Time, Relativity, and Divine Eternity

Summary

Does only the present exist, or are past and future just as real?  Is God outside time or inside it?  Does God's knowledge of tomorrow leave anyone free?  And did time itself begin?  This article asks what relativity physics says about each question, and what it does not say.

1. Relativity's measured content is not in dispute. Clocks that move, or sit higher, tick at different rates. Laboratory clocks have measured the difference at less than 10 meters per second and less than a meter of height. Observers in relative motion also disagree about which distant events are happening "now." Two people walking past each other at an ordinary pace disagree about the present moment in the Andromeda galaxy by about eight days.
2. From that, some physicists and philosophers concluded that the future already exists. C. W. Rietdijk in 1966 and Hilary Putnam in 1967 argued that if no observer is privileged, every event in anyone's "now" is real, so future events are real. Putnam called the question "solved by physics and not by philosophy." Einstein, in a letter of condolence in 1955, called the distinction between past, present and future "only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
3. Relativity does not settle it. The argument needs a premise no experiment tests: that every observer's "now" is equally real. A presentist can hold that one frame's "now" is the real one, as Hendrik Lorentz did before Einstein. That view predicts every measurement Einstein's does. John Bell, whose theorem started the modern tests of quantum nonlocality, called it "perfectly coherent." Its price is a preferred present that nobody can detect. Einstein himself told Rudolf Carnap that the problem of the Now "worried him seriously."
4. The classical Christian view is that God is timeless. Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas held that God has his whole life at once and sees all times as present. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Richard Swinburne answer that a God who acts, responds and redeems must be in time. William Lane Craig holds that God was timeless without creation and has been temporal since. Paul Helm, who defends timelessness, grants that the biblical texts do not settle the question.
5. Physics ties each model of God to a theory of time. A timeless God fits the block universe, where all times exist and nothing is uniquely "now." A God in time needs one real "now" across the universe, which relativity does not supply unless a preferred frame is added. Newton made exactly that move, and Craig makes it today. Neither model is ruled out by evidence. The attempt to have both through Stump and Kretzmann's "ET-simultaneity" is rejected by critics on both sides as explaining nothing.
6. Foreknowledge does not force a choice. Nelson Pike's 1965 argument says that if God believed yesterday what Jones will do tomorrow, Jones cannot do otherwise. The Boethian answer needs a timeless God. The Ockhamist answer works on either model. Open theism, which says God does not know future free choices, needs an open future, but presentism does not need open theism: Craig is a presentist who affirms full foreknowledge. Prayer makes sense on both models.
7. Time probably began, and that fits creation without proving it. Augustine wrote that the world was made "with time" and not "in time." The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem shows that an expanding universe cannot be extended forever into the past without new physics. Vilenkin thinks the universe "probably did" begin; Sean Carroll thinks current physics is compatible with either answer; Stephen Hawking's no-boundary idea, a finite past with no first moment, is "just a proposal" in his own words. Aquinas held that the world's beginning is known by faith and cannot be proved.
8. Young-earth physicists are split on the same question. Phillip Dennis, a presentist, and Jason Lisle, an eternalist, each call the other's view heretical. Both charges rest on readings the other side rejects. Both views allow a young universe, because the age of the universe is the time elapsed on clocks since creation on either theory.

Verdict.  Relativity makes the block universe the simpler reading of physics, but the choice between it and a real, moving present is a matter of metaphysics, and the presentist's preferred frame costs nothing observable.  Christian theism has a coherent model on either side:  a timeless God for the block universe and a God in time for the moving present.  The weight of physics bears on which model of God is easier to hold, not on whether God exists.

Part 1: What relativity says about time

What is measured

Two facts about time come from experiment, and nobody in this debate disputes either.

The first is that clocks disagree.  A clock moving relative to another runs slow, and a clock lower in a gravitational field runs slow.  Earlier experiments saw them with atomic clocks at high speeds and over large changes of height.  In 2010 a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology saw both with two aluminium-ion clocks on a laboratory bench:  "We observed time dilation from relative speeds of less than 10 meters per second," and "We can now also detect time dilation due to a change in height near Earth's surface of less than 1 meter."¹¹

The second is that observers in relative motion disagree about which distant events are simultaneous.  For two observers moving at relative speed v, the events each calls "now" at a distance d differ by about v × d / c², where c is the speed of light.²  The effect is tiny nearby and large far away.  Motion at an angle to the line of sight gives proportionally less:

The example of two walkers is Roger Penrose's, and it is the standard way the problem is taught.³³  Nothing either walker does can affect Andromeda during those days, or be affected by it, because no signal can cross the distance that fast.  Relativity therefore offers no physical fact that decides whose "now" is right.

The block universe, in physicists' words

Hermann Minkowski turned Einstein's 1905 theory into a geometry of four dimensions in 1908.  "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."⁴⁴  The picture that came with it is called the block universe:  all events, past, present and future, laid out together in spacetime, with no moving "now."  The mathematician Hermann Weyl put it in 1949 in the sentence most often quoted:  "The objective world simply is, it does not happen.  Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time."⁵⁵

Einstein drew the same conclusion in print, more cautiously, in an appendix added to his popular book on relativity in 1952:  "Since there exist in this four-dimensional structure no longer any sections which represent 'now' objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated.  It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence."⁶⁶

His most quoted line on the subject comes from a letter of condolence.  His lifelong friend Michele Besso died on 15 March 1955.  On 21 March Einstein wrote to Besso's family:  "Nun ist er mir auch mit dem Abschied von dieser sonderbaren Welt ein wenig vorausgegangen.  Dies bedeutet nichts.  Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch hartnäckigen Illusion."⁷⁷  In Alice Calaprice's translation:  "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That signifies nothing.  For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."⁸⁸  Einstein died four weeks later.

The letter is a consolation, not a paper.  The physicist H. D. Zeh, who opens a chapter with it, judged that "There is no doubt that Einstein meant this remark very seriously."⁹⁹  It also needs a companion.  Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, talked with Einstein at Princeton between 1952 and 1954, and recorded this:

Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously.  He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.  That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation.¹⁰¹⁰

Einstein, Carnap adds, thought "that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science."¹⁰  Carnap, who held that science can in principle say everything, thought Einstein had confused experience with knowledge.  The man whose theory started the argument was on both sides of it.

The argument from relativity to the block universe

The physicist C. W. Rietdijk in 1966 and the philosopher Hilary Putnam in 1967 made the block picture into an argument.³  Putnam's version starts from the common view that "(i) All (and only) things that exist now are real," and adds what he calls "the most important assumption," the principle that "There Are No Privileged Observers":

If it is the case that all and only the things that stand in a certain relation R to me-now are real, and you-now are also real, then it is also the case that all and only the things that stand in the relation R to you-now are real.¹¹¹¹

Now take the two walkers.  Each is real to the other, since they stand at the same place.  An event on Andromeda that is "now" for the first walker is real to him, and so, by the principle, real to the second walker as well, even though for the second walker it lies days in the future.  Putnam concluded:  "on every natural choice of the relation R, it turns out that future things (or events) are already real!"¹¹  And he claimed the matter closed:  "I conclude that the problem of the reality and the determinateness of future events is now solved.  Moreover, it is solved by physics and not by philosophy."¹¹

Why the argument does not settle the question

The argument is valid.  Its weak point is its third premise, and that premise comes from philosophy, not from any measurement.

The premise can be denied without contradicting any experiment.  A presentist, who holds that only present things exist, simply says that some observers are privileged:  one family of observers has the true "now," and the rest have a "now" distorted by their motion.  This was Hendrik Lorentz's view before Einstein.  Lorentz explained the null results of the ether-drift experiments by saying that motion through the ether shortens rods and slows clocks, so the ether frame can never be detected.  His equations are Einstein's equations.  Every prediction is the same.  Craig, who prefers Lorentz's reading, states the position fairly:  the two interpretations are "radically different in their metaphysical foundations and yet which are, to date, experimentally indistinguishable."¹²¹²

John Bell, the physicist whose theorem set up the modern tests of quantum nonlocality, said so in an interview for the BBC, published in 1986:  "what is not sufficiently emphasized in textbooks, in my opinion, is that the pre-Einstein position of Lorentz and Poincare, Larmor and Fitzgerald was perfectly coherent, and is not inconsistent with relativity theory."¹³¹³  Bell had a physical reason to care.  Experiments on entangled particles seemed to him to show that "behind the scenes something is going faster than light," and a faster-than-light influence in Einstein's theory would run backward in time in some frames.  His "cheapest resolution":

going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincare thought that there was an aether - a preferred frame of reference - but that our measuring instruments were distorted by motion in such a way that we could not detect motion through the aether.¹³

He offered it as a dilemma, not a result.  He had, he said, no "solution to sell."¹³

William Lane Craig builds the presentist's case on this.  He grants the whole mathematics of special relativity and rejects only Einstein's reading of it:  "relativity corrects Newton's concept of physical time, not his concept of absolute time."¹⁴¹⁴  He then points to the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left from the early universe, as a natural marker of the preferred frame.  The Sun moves at 369.82 ± 0.11 km/s relative to it.¹⁵¹⁵  Craig calls the background "a sort of aether, serving to distinguish a universal rest frame," and adds:  "none of this proves that Newton was right in thinking that God is in time; but it does undercut the claim that STR has proven Newton to be wrong."¹⁴

That claim needs a correction.  The microwave background picks out a frame in which the matter of the universe is at rest on average.  The laws of physics are the same in every frame, and no experiment has found any law that singles that frame out.  So the background gives a presentist a natural candidate for the real "now."  It is not evidence that the candidate is real.

The relativist has a reply of his own.  The philosopher Howard Stein answered Putnam in 1968 and 1991.  Steven Savitt's summary of the result:  if "having become" must be defined from spacetime's own geometry rather than from any observer's coordinates, the only relation that works is the one between a point "and each point in or on its past light cone."³  On Stein's view, what has "become" for you is what could have sent you a signal.  That keeps a kind of becoming in relativity without any universal present.  It also means that nothing at a distance is happening "now" at all.

Kurt Gödel pressed the problem further in 1949.  He found solutions of Einstein's equations, rotating universes, in which no cosmic time can be defined.  If time's passage means that "reality consists of an infinity of layers of 'now' which come into existence successively," then where simultaneity is relative, "Each observer has his own set of 'nows,' and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time."¹⁶¹⁶  Gödel conceded that "Our world, it is true, can hardly be represented by the particular kind of rotating solutions referred to above."  His objection to a presentist who uses the cosmic time of our actual universe is that it makes whether time passes depend "on the particular way in which matter and its motion are arranged in the world."  He granted:  "This is not a straightforward contradiction."¹⁶  A theist has an answer here that Gödel did not discuss.  If the real present is God's present, then matter does not create it.  Matter's rest frame only lets observers estimate it.

What the evidence allows

No experiment distinguishes Einstein's reading of relativity from Lorentz's.  The case for the block universe is therefore a case from simplicity:  Einstein's reading needs no undetectable frame, and most physicists adopt it for that reason.  David Ingram and Jonathan Tallant, in the encyclopedia's article on presentism, state the cost plainly:  "we have to posit an unobservable frame of reference and we don't, typically, posit unobservables without good reason."¹⁷¹⁷  Simplicity is a fair guide, but it is not a measurement.  The case for a real present rests on experience, on the tenses of ordinary language, and, for some physicists, on quantum mechanics.  That last reason depends on how quantum mechanics is interpreted, which is the subject of Quantum Mechanics and Divine Action.  Not every physicist accepts the fixed block.  The cosmologist George Ellis, with Tony Rothman, argues for an "Emergent Block Universe" that "depicts the change from the potentialities of the future to the determinate nature of the past," a block that grows as quantum possibilities become definite.¹⁸¹⁸

The table above shows what the presentist pays.  At Andromeda, the Sun's "now" and the background's "now" differ by about 2,400 years.  If the background frame is the true one, then observers on Earth have the wrong idea of what exists at Andromeda today by more than two thousand years, and they can never find out by looking.  That is a strange thing to believe.  It is not a contradiction, and it is not refuted by any measurement.

Part 2: Is God timeless or in time?

The classical answer: God has his whole life at once

For about a thousand years the standard Christian answer was that God is outside time.  Richard Swinburne, who rejects that answer, gives its history fairly:  Origen held it in the third century, "but it became the normal view only with Augustine at the end of the fourth century, and was then universally taken for granted for the next millennium."¹⁹¹⁹

Augustine put it as a prayer to God in Book XI of the Confessions:  "Nor dost Thou by time precede time; else would not Thou precede all times."  And:  "Your years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come, that all may come.  All Your years stand at once".²⁰²⁰  In Latin, "anni tui omnes simul stant":  all your years stand together.²¹²¹

Boethius, a Roman statesman who wrote in prison at Pavia before his execution in 524,²² gave the definition every later writer used:  "Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis uitae tota simul et perfecta possessio," eternity is "the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment."^23232222  From it he drew his answer to the problem of foreknowledge, taken up in Part 3:  God's knowledge is better called "providence" than "prevision," because God does not see the future ahead of time.  He sees everything as present.²³

Thomas Aquinas adopted the definition in the Summa Theologiae and drew the consequence for God's knowledge:  "all things that are in time are present to God from eternity, not only because He has the types of things present within Him, as some say; but because His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality."  His image:  "he who goes along the road, does not see those who come after him; whereas he who sees the whole road from a height, sees at once all travelling by the way."²⁴²⁴

The temporal answer: a God who acts must change

Modern critics of timelessness argue from the God of the Bible, who hears, answers, waits and redeems.  Nicholas Wolterstorff, then of Calvin College, put it most sharply in 1975:

God the Redeemer cannot be a God eternal.  This is so because God the Redeemer is a God who changes.  And any being which changes is a being among whose states there is temporal succession.²⁵²⁵

He granted that Scripture calls God changeless in one sense:  "he is steadfast in his redeeming intent and ever faithful to his children."  But a timeless God, he argued, cannot know what is happening now, remember, or carry out a plan, and "if God were eternal he could not be the object of any human action whatsoever."²⁵

Swinburne calls the everlasting view "the simple, naïve, initial view," and holds that it is the view "explicit or implicit in Old and New Testaments and in virtually all the writings of the Fathers of the first three centuries."¹⁹  He judges timelessness "incoherent," because a cause must come before its effect and a perception after what is perceived.¹⁹  His reply to the worry that a temporal God is "time's prisoner" is that God chooses the conditions of time:  "To the extent to which he is time's prisoner, he has chosen to be so.  It is God, not time, who calls the shots."¹⁹  Without a created universe there would be no clock and no measure of how long anything lasts.  A measured time comes only with a universe "governed by laws of nature."¹⁹

Craig's two phases

William Lane Craig holds a middle view.  Time began with the universe, he argues, so God "existing changelessly alone without creation is timeless" and "enters time at the moment of creation in virtue of His real relation to the temporal universe."  His summary:  "Given that time began to exist, the most plausible view of God's relationship to time is that He is timeless without creation and temporal subsequent to creation."¹⁴  At the end of the book he states it again:  "God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation."¹⁴

Swinburne's own view of the time before creation, a time with order but no measure, is one Craig rejects.  A time without a metric still has the structure of a line, Craig argues, and so would be infinite in the past, with the problems an infinite past brings.¹⁴

What Scripture says

The Bible teaches that God has no beginning and is not measured by the world's time.  "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Psalm 90:2).  "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past" (Psalm 90:4), which 2 Peter 3:8 echoes:  "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."  God is "the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity" (Isaiah 57:15).²⁶²⁶  Paul twice speaks of God's purpose as set pro chronōn aiōniōn, "before eternal times," which the King James Version renders "before the world began" (2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2).²⁷²⁷  Augustine read that phrase as a sign that there were "times" before human history but none co-eternal with God.²⁸²⁸

The same Bible speaks of God in tenses.  He is the one "which is, and which was, and which is to come" (Revelation 1:8),²⁶ and he hears, answers, relents and acts at particular times.  Temporalists read those texts plainly.  Timeless theists read them as God's dealings with creatures who live in time.  Helm, who defends timelessness, grants that even Psalm 90 "cannot be regarded as conclusively" teaching it.²⁹  Swinburne, who rejects it, holds that the everlasting view is "explicit or implicit in Old and New Testaments."¹⁹  The texts settle that God is without beginning, made time along with the world, and is not bound by it.  They do not settle whether God's life has a before and after.

Testing each model against relativity

Physics cannot say whether God is in time.  It does say what each answer commits its holder to, and the commitments run in opposite directions.

A timeless God fits the block universe.  On the block view, every event exists at its own place in spacetime, and none is uniquely "now."  That is close to what Aquinas said God sees:  all things "present to God from eternity."  The relativity of simultaneity is no difficulty for a God who is not located at any time.  But this model has a cost of its own.  If there really is a moving present, a timeless God cannot know which moment it is.  Craig makes the argument:  "if He is to know tensed facts, He must know that t is present.  Thus, His factual knowledge must be constantly changing, in which case God must be in time."¹⁴  So a timeless God goes most naturally with the block universe, or with a view of time in which "now" is a matter of perspective.  Craig advised defenders of timelessness to say so openly:  "a more promising route for defenders of divine timelessness to pursue would involve the explicit adoption of a B-theory of time," the theory on which "now" is a matter of perspective.¹²¹²

A God in time needs a real present across the universe.  Craig himself states the problem:  "if God is in time, then the obvious question raised by STR is:  Whose time is He in?"¹⁴  God is everywhere, so his "now" must reach every place.  But on Einstein's reading of relativity no frame's "now" is privileged, and choosing one would be, in Craig's words, "the equivalent of the classical aether frame."¹⁴  Craig accepts that consequence.  He rejects Einstein's reading and returns to Newton.  Newton's absolute time "flows equably without relation to anything external,"³⁰³⁰ and Newton tied it to God.  In the General Scholium he added to the Principia he wrote of God:  "He is not Eternity or Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration or Space, but he endures and is present.  He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes Duration and Space."³¹³¹  Craig's gloss:  "In Newton's view God's "now" is thus the present moment of absolute time."¹⁴  So a temporal God requires the Lorentzian view of Part 1, with its undetectable preferred present.  Craig names the cosmic time of the expanding universe as the likely candidate:  "The defender of divine temporality may accordingly hold that God exists in cosmic time."¹⁴

The attempt to have both explains nothing.  Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann proposed in 1981 a relation they called "ET-simultaneity," which, as Natalja Deng puts it, they based "on notions borrowed from some presentations of special relativity."³²³²  Two items, one eternal and one temporal, are ET-simultaneous when "for some observer, A, in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present," and "for some observer, B, in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present."³²  So every moment of time is present to God, and God is present to every moment, without the moments being present to each other.  Critics from both camps reject it.  Craig, the temporalist, calls the definition "explanatorily vacuous."¹⁴  Paul Helm of King's College London, whose book is a defence of timelessness, agrees:  "The 'solution' to the problem is found simply by rewording the problem with the help of the device of ET-simultaneity.  ET-simultaneity has no independent merit or use, nothing is illuminated or explained by it."²⁹²⁹

The result is a pairing, not a verdict.  The timeless God and the block universe stand or fall together, and so do the temporal God and the preferred present.  Since Part 1 found that physics cannot choose between the block and the preferred present, it cannot choose between the two models of God either.

Part 3: Freedom, foreknowledge and prayer

This part is short.  The full debate over predestination, middle knowledge and open theism belongs to Divine Sovereignty and Freedom.  The question here is narrower:  which answers to the foreknowledge problem depend on the model of time.

The dilemma

Nelson Pike stated the modern form of the problem in 1965.  Boethius, he noted, had "entertained (though he later rejected) the claim that if God is omniscient, no human action is voluntary."³³³³  Pike's example is a man named Jones who mows his lawn on Saturday afternoon.  If God believed eighty years earlier that Jones would mow, then for Jones to refrain he would have to make God's past belief false, or make God not have held a belief he did hold, or make the believer not God.  None is in Jones's power.  Pike concluded that if God exists "(and is essentially omniscient in the way I have described) no human action is voluntary."³³

Every step of the argument uses a time:  God believed at t1 that Jones would act at t2.  That is why the model of time matters.

The answers, and what each needs

The Boethian answer denies that God believes anything at a time.  Linda Zagzebski's encyclopedia article puts it this way:  God "does not have beliefs at a time.  It is therefore a mistake to say God had beliefs yesterday, or has beliefs today, or will have beliefs tomorrow."³⁴³⁴  God sees Jones mowing as present, the way a person watching sees a man walk.  Boethius's own illustration:  "if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking," but your knowing does not make him walk.²³  Pike saw this reply coming.  A God outside time, he wrote, "could not be said to have known that a given natural event was going to happen before it happened."³³  The Boethian answer therefore needs a timeless God, and with him, on the reasoning of Part 2, something close to the block universe.

The Ockhamist answer works on either theory of time.  William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, revived by Marilyn Adams in 1967 and defended by Alvin Plantinga in 1986, distinguished "hard" facts about the past from "soft" ones.³⁴  A soft fact is partly about the future.  God's belief eighty years ago that Jones would mow on Saturday is true only because Jones mows on Saturday, so it is not fixed the way a hard fact is.  Plantinga:  "Not all facts about the past, then, are hard facts about the past; and only the hard facts are plausibly thought to be accidentally necessary."³⁵³⁵  This answer needs a temporal God, who believes things at times, and it needs there to be truths about the future for him to believe.

Open theism denies that God knows future free choices.  Gregory Boyd:  "I came to believe that the future was, indeed, partly determined and foreknown by God, but also partly open and known by God as such."  He insists the dispute is not about God's power to know:  it "is completely a debate over the nature of the future:  Is it exhaustively settled from all eternity, or is it partly open?"³⁶³⁶  Open theists, Zagzebski notes, "reject divine timelessness and immutability, along with infallible foreknowledge."³⁴  Open theism needs a future that does not yet exist, or at least contains no fixed truths about free choices.  It cannot be held with the block universe, where Jones's mowing simply exists at its date.

Restricted foreknowledge is the temporalist's middle path.  Swinburne, who holds God is in time, accepts the cost openly:  God "does not have essential knowledge of future human free actions," and God has chosen that limit by choosing to make free creatures.¹⁹

The table shows the point that matters for Part 5.  Eternalism rules out open theism.  Presentism does not require it.  Craig holds both presentism and full foreknowledge:  since creation, he writes, "God possesses literal foreknowledge, rather than timeless knowledge, of events which will happen in the future," and "In virtue of His knowing all future-tense facts, as well as all present- and past-tense facts, God has literal foreknowledge of the future."¹⁴

Prayer

Each model gives petitionary prayer a place.  C. S. Lewis put the timeless answer in popular form in 1952:  "Almost certainly God is not in Time.  His life does not consist of moments following one another.  If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty."  God "has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames."³⁷³⁷  On the same model God does not literally foresee:  "He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them".³⁷  Lewis offered his comparison to a novelist outside the story's time as an imperfect picture, not a proof.

On Craig's model God, in time, knows every prayer in advance and can plan its answer from the beginning.  On open theism prayer can change what God decides to do, because his decisions respond to choices he did not know in advance.  On every model, prayer is a request made to a person, not a mechanism, which is why controlled trials of distant prayer test something Scripture does not teach.  Those trials are examined in Does Prayer Heal?.

Part 4: Did time begin?

Augustine: no time before creation

The old objection to creation was a question:  what was God doing before he made the world?  Augustine reported a joke answer, that God "was preparing hell" for "those who pry into mysteries," and refused it.  His own answer was that the question has no subject:  "I boldly say, That before God made heaven and earth, He made not anything."²⁰  There was no "before," because there was no time.  The questioners should "see that where there is no time, they cannot say never," and "that there could be no time without a created being."²⁰

In the City of God he gave the formula every later writer used:  "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time."  In Latin, "non est mundus factus in tempore, sed cum tempore."^38383939  His reason was a definition:  "time does not exist without some movement and transition, while in eternity there is no change," so there could be no time until something changing had been made.³⁹  On this view time is a feature of the created world, as space is, and God is the creator of both.

Aquinas agreed that the world began, but he denied that this could be proved.  "By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist," because "the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself."⁴⁰⁴⁰  For Aquinas, a world without a beginning would still need God as the cause of its existence at every moment.

What physics now says

Whether the universe had a first moment is argued in The Big Bang and in The Cosmological Argument, and is not re-argued here.  The short version is that physics points toward a beginning without settling it.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of 2003 showed that "a cosmological model which is inflating — or just expanding sufficiently fast — must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions."⁴¹⁴¹  Its authors concluded that "some new physics is necessary in order to determine the correct conditions at the boundary."⁴¹  Alexander Vilenkin, one of the three, reads it this way:  "The answer to the question, 'Did the universe have a beginning?' is, 'It probably did.'"⁴²⁴²  He also says the theorem "does not tell us anything about the existence of God."⁴²  Sean Carroll, a physicist and naturalist, holds that "our current incomplete understanding of quantum gravity is fully compatible with both the possibility that the universe has lasted forever, and that it had a first moment in time."⁴³⁴³

Stephen Hawking offered a third possibility:  a past that is finite but has no first moment, because near the beginning time behaves like a direction of space.  "The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself.  It would neither be created nor destroyed, It would just BE."  He drew the moral himself:  "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?"⁴⁴⁴⁴  He also called the idea "just a proposal:  it cannot be deduced from some other principle."⁴⁴

Does a beginning of time support theism?

It fits theism, and the fit is not trivial.  Augustine said in the fifth century that time began with the world, long before physics took the possibility seriously.  A beginning also suits Craig's model, in which God is timeless "without creation" and enters time with it.

It does not prove theism, for three reasons.  First, the physics is not settled, as Carroll and Hawking show.  Second, a beginning of time raises a puzzle of its own:  a cause is usually earlier than its effect, and nothing is earlier than the first moment.  Augustine's answer is that God comes before time not by being earlier in time but by being eternal:  "Nor dost Thou by time precede time."²⁰  That is coherent, but it is a philosophical claim, not something physics shows.  Third, as Aquinas saw, the case for a creator does not depend on a first moment.  Hawking's question, "What place, then, for a creator?", assumes that a creator's only job is to start things.  The classical answer is that a creator is needed for anything to exist at all, at every moment, whether or not there was a first one.

Part 5: Time in young-earth cosmology

Relativity in the starlight models

Young-earth physicists use relativity's flexibility about time to answer the distant-starlight problem:  how light from galaxies billions of light years away reached Earth within a few thousand years.  Russell Humphreys used gravitational time dilation, John Hartnett a five-dimensional extension of relativity, and Jason Lisle a choice of how to synchronize distant clocks.  Those models and their fate are the subject of Young-Universe Cosmologies, with separate articles on white-hole cosmology, Carmelian cosmology, the anisotropic synchrony convention and the coordinate cosmologies.

One point from Part 1 matters to them.  Lisle argues that the Bible cannot be using Einstein's convention for simultaneity, because on that convention "Even the earth's annual orbit would cause the Creation Week to become millions of years long."⁴⁵⁴⁵  The arithmetic is right:  Earth's orbital motion shifts Einstein's "now" at 10 billion light years by about a million years each way over the course of a year.²  It shows that the creation week cannot be dated across the universe by a frame that changes with the seasons.  It does not show which convention, if any, the text uses.

Two young-earth physicists, two theories of time

Phillip Dennis and Jason Lisle, both young-earth physicists with relativistic models of creation, disagree about the metaphysics of time, and each calls the other's view heretical.  The exchange of fourteen publications is set out in Coordinate Cosmologies.  This article owns the question they ended up arguing about, so the charges are tested here.

Dennis is a presentist.  "Presentism is the view that the present is real; that there is an actual real moment called now throughout the Creation.  A present moment that continually passes.  The past is forever gone, the future will be."⁴⁶⁴⁶  His charge against eternalism is that it freezes the events of redemption in place:  "Christ is still on the cross suffering for sinners again and again and uttering "It is finished" (as potential time-travelers journey back in time to witness the event)."⁴⁶  He adds that "An eternalist cannot say the universe is young.  Since the future already exists, God created a universe with a temporal extent equal to the geometric distance from the first Creation events to a hypothetical final destruction of spacetime and some unknown future boundary."⁴⁶  He calls Lisle's view, if knowingly held, "a serious heresy."⁴⁶

Lisle is an eternalist.  "Eternalism is the claim that the past, the present, and the future are equally real.  I affirm this view."  His charge against presentism is that it denies the events of redemption:  "if only present things exist, have existed, or will exist, as strong presentism affirms, then the resurrection of Christ did not exist."  And he ties it to a heresy by name:  "presentism is the view of time that is embraced by open theists.  Open theism is the heresy that God does not know the future since it (allegedly) doesn't exist."⁴⁷⁴⁷

Each charge rests on a reading the other side rejects.

1. Presentists do not deny that the resurrection happened. A presentist holds that the resurrection is past, not that it never occurred: "Christ rose" is true, and true now. Lisle's argument is a version of a recognized objection, which the encyclopedia calls the "triviality argument": "only present things exist now" is trivial, "only present things have existed, exist now, or will exist" is false, so "presentism is either trivial or false."¹⁷ Lisle's gloss, that presentism holds "only present things exist, have existed, or will exist," is the second reading, and presentists reject it. Their claim is that only present things exist, full stop, while past-tense truths stay true; whether that collapses into the false reading is, in the encyclopedia's word, "controversial." Presentists treat giving up truths about the past as a price no presentist should pay: "rejecting (ii) seems a steep price to pay."¹⁷ Lisle has a real argument, but not one that shows presentists must deny the resurrection.
2. Presentism does not entail open theism. Dennis rejects open theism in the same paper, and gives Craig as a fellow Christian presentist.⁴⁶ Craig affirms that God "has literal foreknowledge of the future."¹⁴ Part 3's table shows the true relation: eternalism rules out open theism, but presentism leaves foreknowledge open.
3. Eternalists do not hold that Christ suffers again and again. On the block view the crucifixion happens once, at one date, earlier than the resurrection. It does not recur, and it is not "still" happening, because "still" is a present-tense word the block view does not apply to past events. Dennis's time travellers are his own addition. Nothing in eternalism requires that time travel be possible.
4. Eternalism leaves the universe exactly as young as presentism does. The age of the universe is the time that has passed on clocks since creation. In relativity it is measured along a path through spacetime, and the block view does not change that measure. If six thousand years have passed since creation on a presentist view, six thousand years have passed on an eternalist view. The existence of future times adds to the universe's total extent, not to its age.

The quarrel is still revealing, because each man's metaphysics matches his physics.  Lisle's model treats distant simultaneity as a convention with no fact behind it, which sits comfortably with a block universe in which "now" is a matter of perspective.  Dennis's model uses the cosmic time of an expanding universe, the presentist's preferred present.  A presentist has a reason to doubt any convention-based answer to the starlight problem:  if there is a real "now" across the universe, then there is a real answer to how long ago, in that "now," the distant galaxies were made, and no choice of convention changes it.  That is a consequence of Part 1, and it applies to Lisle's model only for readers who hold a real present.

Objections and responses

"Relativity has refuted the idea of a real present.  Only someone who ignores physics still believes in one."  What relativity measures is that observers' clocks and simultaneity judgments disagree.  It does not measure that every judgment is equally correct.  Bell called the Lorentzian alternative "perfectly coherent" and "not inconsistent with relativity theory,"¹³ and Ingram and Tallant, who are not defending it, grant that it is a real option whose cost is an unobservable frame.¹⁷  The honest statement is that the block universe is the simpler reading, not the only one consistent with the evidence.

"The neo-Lorentzian frame is an ether that conspires to hide itself.  That is ad hoc."  It is undetectable by construction, and that is its real cost.  But the block universe also asserts something no observation can check:  that future events already exist.  Both readings go beyond the measurements in the same way.  The choice between them is made on grounds of simplicity, experience and fit with other beliefs, and the article grants that simplicity favours the block.

"The cosmic microwave background is the preferred frame.  Science has found the ether."  No.  The background picks out the frame in which the universe's matter is, on average, at rest, and the Sun's speed relative to it is measured to be 369.82 km/s.¹⁵  That frame is convenient and natural.  No law of physics singles it out, so it is a candidate for the presentist's "now," not evidence that one exists.  Craig's "sort of aether" overstates it.¹⁴

"Quantum entanglement proves there is a preferred frame."  Bell offered the preferred frame as the "cheapest resolution" of a dilemma, and said he had no "solution to sell."¹³¹³  Whether entanglement needs a preferred frame depends on how quantum mechanics is interpreted.  Some interpretations need one, and others do not.  It is a reason some physicists take the Lorentzian view seriously, not a proof of it.

"Einstein called the passage of time an illusion.  Faith that time is real is naive."  Einstein's sentence was written to console a grieving family.  To Carnap he said the problem of the Now "worried him seriously" and that "there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science."¹⁰¹⁰  Whether the Now is an illusion is not something physics can measure, and Einstein seems to have known it.

"A timeless God cannot act in time, answer prayer or redeem."  This is Wolterstorff's objection,²⁵ and it is the strongest against the classical view.  The classical reply is that a timeless will can have effects dated at many times.  Swinburne, who rejects the view, states it fairly:  on it "God can 'at once' in his eternal present choose to bring about at any moment of time any (consistently describable) state of affairs."¹⁹  Whether a single timeless act can respond to events it timelessly sees is the point in dispute.  The Stump and Kretzmann attempt to explain it fails, as Part 2 shows, but the classical view does not depend on that attempt.

"A God in time is not sovereign.  He is carried along by time like everyone else."  Swinburne's answer is that time's limits on God are self-chosen:  "To the extent to which he is time's prisoner, he has chosen to be so."¹⁹  Craig's answer is that God was timeless without creation and freely entered time by creating.¹⁴  Newton's answer was that time is not outside God at all, since by existing always God "constitutes Duration."³¹

"If time began, nothing could have caused it, because causes come before effects."  A cause that comes before its effect in time cannot cause the first moment of time.  The classical theist does not claim one.  Augustine's God precedes time "not by time,"²⁰ and Craig's God is timeless without creation.  This needs a cause that is not earlier in time, which is a philosophical claim and is argued in The Cosmological Argument.

"Hawking's no-boundary universe needs no creator."  Hawking offered it as "just a proposal,"⁴⁴ and it addresses only the need for a first moment.  Aquinas held that even a universe with no beginning would need a creator for its existence.  Whether that argument works is the subject of The Cosmological Argument, not of physics.

"Scripture settles it.  God is 'Declaring the end from the beginning' (Isaiah 46:10), so the future is real.  Or:  God is the one 'which is, and which was, and which is to come' (Revelation 1:8), so time passes for him."  Both kinds of verse exist.  Lisle cites Isaiah 46:9-10 for eternalism.⁴⁷⁴⁷  Temporalists cite the many texts in which God responds and acts.  Helm, defending the classical view, concedes that "even expressions which seem prima facie to sanction timelessness cannot be regarded as conclusively doing so."²⁹  The Bible teaches that God has no beginning, made the world and knows its future.  It does not teach a theory of tense.

"Choosing a theory of time to suit one's theology is motivated reasoning."  Physics leaves the choice open, so everyone who chooses does so on other grounds.  The naturalist who prefers the block for its simplicity is also choosing on a non-empirical ground.  The article's own verdict grants that simplicity favours the block.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Several primary papers were read only through reprints or summaries. Putnam was read in his 1975 collected papers, Pike and Plantinga in the 1989 Fischer anthology, and Stump and Kretzmann's 1981 definition and Stein's reply only through the Stanford Encyclopedia's quotations. Rietdijk's 1966 paper was not read. The page numbers given are those of the editions read.
2. The Einstein-Besso volume was not seen. The German and English of the 1955 letter come from Jammer and Calaprice, both of whom cite the Einstein Archive and the 1972 Speziali edition. Printings differ on one word ("Dies" or "Das bedeutet nichts").
3. Whether cosmic time can carry God's "now" in a lumpy universe was not examined. Cosmic time is defined exactly only in a perfectly uniform universe. How precisely it is defined in the real, clumpy one, and whether the presentist needs it to be exact, is a technical question this article does not settle.
4. The quantum argument for a preferred frame is left to another article. Bell's remark is reported, not evaluated. Whether any viable interpretation of quantum mechanics needs a preferred foliation is a question for Quantum Mechanics and Divine Action.
5. The link between Lisle's synchrony convention and eternalism is the article's inference. Lisle and Dennis argue about presentism and about the convention, but neither states in those words that a real present would make the convention-based answer to starlight incomplete.

Verdict

Relativity measures that clocks and simultaneity judgments depend on motion.  It does not measure whether the future exists.  The argument from relativity to the block universe needs a philosophical premise, that no observer is privileged, which a presentist can deny at no observational cost.  The block universe is the simpler reading of the physics, and that is a real point in its favour.  The presentist alternative is coherent and pays for it with a preferred present that no experiment can find.

Christian theism has a coherent model on each side.  The classical timeless God, held by Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas, fits the block universe, where all times are equally real and none is uniquely now.  The temporal God of Wolterstorff, Swinburne and Craig fits a real, moving present, and with it the preferred frame.  The one attempt to combine the two, ET-simultaneity, explains nothing, and critics on both sides say so.  Foreknowledge has an answer on either model, though open theism is ruled out by the block universe.  A beginning of time fits creation and suits Craig's model in particular, but it is not settled physics, and Aquinas was right that a creator is not needed only to start things.

The young-earth dispute between Dennis and Lisle is a small version of the same choice.  Each charge of heresy rests on a reading the other side rejects.  Both views of time allow a young universe.

Sources