Richard Swinburne - What is God's Eternity?

Could God be eternal? For God to be eternal, God would exist outside of time, would not experience time's flow. God would have no past, present or future. As Boethius said in the 6th Century, "Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life". God's relationship to time helps assess God's existence and discern God's essence.

[mikeclancy]

Thank you Robert for all your work in uploading these clips and with such an interesting range of scientists, philosophers and theologians.

[rossheaton]

If God is Omniscient, why would he need to interact with his creation in any point in time. He already knew before the creation, what his creation was going to do. He created humans knowing they were going to commit all these sins. He created millions if not billions of humans, knowing he would torture them in Hell-Fire for eternity. Why would a lovely God with Omniscience do that? I would call this a contradiction, or a paradox at best.

[mcgche]

God is at whatever He wants to be whenever He wants to be.

[anaccount]

It's amazing how much theologians can talk without saying anything, yet still manage to sound convincing to those who are desperate to be convinced.

[kriskelvin]

Why can t we just accept that we connot know anything about "God"

[uremove]

Hmmm... I think the problem is we think of God as ‘a being’ like Zeus, or Odin, rather than the transcendental Source of all being, yet if God is omnipresent, He/She/It cannot be ‘a being’, but must be ALL being, at every level of existence. So, if God is omnipresent He is both ‘outside’ time, ie. in a higher dimension of time, eg. with a 4D block universe before Him, yet also present at every point within that block in our 1D linear time. In the same way, we in 3D space are outside of, yet could intervene at any point in 2D Flatland, because our 3D space includes Flatlands 2D world within it. To say that 3 different times in our linear time must be 3 different times in God’s experience is to restrict God to our 1D linear time.

[dom-dominiquecaldwell]

What if God dose not experience time as we experience time?, God is out of our understanding on how time is experienced by God?
So we can try to put time to God but we will not know unless God tells us. Best way to understand God “in my opinion” God is omnipresent. Time for us mortals existence and experience is fixed in time do to our material being. God is eternal thus time is eternal as for us time mortal as we will experience time only for how long one lives?
Love to learn other opinions about this. I love learning to understand God as we try to know God.

[adamrspears]

(1):
Something can have a beginning & an end. Its said to be finite.

(2):
Something can have no beginning, & no end. Its said to be non-existant.

(3):
Can something have no beginning, & yet an end?....No.

(4):
CAN something have a beginning, but no end?....if so, is it eternal?

(5):
CAN something exist, but have no beginning & no this eternal, infinite, both, or neither?

[brentonbrenton]

So I'm confused as to why people struggle with the concept of God being 'outside time' when we can experience exactly that state of consciousness under the influence of psychedelics. Just use the tool, then you understand what it means. That revelation usually comes at very low doses. If you want to understand Gods omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence... well then you have to go for a full Ego death dose - but those answers are down there too.

[lyletulk]

To me, these conversations are kind of like two avatars in a video game trying to define the nature of the programmer...🙄

[jesipatrocinio]

God himself already explained the real nature of time to Neal Donald Walsch in Conversations 2..."There is no time but this time..Now is all there is..Everything that ever happened, is happening, and ever will happen, is happening right now...Time is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally... There is only One Moment--this moment--the Eternal Moment of Now." This is exactly how the Enlightened mystics and the Near-death experiencers describe their experience of time.

[enzonazzaro]

if god exist outside of time then free will is dead. As the idea of omnipotence, especially in terms of causality and time, means the events have been set in motion you were always going to do everything you have and will do. you could argue that from my perspective that I feel I have free will but I can't actually make a decision in which god has not seen so its more of and illusion if anything.

[Hjgfrfjufdetivjiu]

This makes me almost have a panic attack thinking about this

[ronjohnson]

the more you try to explain god, the sillier the explanations get.

[cajones]

i wonder how/if entanglement can relate to this topic

[kanemurphy]

Isnt every moment in infinity.. Infinity.. I. E. A tenth of infinity would be infact infinite.. You can't have a period of infinity that builds up to anything.. God would have to been created with the universe.. Or hes finite... I also find it astonishing academics profess to know anything about god.. Whats written down is written by other men.. Not just any old men.. Men born of a time when the thought the earth was flat.. Pretty much in the dark about nearly everything we take for granted.. If theres a force that created the universe. Id dont think theres a man or women on earth that has any details on its nature or whether its got good bad or no intentions towards mankind... We can't even trust revelation.. As we dont understand consciousness as yet...

[allgodsmyth]

Swinburne's topological time (one unmeasured thought event for God after another, prior to the creation of the universe) fails if you believe there cannot be an infinite past regress. God could not have a "first thought (T1)" if there was no beginning for God and his thoughts. Even "topological time" requires there be an ordered sequence (T1 precedes T2 precedes T3), and so on. He goes on to argue we could not measure the duration of any given thought (T2, for example). Yet, we can. There would be a _relative_ difference between T1, T2, T3, etc., which could be measured. (God's thought T1 was twice as long as T2, but half as long as T3, etc.) Thus, the change and duration of God's own thoughts would be the scale by which time could be measured prior to the universe. Post creation, God could measure the time from when he created the universe to our present time relative to the duration of his other thoughts (e.g., from the big bang to our "now" was, for God, the duration of his thought T2). Thus, Swinburne does not get away with having God's time and in-universe time being substantially different when we use the relative duration of God's sequential thoughts as the clock by which all time could be measured.

[blessedamerican]

There is no such thing as time. You are either GOD’s good dreams or HIS nightmares.

[gtrmain]

His answer is his god is in time, out of time and controls it all. That is a most unscientific and unsatisfying answer.

[chrisc]

What rubbish. God is a being outside of time yet he is there at the time of events?