Three Questions on God and Time

Today I thought I'd round out some common questions about how God relates to time and space. 



Dear Apologist, how do I respond to my Atheist friend who asks what God was doing prior to creating the world, and why He waited so long to create mankind?

One of the great ironies of the “New" Atheist movement is that most of their challenges to God’s existence could be dated back to ancient history.  Among these are questions about how God relates to time.  Sometimes you’ll hear a person ridicule the idea of a Creator by asking:

“What was God doing before He made the world?  And why not create humanity straight away rather than waiting billions of years?”

 One person who tackled this question was Saint Augustine, who wrote in his Confessions:

“Are they not full of their ancient way, those who say to us, ‘What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?’”  

He responded:

“For whence could innumerable ages pass by which You did not make, since You are the Author and Creator of all ages? Or what times should those be which were not made by You?” - Confessions, Book 11

Augustine’s insight was that time itself is part of the created order.  God, who is not a creature, therefore transcends the very motion of time.  So it was not necessary for God to wait on anything, because for God there is no passage of time.  Asking what God was doing before He made the world is a nonsense question because for God there is no “before” or “after”. 

As Thomas Aquinas wrote in the first part of the Summa, God exists changelessly in the "eternal now”.  His atemporal nature can be gleaned from Him saying to Moses, “I AM WHO AM.” And this is also reflected in the Catholic Catechism, which states:

“We firmly believe that there is only one true God, eternal and unchangeable”                   -CCC 202  

If you’d like to learn more, look for a trio of articles on National Catholic Register called “3 Views of Time and Eternity” by Jimmy Akin.

Dear Apologist, If God is timeless and never changes, how can He be the same God we see speaking and acting in the Bible?

Natural philosophy tells us that the creator of all space and time must Himself be spiritual and timeless.  However, this can seem inconsistent with God’s depiction in the Bible, where we see Him acting, speaking, and even changing His mind!  How do we account for this discrepancy? 

We have to analogize how a timeless, changeless being could interact with creatures in the flow of time.  This takes a bit of imagination. 

Let’s imagine you came up with a story about a group of people on a journey.  At a certain point in the story these travelers will need some direct help from you, the author.  So you, as the story’s creator, decide they are going to hear a booming voice from the sky telling them what to do. 

Let’s further imagine that this story popped into your head all at once – beginning to end.  And now you can see the whole thing like a great tapestry.

Now let’s think about this situation.  Since you have the whole story in your head, all moments of the story are equally present to you.  And despite having a place in the story where you provide input to the characters as a booming voice, you are not personally present in the flow of the story. 

In an analogous way, God can have all of these interactions with us, but God sits outside the flow of time.  From God’s point of view, all of these interactions are mechanisms He’s using to communicate with us as we are in story which He sees happening all at once. 

So as we see God’s interventions in the Old Testament, we can know these as means by which a timeless God interacts with timebound creatures in a way they’ll more readily understand.

Dear Apologist, How can God be outside of time and changeless and yet beget the Son?

The answer is to recognize that not all sequences require change or the passage of time.  The movement from one human generation to the next requires time, but not everything is like that.  

Back in geometry class you may have done geometric proofs.  A problem would present you with a figure composed of several lines and shapes; your task would be to prove that two lines on the figure are parallel given a starting premise in a different location.  You would use the rules of geometry to prove one thing after another until – step by step - you arrive at your goal.  

Looking back, there was a logical sequence of deduction, but you can see that all those features you uncovered were simultaneously true all along.

The persons of the Trinity are more like that.  There is an order, but it’s more like the sequence of logic in your geometry problem.  All three persons are simultaneously, atemporally existent even if there is an order to their procession.