Concepts of God: God does not exist in time (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Saturday, March 06, 2021, 09:50 (1357 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have granted you only logical thought. Stop backpedaling.

DAVID: (Saturday 6 February) All we can be sure of is logic on his part. His thought patterns and emotions are possibly similar, but that possibility cannot be used to give him human desires.

dhw: Apart from your censorship of what sort of thought patterns and emotions you will allow him to have, you agreed that similar thought patterns etc. are possible. And I still don’t know what gives you the authority to state that your God is unchanging and cannot learn. Do please tell us the source of your inside information.

DAVID: The general view of God is all-knowing. Again your concept is humanizing.

You have agreed that his thought patterns etc. may be similar to ours, and I’m sorry, but I do not regard what you consider to be the general view as evidence that you and the large numbers of your fellow believers have any more inside knowledge of your God’s patterns of thought than I do.

DAVID: As usual, you slip into human thinking about God. We view His possible previous events as indicating 'time', but it is OUR view, not His. Spacetime is a property of this universe, not outside of it, where is where I view God as existing.

dhw: How on earth do you expect to know God’s view? Of course these are our views. We have no idea if there is an “outside” of our universe, but you have just stated that “He can and does work in our time in our universe which is time as you define it.” If he works inside our time and our universe” (the only universe we know of), it is patently absurd to tell us that he does not exist in our time and universe! And I still haven’t a clue what is the point of this discussion.

DAVID: It is God's duality: He can work in our time/universe but He is timeless outside of it. In a weird way it is like the coven of witches around the boiling cauldron, creating.

Why do you keep agreeing with me and pretending you disagree with me? If he can and does work in our time/universe, then it is absurd to say he does not exist in our time and universe. What do you mean by he is “timeless” if you don’t mean he is eternal? How does eternal-ness come to mean that he does not exist in time? It simply means he has no beginning and no end. That does not exclude the “passage of time”, as evinced by what you believe was the creation of the universe from an unknown “before” through sequence after sequence of time-dependent causes and effects. The coven of witches can’t possibly create without being in the same place as the cauldron, using the sequence of past, present and future, cause and effect, to work their magic. I still don’t know what this discussion is about, except that you can’t bear to contradict Feser, even though you agree with me.