Omniscience, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity

Faith and Philosophy 17 (2):227--228 (2000)
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Abstract

A difficulty for a view of divine eternity as timelessness is that if time is tensed, then God, in virtue of His omniscience, must know tensed facts. But tensed facts, such as It is now t, can only be known by a temporally located being.Defenders of divine atemporality may attempt to escape the force of this argument by contending either that a timeless being can know tensed facts or else that ignorance of tensed facts is compatible with divine omniscience. Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow adopt both of these strategies in their various defenses of divine timelessness. Their respective solutions are analyzed in detail and shown to be untenable.Thus, if the theist holds to a tensed view of time, he should construe divine eternity in terms of omnitemporality

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William Lane Craig
Houston Baptist University

Citations of this work

The divine attributes.Nicholas Everitt - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (1):78-90.
Impossibility Arguments.Patrick Grim - 2007 - In Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 199--214.
Omniscience and Eternity: A Reply to Craig.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 2001 - Faith and Philosophy 18 (3):369-376.
Kvanvig No A-Theorist.William Lane Craig - 2001 - Faith and Philosophy 18 (3):377-380.
Wierenga No A-Theorist Either.William Lane Craig - 2004 - Faith and Philosophy 21 (1):105-109.

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References found in this work

Eternity.Eleonore Stump & Norman Kretzmann - 1981 - Journal of Philosophy 78 (8):429-458.
Omniscience, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity.William Lane Craig - 2000 - Faith and Philosophy 17 (2):225-241.
Eternity and Simultaneity.Brian Leftow - 1991 - Faith and Philosophy 8 (2):148-179.

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