ABSTRACT
A popular argument for divine timelessness arises from the concept of time in Albert Einstein’s Special eory of Relativity (STR). According to Einstein’s theory, there is no unique, universal time and so no unique, worldwide “now”. Each inertial frame has its own time and its own present moment, and there is no overarching, absolute time in which all these diverse times are integrated into one. So if God is in time, then, the obvious question raised by STR is: Whose time is He in? e defender of divine timelessness maintains that there is no acceptable
answer to this question. We cannot plausibly pick out some inertial frame and identify its time as God’s time because God is not a physical object in uniform motion, and so the choice of any such frame would be wholly arbitrary. Moreover, it is di›cult to see howGod, conned to the time of one inertial frame, could be causally sustaining events which are real relative to other inertial frames but are future or past relative to God’s frame. Similarly, God’s knowledge of what is happening now would be restricted to the temporal perspective of His frame, leaving Him ignorant of what is actually going on in other frames. In any case, if God were to be associated with a particular inertial frame, then surely, as God’s time, the time of that frame would be privileged. It would be the equivalent of the privileged ether frame in classical physics. So long as we maintain, with Einstein, that no frame is privileged, then we cannot identify the time of any inertial frame as God’s time. Neither can we say that God exists in the “now” associated with the time of every
inertial frame, for this would obliterate the unity of God’s consciousness. In order to preserve God’s personal consciousness, it must not be fragmented and scattered among the inertial frames in the universe. But if God’s time cannot be identied with the time of a single frame or of a plurality of frames, then God must not be in time at all, that is to say, He exists timelessly. We can summarize this reasoning as follows:
i
What can be said in response to this argument?
