Omniscience, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity

Faith and Philosophy 17 (2):225-241 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

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.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Omniscience, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity.William Lane Craig - 2000 - Faith and Philosophy 17 (2):227--228.
Divine eternity.William Lane Craig - 2008 - In Thomas P. Flint & Michael Rea (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. Oxford University Press.
Timelessness, Omniscience, and Tenses.Laura L. Garcia - 1993 - Journal of Philosophical Research 18:65-82.
Tensed Facts.Richard Swinburne - 1990 - American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (2):117 - 130.
Timelessness, Omniscience, and Tenses.Laura L. Garcia - 1993 - Journal of Philosophical Research 18:65-82.
What Do We Hope For?Margaret M. Rooney - 1980 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 11 (1):75-92.
Temporal language and temporal reality.Heather Dyke - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (212):380–391.
Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe.Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2):307 - 320.
Divine Eternity and the Nature of Time.Alan Gregory Padgett - 1989 - Dissertation, University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-02-17

Downloads
34 (#407,230)

6 months
8 (#157,827)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

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, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity.William Lane Craig - 2000 - Faith and Philosophy 17 (2):227--228.
Omniscience and Eternity: A Reply to Craig.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 2001 - Faith and Philosophy 18 (3):369-376.
Wierenga No A-Theorist Either.William Lane Craig - 2004 - Faith and Philosophy 21 (1):105-109.

View all 8 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references