Table Of Content

God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature Gregory E. Ganssle David M. Woodruff, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS GOD AND TIME This page intentionally left blank GOD AND TIME Essays on the Divine Nature EDITED BY Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff 1 2002 3 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright ©2002 by Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data God and time: essays on the divine nature / edited by Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512965-2 1. God—Immutability. 2. Time—Religious aspects. I. Ganssle, Gregory E., 1956– II. Woodruff, David M., 1960– BT153.I47 .G64 2001 212'.7—dc21 00-068152 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Jeanie and for Ann This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Wehave many people to thank for helping us in this project. We beneﬁted greatly from early encouragement from William Lane Craig and Michael Della Rocca. Daniel Howard-Snyder provided much encouragement, especially through organizing the Paciﬁc Society of Christian Philosophers conference in April of 1999 at George Fox University at which several of these papers were presented and vigorously discussed. Our editor at Oxford University Press, Peter Ohlin, also has been extremely patient and helpful. The writers of these essays were patient and kind to read and consider yet another batch of comments. Most of all, we thank our wives, Jeanie Ganssle and Ann Woodruff for love, support, and friendship and for showing the most patience of all. This page intentionally left blank Contents Contributors xi Introduction 3 Gregory E. Ganssle Part I God’s Eternal Nature 1.The Eternal Present 21 Brian Leftow 2.Atemporal,Sempiternal,or Omnitemporal:God’s Temporal Mode of Being 49 Garrett DeWeese Part II God, Time, and Creation 3.Divine Foreknowledge and the Arrow of Time:On the Impossibility of Retrocausation 65 Alan G. Padgett 4.God inside Time and before Creation 75 Dean W. Zimmerman 5.Time Was Created by a Timeless Point:An Atheist Explanation of Spacetime 95 Quentin Smith 6.The Elimination of Absolute Time by the Special Theory of Relativity 129 William Lane Craig