ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 5, the consensus among medieval philosophers and theologians was that God existed atemporally. I attributed the consensus primarily to views of God's simplicity and immutability, which had their origins in Neoplatonism. Further, the threat of theological fatalism motivated discussions of the nature of time and God's foreknowledge, and common models of the relationship between God and time had the implication that time is static. While I have argued that an atemporal view of God's being entails static time, and have referred to passages in Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas which are most naturally interpreted as entailing static time, it is not so clear that these thinkers consciously adopted a static concept of time. Indeed, I think William Lane Craig is correct to maintain that it is almost inconceivable that Aquinas-and, I would add, the others we have considered-consciously held to a B-theory of time. I
The development of thought on these issues did not advance much after Duns Scotus and Ockham until the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina. Although he himself held to divine atemporality, Molina's views of dynamic time and his notable contribution of the doctrine of Middle Knowledge make him a suitable figure with which to end this chapter.
