Can a Timeless God Act in the World?

Abstract

Can a timeless God act in the world? The purpose of this paper is to address this question by exploring the nature of timeless God’s omniscience. In the first part I argue—having explored what it means to say that God is timeless—that we should think of a timeless God’s omniscience factually rather than propositionally i.e. that a timeless God doesn’t know all propositions, but does know all facts. One consequence of this view is that though everything (what we call past, present and future) is equally present in the mind of a timeless God, being timeless he doesn’t know which events are past, which are present and which are future. For example, he doesn’t know that what is presently happening in the world is presently happening. The central issue I then consider in the second part is whether his knowledge could really be of the right kind for him to act in the temporal world. I argue that though God has knowledge of all the events in the temporal world and even knows (perhaps) their temporal orderings, he is unable to intervene because to do so he would need to have the knowledge he lacks; namely, he would need to know which events in the temporal world are past, which are present and which are future.