've read is Brian Greene's, but he seems to think there being a first moment of time isn't decisively supported by the data, and that there's good evidence for eternal inflation. This was a 2010 book. When was the Vilenkin talk?

The Vilenkin talk was in 2012. I'm about 98% sure he's since made a stronger statement, but I can't for the life of me find it lol. I haven't read Greene's book, so I can't say anything to it, but James Sinclair analyzes string models in his and Craig's essay on the Kalam in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

> I don't know. I don't know how controversial it is among scientists; all I have are (e.g.) the Wikipedia page, which is perfectly friendly to beginningless universes, and admits that a Big Bang singularity is impossible according to our well-supported physics.

I think you might find this article stimulating.

> It's also inconceivable that time have a sufficiently explained first moment, which is some evidence against it, if the normal pro-PSR considerations are evidence.

Well that's now to move past physics and into philosophy, particularly the intersection of phil of time and phil of religion. There are various ways theists attempt to hash out this perplexing issue. Craig himself grapples with this in his book on the Kalam, in the Blackwell essay, and in his book Time & Eternity. There is a solid Four Views book on this too. I think it must also be said that it is, at the very least, just as inconceivable that there is an infinite amount of time before this very moment than of time beginning.

> And there are many beginningless models; I'm not sure why we should think the disjunction of them has a probability below 0.5.

Yes, of course there are many beginningless models, but that's not to say they are the best-supported or even well-supported for that matter. In philosophy, for example, as I'm sure you're aware, there are dozens of models for the mind-body problem, but that alone doesn't thereby validate any of these models. From my understanding of the current state of the field, which, admittedly, is rather shallow, physicists pushing past-eternal models do so knowing that the current evidence we have is in favor of models with an absolute beginning of the universe. In other words, they are knowingly going against the grain of the evidence.

> In any case, the point of my original comment was to say that I don't know whether principles such as PSR apply to cosmogonic questions. I don't have any intuition in that direction, and it seems possible that PSR is a metaphysically contingent consequence of the physical laws we happened to arrive at, laws that themselves would be metaphysically contingent.

I suppose we just have different intuitions, and thus reach an impasse here lol. However, I'm not sure how PSR could be a metaphysical consequence of physical law. Could you explain that more (or differently)? I can understand it being contingent given it being birthed by contingent physical law, but I'm not sure how physical law can birth a metaphysical PSR. If it's a strictly physical principle, then why say there is a metaphysical PSR? Or am I misunderstanding you?

> But that's precisely what physicists do with physics itself: apply it to everything in the universe but toss it out when we get to the Big Bang singularity. And the beginning of the universe is radically different from everything else in the universe in interesting ways, for example (allegedly) that it's unbounded by time on one side.

Well you're conflating the KCA with the contingency argument. The KCA operates on a causal principle from beginnings ("everything that begins to exist has an efficient cause"), whereas contingency arguments operate on broader explanatory principles, typically focusing on contingent concrete particulars ("everything that exists (concretely) has an explanation for its existence"). With that said, physics only goes so far until we reach metaphysics, of course, and I'm not familiar with any relation between the PSR and cosmogony, let alone it being standard practice of physicists to throw it out completely. In fact, the entire project of cosmology seems completely founded on the PSR.

> But in my experience (I'm not an expert), those religion still (e.g.) anthropomorphize this creative agent or describe its act as will. And I certainly wouldn't want to call these views theistic either.

Well, they would, haha, but I suppose this is now just categorical. But would you consider the existence of a single, impersonal, immaterial, eternal, transcendent cause of the universe closer to theism or atheism? Where would you put this on the spectrum of conceptual schemes?