God, eternity and free will Flashcards
Boethius on eternity.
“Eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life.”
Difference between eternity and everlasting existence.
Eternity is outside of and unaffected by time, whilst everlasting existence is existence without end.
Atemporality.
The state of being outside the time process.
Kortabinski on time.
Time is the duration of objects, not a seperate thing.
Stump and Kretzmann on God affecting time.
“An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events, but it can affect events only as they are actually occuring.”
Simple necessity.
Something which has to be the case.
Conditioned necessary.
Necessity following from choice, for example if I choose to walk then I am necessarily walking.
D.Z. Phillips criticism of Boethius.
He priortises God’s greatness over God as love.
Anslem’s definition of God.
‘That which nothing greater can be concieved”.
Impassible.
Not capable of being affected by that outside Himself.
Anselm on freedom.
Freedom is tied to rectitude, we are free to do the right thing as doing the right thing without having freely chosen to is then not us demonstating goodness.
Four-dimensionalism.
Being within a particular time/place is a limitation which ‘confines’ a being to having certain parts of itself existing at one time/place and other parts of itself at others; as an unlimited being, God cannot be within time like we are.
Anselm on fourth dimension.
“That he is not in place or time, but all times and places are in him.”
Protestant theologians who argue against God as timeless.
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Oscar Cullman.
Tillich on God as timeless.
Means God would be lifeless, but believers speak of a ‘living God’.
Barth on God as timeless.
Could contradict the incarnation, wherein God acted intentionally within human history.
Swinburne on God as timeless.
Contradicts God’s actions within human time, such as punishing someone.
Swinburne comment on God.
“The God of the Hebrew Bible […] is pictured as being in continual interaction with humans.”
Jean-Paul Satre on radical freedom.
No reasons can be given for our choices other than the fact we have done them.
Plantinga on freewill.
We have freewill in regards to actions, and that it is our choice to do or not do an action which makes it good.
Alvin Plantinga on God and problem of evil.
For the world to be completely good then free will and morality would have to be removed, in which case there is no free cooperation between God and people and there would be no option for moral goodness.
William Hasker comment on God as temporal.
“It seems much better to take the Bible at face value and to understand God as a temporal being.”
Ingolf Dalferth comment God’s attributes.
“God’s love does not operate uniformly as it does in timeless creation. It adapts to cirumstances.”
