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God is immutable in his basic character, but this does not mean that he cannot change at all. He is eternal, but this is to be understood as everlasting, not as ‘outside time’. If we take all the properties analysed in Part 2 of this book together, God is to be conceived as a ‘personal ground of being’. There could only be more than one such personal ground if all such grounds were dependent for their existence on the first ground. That leaves open the possibility that God is a Trinity.

Eternal

The property of being creator of the universe is different from the other properties which we have considered so far in the following respect. To say that there exists now a being with the other properties does not entail the existence of such a being at any other time. A being with all the other properties could come into existence yesterday and cease to exist today—though his ceasing to exist today could not have been something which was against his choice; otherwise he would not have been omnipotent before ceasing to exist. However if a creator of the universe exists now, he must have existed at least as long as there have been other logically contingent existing things. For a creator of the universe is (see pp. 133 f.) one who brings about or makes or permits other beings to bring about the existence of all logically contingent things which exist, i.e. have existed, exist, or will exist. On the assumption that an agent can only bring about effects subsequent to his action, he must have existed at least as long as created things.

However, traditionally theists believe not merely that this spirit, God, exists now or has existed as long as created things, but that he is an eternal being. This seems to mean, firstly, that he has always existed—that there was no time at which he did not exist—and that he has always had the properties which we have been considering. Let us put this point by saying that they believe that he is backwardly eternal. The supposition that a spirit of the above kind is backwardly eternal seems to be a coherent one. If, as I have argued, it is coherent to suppose that such a spirit exists at the present time, then it would seem coherent to suppose that he exists at any other nameable time; and, if that is coherent then surely it is coherent to suppose that there exists a being now such that however far back in time you count years you do not reach the beginning of its existence. The above spirit could surely be of that kind. Then he would be backwardly eternal. Various writers have suggested that endless life would be tedious, boring, and pointless. An omnipotent being could, however, if he so chose, ensure that his life was not tedious or boring. And given, as I have argued, that there are true moral judgements, there will often be a point in doing one thing rather than another.

The doctrine that God is eternal seems to involve, secondly, the doctrine that the above spirit will go on existing for ever, continuing for ever to possess the properties which I have discussed. I will put this point by saying that he is forwardly eternal. This too seems to be a coherent suggestion. We, perhaps, cease to exist at death. But we can surely conceive of a being now existent such that whatever future nameable time you choose, he has not by that time ceased to exist; and the spirit described above could be such a being. A being who is both backwardly and forwardly eternal we may term an eternal being.

The above seems the natural way of interpreting the doctrine that God is eternal, and it is, I have urged, a coherent one. However, there is in the Christian theistic tradition an alternative way of interpreting this doctrine, and I shall consider this alternative after considering the doctrine of God’s immutability.

Immutable

Closely connected with the doctrine of God’s eternity is the doctrine of his immutability. Theists traditionally claim that God is immutable, that he cannot change. We can understand ‘immutable’ in a weaker or stronger way. In the weaker way to say of a person that he is immutable is simply to say that he cannot change in character. To say of a free and omniscient creator that he is immutable is simply to say that, while he continues to exist, necessarily he remains fixed in his character. We saw in Chapter 11 that of logical necessity a person who is perfectly free and omniscient will be perfectly good. Hence a person cannot change in character while he remains perfectly free and omniscient. According to traditional theism God is eternally perfectly free and omniscient, and so it follows that he will not change in character. Given the doctrine which I shall discuss later that God necessarily possesses such properties as freedom and omniscience, it will follow that he cannot change in character, and so is immutable in the weaker sense. God’s immutability in this sense is of course something which theism has always wished to affirm.

Theists have, however, sometimes understood immutability in a much stronger sense. On this understanding to say that God is immutable is to say that he cannot change at all. The doctrine of divine immutability in this sense is often combined with the doctrine of divine timelessness. But for the moment I shall consider it independently of the latter doctrine. To
investigate the coherence of the suggestion that a person with the properties so far delineated be immutable in this strong sense, we must begin by asking what it is to change. There is a famous but clearly unsatisfactory criterion of change, which Professor Geach has called the Cambridge criterion.

If God had thus fixed his intentions ‘from all eternity’ he would be a very lifeless thing; not a person who reacts to men with sympathy or anger, pardon or chastening because he chooses to there and then. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 10, the God of the Old Testament, in which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity have their roots, is a God in continual interaction with men, moved by men as they speak to him, his action being often in no way decided in advance. We should note,further, that if God did not change at all, he would not think now of this, now of that. His thoughts would be one thought which lasted for ever.

It seems to me that although the God of the Old Testament is not pictured as such a being, nevertheless a perfectly free person might act in fact only on intentions which he had had from all eternity, and so in a strong sense never change. However, a perfectly free person could not be immutable in the strong sense, that is unable to change. For an agent is perfectly free at a certain time if his action results from his own choice at that time and if his choice is not itself brought about by anything else. Yet a person immutable in the strong sense would be unable to perform any action at a certain time other than what he had previously intended to do. His course of action being fixed by his past choices, he would not be perfectly free. Being perfectly free is incompatible with being immutable in the strong sense. We could attempt to save the coherence of the supposition that God is both perfectly free and immutable (in the strong sense) by pleading that words are being used analogically, but there seems no need whatever for this manoeuvre here, because there is no need whatever for the theist to say that God is immutable in the strong sense. Why should many theists have wished to suppose that God is immutable in the strong sense? The belief that God is immutable in this sense does not seem to me to be much in evidence in Christian tradition until the third or fourth century A.D. It came, I suspect, from neo-Platonism. For a Platonist things which change are inferior to things which do not change, Aquinas, claiming that God is altogether unchangeable, gives as one of his reasons that ‘anything in change acquires something through its change, attaining something not previously attained. Now God . . . embracing within himself the whole fullness of perfection of all existence cannot acquire anything.’ (ST II 1a.9.1)

Being perfect already he can lack nothing. However, an obvious answer to this point is to suggest that the perfection of a perfect being might consist not in his being in a certain static condition, but in his being in a certain process of change. Only neo-Platonic dogma would lead us to suppose otherwise. That God is completely changeless would seem to be for the theist an unnecessary dogma. It is not, I have suggested, one implicit in the Old or New Testaments. Nor, I would think, is it one to which very many modern theists are committed, unless they have absorbed Thomism fairly thoroughly.

Timelessness

Armed with the results of the last few pages, I now return to consider an alternative interpretation of the doctrine that God is eternal, alternative to the simple interpretation that God’s eternity consists in his always having existed and his going to exist for ever. This simple interpretation, I urged earlier, was a coherent one.

The alternative interpretation of God’s eternity is that to say that God is eternal is to say that he is timeless, that he exists outside the ‘stream’ of time. His actions are timeless, although they have their effects in time. His thoughts and reactions are timeless, although they may be thoughts about or reactions to things in time. His knowledge is timeless, although it includes knowledge of things in time. There is no temporal succession of states in God. Another way of putting these points is to say that God has his own time scale. There is only one instant of time on the scale; and everything which is ever true of God is true of him at that instant. In a sense, however, that instant of time lasts for ever. In this chapter I wish to consider whether it is a coherent claim that God is timeless and whether it is one which the theist needs to make. Most of the great Christian theologians from Augustine to Aquinas taught that God is timeless.

The best-known exposition of this doctrine occurs in the last section of the Consolation of Philosophy of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius. Let us look at Boethius’s exposition. God, Boethius says, is eternal, but not in the sense that he always has existed and always will exist. Plato and Aristotle thought that the world always had existed and always would exist. Christian revelation had shown that the world had a beginning and would have an end in time. But even if Plato and Aristotle had been right, that would not mean that the world was eternal in the sense in which God is eternal. ‘Let us say that God is eternal, but that the world lasts for ever.’ God, however, is eternal in being present at once to all times which from our view at any one time may be past or future. God is thus outside the stream of temporal becoming and passing away. Boethius’s much-quoted definition of eternity is that it is ‘the complete and perfect possession at once of an endless life’. ‘For it is one thing to be carried through an endless life which Plato attributed to the world, another thing to embrace together the whole presence of an endless life, a thing which is the manifest property of the divine mind.’

The obvious analogy is to men travelling along a road; at each time they can see only the neighbourhood on the road where they are. But God is above the road and can see the whole road at once. Taking man’s progress along the road as his progress through time, the analogy suggests that while man can enjoy only one time at once, God can enjoy all times at once. God is present to all times at once, just as he is present to all places at once. This doctrine of God’s eternity provided Boethius with a neat solution of the problem of divine foreknowledge. Because all times are present to God, God can just as easily see our future acts as other men can see our present acts. But this does not affect their freedom. Just as the fact that we see a man acting now does not mean that he is not acting freely, so God’s seeing a man acting in the future does not mean that the man will not act freely. For God does not ever see what are from bur point of view future acts, as future. He always (on his time scale) sees them as present, and hence the difficulties discussed in Chapter 10 concerning God’s present knowledge of our future free actions do not arise.

This doctrine of divine timelessness is very little in evidence before Augustine. The Old Testament certainly shows no sign of it. For Old Testament writers, as has been noted, God does now this, now that; now destroys Jerusalem, now lets the exiles return home. The same applies in general for the New Testament writers, although there are occasional sentences in the New Testament which could be interpreted in terms of this doctrine. Thus in the Revelation of St John the Divine God is described more than once as ‘Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’ and also as he ‘which was and is and is to come’. But it seems to be reading far too much into such phrases to interpret them as implying the doctrine of divine timelessness. Like the doctrine of his total immutability, the doctrine of God’s timelessness seems to have entered Christian theology from neo-Platonism, and there from Augustine to Aquinas it reigned. Duns Scotus seems to have rejected it and so did William of Ockham. It seems to have returned to Catholic theology from the sixteenth century onwards, but to have had comparatively little influence in Protestant theology. Post-Hegelian Protestant theology explicitly rejects it. For Hegel the Absolute or God was essentially something in process and Tillich acknowledges his debt here to Hegel, by claiming that Hegel’s ‘idea of a dialectical movement within the Absolute is in agreement with the genuine meaning of eternity. Eternity is not timelessness’.

Tillich claims that God is not outside the temporal process, for, if he were, he would be lifeless. Only a God who acts and chooses and loves and forgives is the God whom we wish to worship, and the pursuit of these activities, since they involve change of state, means being in time. ‘If we call God a living God, we affirm that he includes temporality and with this a relation to the modes of time.’

Exactly the same point is made by Barth, though he argues not only from the general fact that God is a living God but also from the particular fact of the Incarnation. The Incarnation means, according to Barth, that God acts at a particular temporal moment. Only a temporal being can do this. ‘Without God’s complete temporality the content of the Christian message has no shape’.7

The reasons why theists would wish to adopt this doctrine are interior to theism. That is, it is felt by some theists to be better consonant with other things which they wish to say, to say that God is timeless than to say that he lives through time. However, it seems to me that the reasons which the scholastics had for putting forward the doctrine of timelessness were poor ones. A major consideration for them seems to have been that this doctrine would provide backing for and explanation of the doctrine of God’s total immutability. For if God is timeless he is totally immutable—although it does not follow that if he is totally immutable he is timeless. Aquinas seems to have thought that the latter did follow: ‘something lacking change and never varying its mode of existence will not display a before and after’.9

God’s eternity (in the sense of timelessness), he claimed, ‘follows upon unchangeableness, and God alone . . . is altogether unchangeable’.

However, this seems mistaken. A totally immutable thing could just go on existing for ever without being timeless—especially if other things, such as the universe, changed, while the immutable thing continued changeless. The change of other things would measure the passage of time during which the immutable thing changed not. Still, the timelessness of God would explain God’s total immutability, if he was totally immutable. But we have seen no reason why the theist should advocate God’s total immutability.

A second reason why the scholastics adopted the doctrine of timelessness, is, as we saw for Boethius, that it allowed them to maintain that God is omniscient in a strong sense which was discussed in Chapter 10. God outside time can be said never not to know our free actions, even though they may sometimes be future from our point of view. Since they are never future for God, he sees them as present and this does not endanger their free character. In view of the general Christian tradition that God’s omniscience includes knowledge of future free human actions, the doctrine of timelessness does seem to have the advantage of saving the former doctrine against obvious difficulties. I urged in Chapter 10, however, that the view that God’s omniscience includes knowledge of future free human actions is easily detachable from the theistic tradition.

A further reason why a theist might want to adopt the doctrine, although, as far as I know, it was not one put forward by the scholastics, is the following. A man, especially a modern man, might feel that a temporal being was as such less than perfect in that his mere existence in time would mean that he was as it were continually losing parts of his existence all the while. As today ends and tomorrow begins the being has lost today—his existence today is dead and gone, for ever unrecallable:

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay,
Put up your caravan just for one day?

But why does the continual passage of time mean loss for those who live in it? Obvious answers are—that they get older and so weaker, that new experiences are not so exciting as old ones, and that they draw nearer to death, which, they fear, is the end. All of these are indeed proper reasons for regretting the passage of time; and if the passage of time had these consequences for God, he would indeed have cause for regret. But these are mere factual consequences of the passage of time for moral finite man; an omnipotent being need not suffer them. But still, it might be felt, there are some consequences of life in time which even an omnipotent being would have to suffer. These are that the moment certain states, experiences, and actions are past, they are for ever unrepeatable. If he performed a certain A on one day, he could not perform exactly that action on another day—he could only perform one qualitatively similar. This is true of logical necessity. States, experiences, actions, etc. are individuated by the time of their occurrence. An ‘action’ is a numerically different individual ‘action’ from a similar action tomorrow, because of the criteria which we have for distinguishing one ‘action’ from another. But what real loss does this fact mean? If I can tomorrow have states and do actions qualitatively as similar as I like to those of today, why should the passage of time cause me regret? And anyway, even if this limitation is a logically necessary one for all beings in time it is one which a being who lives and acts, chooses and reacts in anything like a literal sense will—of logical necessity—have to endure. Such a being may still be as close as it is logically possible for a being to be to being perfect.

So much for the reasons why a theist might wish to claim that God is timeless. I have urged that they are not very good reasons. Further, the claim that God is timeless, as I have expounded it, seems to contain an inner incoherence and also to be incompatible with most things which theists ever wish to say about God.

Generally, the theist’s only hope for maintaining the inner coherence of his claim that God is timeless and its coherence with others of his claims would be to maintain that many words are being used in highly analogical senses. When he says that God is a ‘person’ or ‘brings about’ states of affairs, or ‘knows’ what happened yesterday ‘at the same time as’ he ‘knows’ what happens tomorrow and that he ‘knows’ all these things at and only ‘at the same time as’ they happen, the theist could claim that the words involved here are being used in highly stretched senses, so that there is no incoherence in what is being said and no incompatibility with other things which the theist wishes to say. When discussing that analogical use
of words in Chapter 4, I warned that although a theist would be justified on occasion in using words in an analogical sense, nevertheless too many appeals to analogical senses of words would make sentences in which the words were used empty of content. In this case it seems to me that the theist has no need to make such an appeal. For as I have been urging, the theist has no need to incorporate the doctrine of the timelessness of God into his theism. He can easily do without it and all the difficulties which it brings, and rely instead on the simple and easy coherent understanding of God’s eternity which I
delineated earlier.

The doctrine of the timelessness of God is connected in the Thomist system with various connected doctrines, expressed in Aristotelian terminology, that there is no potency in God, that God is pure act, and that God is one pure act. There seem to me similar reasons for adopting or rejecting these doctrines as for adopting or rejecting the doctrine of timelessness.

Personal Ground of Being

The theist’s claim is that there exists a personal ground of being. The arguments of Part II have been arguments designed to show that the concept of a personal ground of being is a coherent one. I claim that those arguments do show that.

Although the properties associated together in the property of being a personal ground of being do not, I think, entail each
other in any further way, they do belong very naturally together. A person who brings about effects clearly does so in virtue of his powers or capacities. An omnipotent person is a person to whose powers there are no limits but those of logic.

If all power is really to be in the hands of some agent, it is natural to suppose that how that power is exercised lies also within his hands, and that involves him in being perfectly free.

Now an omnipotent being must be able to acquire knowledge of anything, but he need not actually possess knowledge of
everything. Yet he clearly has to possess some knowledge. He must, for example, surely know of the basic actions which he is performing, that he is performing them. I can only move my hand, or open my mouth, as basic actions, things which I do
meaning to do them, if I know that I am doing them. Further, it would seem very odd to suppose that an omnipotent being
might try to do something and yet fail to do it. Yet unless he knew all the truths of logic, this would be possible. For he
might try to do something which was (unknown to him) logically impossible. If this is to be ruled out, any omnipotent being would need to know all the truths of logic. However, omnipotence does not seem to entail omniscience. An omnipotent being might well not know how many pennies I have in my pocket—so long as he could acquire that knowledge when he wanted to do anything about them. But given that he must have much knowledge, the most natural assumption about the knowledge of an omnipotent person is that there are no limits to it except those of logic, viz. that he is omniscient.

If such a being came into existence at any time, there would clearly in a wide sense be limits to his power. Hence it seems natural to suppose that he is backwardly eternal. Forward eternity seems to fit not unnaturally with backward eternity. Could there be more than one personal ground of being? It turns out, contrary to what I once thought, that there can be—if they are related to each other in a special kind of way.

There is no difficulty about two beings both perfectly free and omniscient. They could also both be omnipotent in that they
could both bring about any subsequent state of affairs which they did not have overriding reason not to bring about (see
p. 165), including the non-existence of the other. But if such beings are to exist everlastingly—except by lucky chance—and
not to interfere with each other’s actions, they must have overriding reason to keep each other in being and to limit their spheres of activity in such a way as to ensure that they will not interfere with each other. They might well each have overriding reason to keep the other in being. But what can ensure that each has overriding reason to confine his activity to one sphere of activity and what can determine what that is? Such a
demarcation of activity could arise if one such being brought
about the existence of the second with the request that he
confine his activity to a certain sphere, and the second would
then recognize overriding reason to conform to this request
from the source of his being. The first would then recognize
overriding reason for not interfering in the sphere of activity
which he had assigned to the second. If there is such a
symmetry of dependence it would create overriding reason for
each such being not to exercise his omnipotence in such a way
as to conflict with that of the other. Both would be creators of
all apart from himself in that each would depend for his
existence on the other (everlastingly) bringing it about or
permitting it to exist; but the first would actively bring about
the existence of the second, while the second would permit the
first to exist. And if there can be two personal grounds of
being, similar arguments would allow the possibility of more
than two. But barring such an asymmetry of dependence, I
cannot see any reason for each such being to regard some
particular sphere of activity as exclusively his; and without
that reason, there is no guarantee that each would not limit
the power of the other. Having mentioned this possibility, I
shall not discuss the matter further here; but shall follow
Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (given one interpretation of
the doctrine of the Trinity) in assuming that there is no more
than one such being, I shall talk in future of ‘the personal
ground of being’. I emphasise that some of the arguments of
Part III depend crucially on this assumption; and would have
to take more complicated forms if we drop the assumption.