Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Creation, Part 9.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

In our last lesson, we differentiated carefully between creation and conservation.

Creation is the act of God whereby he first brings something into existence.

Conservation is the act of God whereby he keeps something in existence from moment to moment.

Now I argued that the notion of creation inherently involves the idea of a

Tense Theory of Time, sometimes called the A Theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is an objective and real feature of the world.

Things really do come into being and go out of being as time passes. By contrast on the tenseless view of time, time is stretched out like a line,

and all times, whether past, present or future to us, are equally real.

So I said you could compare this B theory of time to a bologna which is stretched out and can be sliced into temporal slices.

And all of these parts are equally real.

The whole four-dimensional bologna simply exists tenselessly,

and things that are in time are located at different slices of this four-dimensional object.

So on a B theory or tenseless theory of time, the universe never really comes into being.

It just has a front edge, a first slice, but it never really comes into existence.

As a whole, it's as eternal as God is. It would exist timelessly along with God who is outside the four-dimensional

space-time manifold and would be causally operative and connected to everything in it.

So I argued that a serious biblical doctrine of creation involves a tensed theory of time,

whereby things come into being and go out of being, and is therefore incompatible with this

tenseless or B theory of time. Now, what about conservation?

Is it compatible with a B theory of time?

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