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

Today, the Doctrine of God Part 6.

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

We've been talking about God's eternity, and by way of review, we saw that God's eternity is affirmed in Scripture as God's being

beginningless and endless. He exists permanently. But the scriptural data are under-determinative

with regard to how God relates to time. Is God trans temporal? Is he outside of time? Is God an atemporal

being who doesn't exist in time at all? Or is God rather an everlasting being who exists

omnitemporally at every time? The Scripture doesn't make that clear, and therefore this

issue is one that must be resolved by philosophical theology. We need to look at arguments

for and against divine timelessness and temporality. Now I have written a number of books on this subject, having studied

it for about 11 years, and one of these is called Time and Eternity. If you're interested in following

up on this subject, I'd recommend this book to you, published by Crossway Books, Time and

Eternity. In it, I survey what I consider to be the most important arguments for God's

being timeless, as well as the most important arguments for God's being omniportal.

Now, of all of the various arguments that have been offered for God's being timeless, I think

that the best argument is probably the argument from the incompleteness of temporal life.

Temporal existence is terribly incomplete in that you do not yet have your future, it's merely potential,

and you no longer have the past. It's over and done with. All you have is the present,

and that is a brief, fleeting instant that passes away as soon as it comes.

So that temporal existence is a fleeting sort of existence where you do not have the fullness of your entire life at once,

but you just have a brief momentary slice of that life, one slice after another.

And the argument here is that this kind of incomplete existence is incompatible with the existence of a most perfect being, which is what God

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