Das Verständnis des zeitlosen Gottes

Abstract

The Understanding of Timeless God

Eternity is one of the main properties of God. It can be understood either classically as timelessness, or as temporality in the modern understanding. One of the main objections against divine timelessness holds that a timeless God cannot act in the world; thus he cannot even create, or sustain the universe in existence. The reasons for such statements are that a timeless God cannot know what in the world happens earlier or later, and he cannot know what events are past, present, and future. Timeless God is supposed to only possess factual knowledge; he would have no propositional knowledge, as we humans have it. Against this, it could be argued that while God has only factual knowledge, he can still know what humans know through his insight into their consciousness in his essence. Direct knowledge of God is factual, but indirectly he can know propositional knowledge through his knowledge of human time experience, which is a part of human propositional knowledge. This way God can know time experience of individual humans, but he is knowing this, in his consciousness. The objection against the possibility of a timeless God’s acting within the world through creation and sustenance, and hence against the timeless understanding of God, is thus refuted.