Comments on: The Paradoxes of God

By: Dale

Dale — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:50:40 +0000

‘couple of verse’… nice one dale

By: Dale

Dale — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:49:58 +0000

oops – missed a couple of verse (shocking, huh?)

Jude 1:25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

Tit 1:2 in hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before times eternal;

By: Dale

Dale — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 02:35:34 +0000

OK, we must be nearing the ‘as far as we can go’ point?

Bible says ‘all things’, you want it to say ‘and this includes time itself’. I think it’s a logical step, and would be far more difficult to demonstrate God’s captivity within time from Scripture, than to discern that they assumed he created time.

By: Ian

Ian — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:55:23 +0000

I think you’re looking for detailed statements that the Bible shouldn’t be expected to provide.

I don’t expect it to provide anything (lol), but in the absence of such detail surely it is not valid to impose detail on it and then claim that is what scripture says?

Unless the bible specifically says that god is outside time, the best anyone can say is that the hypothesis that god is outside time is not inconsistent with the bible. However this leaves all your work ahead of you to come up with a reason why god should be considered outside time.

By: Dale

Dale — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:47:03 +0000

((the article you link to refers to whether or not the Messiah/Christ was ‘from ‘eternity’ or from ‘ancient times’ “, not whether or not God is in/out of time, etc.))

I think you’re looking for detailed statements that the Bible shouldn’t be expected to provide. It’s quite a simple and logical step to go from God being the Creator and source of all things to assume that ‘all things’ would include time. The (technical and of course extra-biblical) word that all of these texts lead to is ‘transcendent’. God transcends nature-slash-’all-things’. In our modern language, we’d say that God is the creator of the universe (kosmos or ‘world’ in scripture – as opposed to ‘ge’ for earth) – which we call the space, time and matter universe.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:34:47 +0000

I don’t think the biblical authors would recognise time as creatable. They don’t even really make any mention of creating matter or energy, both of which are simpler concepts than time. I think they assumed time just began (a reasonable assumption given their knowledge) and that god was the first thing there when it began and will continue to exist for “all time”.

As an aside, this page makes me doubt if we’ll ever know what the authors actually meant by eternity…

By: Dale Campbell

Dale Campbell — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:06:00 +0000

the bits to do with God being the creator and source of all things – in other words, monotheism sounds trite, but I think this is precisely what the biblical authors are assuming all along the way.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:02:34 +0000

How about another way of approaching this: what in the bible would not make sense if god was within time but would make sense if he wasn’t? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head…

By: Dale Campbell

Dale Campbell — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:35:22 +0000

Ian,
As I’ve been saying, the bible doesn’t make use of technical philosophical jargon, but often uses poetic metaphor. This means we won’t find our more pointed philosophical questions directly answered in the text. We have to try to discern what they would have assumed.

So then, doing our best to discern this, we look at such passages, and can (clearly, I think) see the writers of the Bible quite consistently using language/metaphor which assumes God to be the Creator behind all things. Phrases like ‘before the creation of _____’ are the more obvious examples here.

Far from being ‘not strictly contradicted’ by the text, the view that God is (in our modern terms) ‘outside of time’, is one that logically (and I’d even say necessarily) from the text (and in the most basic of ways).

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:30:31 +0000

Thanks for those Dale.

I reckon the first two can be explained (from the biblical point of view) by pointing out day 1 probably involved some time with no earth or heaven (such that their creation happening on day one made sense). It seems likely to me that this is what they meant given their understanding of the world? Also if eternity is taken to mean “there at any time” the verses makes just as much sense (perhaps even more) than if you take it to mean “outside time”.

I am not convinced that the assumption that god is the creator of time is a valid one. I doubt the author of the bibles even realised time was something that had to be created. In my opinion we are imposing that assumption on the text based on our current world view rather than getting it from scripture. Surely the very best we could say is that it is not strictly contradicted by the text?