@Axis Austin,
Axis Austin wrote:
I have a question about your claim that anything metaphysical, including God, is outside of time. What if God changes? You seem to think, based on your arguments though you don't actually say this, that God doesn't change. Suppose he does. Would he experience time, if change/time are necessarily wrapped up?
If God does not change, you argue that he can still interact. I have a little trouble buying into/understanding this. Yes, if God were timeless he could still do one unchanging act and only through that can the universe exist, perhaps. But how can he do different acts: speaking to Moses in the burning bush and later speaking to his son Jesus? Is he doing both of these, and every number of acts, all together, and we simply feel the affects at different times?
While I think that's a workable theory, for me personally it doesn't adequately portray God's immanence to humanity. I feel that to be truly present, he needs to actually interact (at different times) with us, not just act.
As for the time issue, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. While I have a bit to discuss about God and time, I have little to discuss about time, but am deeply intrigued by it.
The Christian idea of God is that He is a separate being who created the Universe. If that is true, He cannot exist within the Universe and still claim infinitude (because, of course, any definable unit of space must be bounded, and therefore finite--with the largest degree of finitude and the smallest degree of infinitude both being aleph-null, IIRC). To claim infinitude, it seems to me, God must be more infinite than the Universe is, and therefore exist outside our universe. I cannot make any claim about the nature of Time where God dwells, but since time is a measurement of change, and change is a necessarily requirement of conscious existence, then God must have a time (tempo of change) of some sort, just not
our time, and that insofar as we can perceive Him, we cannot even
begin to conceive the workings of His existence, so, as far as our Universe is concerned, God exists and acts outside it, that is to say, outside time.
However, Axis, I have major problems with this theory of God, namely, that (1) if God exists in His
own universe, who's to say there aren't any other beings with God's qualities running about in said universe (actually, it seems to me there must be), and if there are, how can he claim He is the
only God without being deliberately deceptive (and therefore not all-good)?...and (2) if God exists in His own universe, how did that universe come about? For these reasons, I believe there cannot be any distinction between God and the Universe, that is to say, that although I have a Christian background, I have a decidedly non-Christian theology.
