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

Today, the Doctrine of God, Part 7.

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

The last time we met, we were talking about the difference between a tense- and a tensed theory of time.

And I suggested that your view of God's relationship to time is apt to depend upon whether

you think time is tenseless or tensed.

That is to say, if you think that the difference between past, precedent,

and future is merely an illusion of human consciousness and that all events in time are

spread out, as it were, like a line, then you're probably going to think of God's eternity

as a state of timeless existence, and God is related to think of God's eternity as a state of timeless existence and God is related

to all of the events in space and time in that timeless moment.

On the other hand, if you think that time is tensed, that is to say you think that the

difference between past, present, and future is a real and objective

feature of the world and that things really do come into being and go out of being, then

you're probably going to think that God is also in time, in virtue of his real relationships to this constantly changing temporal

world, and in view of his knowledge of tense facts, what time it is now.

And therefore, I think that how you construe the nature of time is going to determine probably your view of God's eternity.

I suggested that for my part, I think that the common sense view of time as being tensed

is the correct view of time that comports with our experience of time, and there isn't any good

reason to deny that experience.

And for that reason, I think that the arguments for God's temporality are good ones that

at least since the creation of time at the beginning of the world, God has been in time

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