A Question of Time

[See update below.]

I’ve been busy on other projects, one to be unveiled soon, so I haven’t had much time to blog. I do have a question for you, though.

What does the word omnitemporal mean? How does it differ from eternal? How does it differ from atemporal?

And who made up that word, anyway? It’s not in my spell check, so is it a real word?

Here’s one explanation for omnitemporal that’s been given: It means “in all times at the same time”. I thought time was a succession of moments. How can something be in all of a succession at one point in the succession? Isn’t that contradictory?

And yes, that’s more than one question. If all times can be at one time, then several questions can be one question. Right?

Help!

Update on Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 10:30AM by rebecca

 Brandon explains some views of God’s knowledge in a comment on the old Blogger blog, and helps me identify where the so-called omnitemporal view fits.  Here’s what he wrote:

Well, since the person may be a little confused (or at least confusing!), perhaps one way to get a handle on it would to be to rough out the standard sorts of views and see how this use of ‘omnitemporal’ fits into it. (The names I’ll be using for the groups will be a bit arbitrary.)

Views about God’s knowledge of freely made choices split into two big groups. One group holds that God lives through time in a way analogous to the way we do — i.e., He lives from moment to moment just as we live from moment to moment, even if His moments are not exactly the same as ours. The other group holds that this living from moment-to-moment is an imperfection and limitation that cannot be attributed to God. (The difference between the two groups boils down to a difference between those who think God is mutable, gaining new experiences through time, and those who think God is immutable, and so does not have to experience new things.) The Mutable group breaks down into two as well:

Open Views (Process theism, open theism, etc.) — God does not know free choices in the future.

Meticulous Views — God knows free choices in the future, because, while God learns what’s happening onlyas it plays out through time, He knows all time all at once.

The Immutable group holds that God does not naturally experience time — time is something He creates. This group breaks down into two smaller groups:

Higher-Dimension Views — God sees time in the way, for instance, we can see the whole of a line. If an ant is walking on a piece of paper (two dimensional) he can only see part of the paper at a time; but since we can see it from a higher dimension (the third dimension), we can see the whole thing. So with time and God.

Traditional Views — God knows, without having to learn it bit by bit, everything done in every moment because everything at every moment depends on him. (There are lots of different versions of this, but for a long time these were the most common views. Most of these hold that God is atemporal, but hold that this does not mean that he is less than temporal, but that He has none of the limitations — like having to learn things bit by bit — that come with being temporal creatures.)

That’s all crude and rough (and it doesn’t include every possible view). But I think you get the idea. So is the person you’re talking to trying to argue for a Mutable & Meticulous view (in which case he’s holding a view that is usually considered to have a lot of logical problems with it), or is he giving a confused version of an Immutable & Traditional view (in which case he’s probably just stating it very badly)? Or is it something else entirely?

I responded:

Aha! It sounds really, really like a mutable meticulous view, which, BTW, I didn’t even know existed. It comes, I think, from accepting some of the presuppositions of open theism, and trying to develop a system that still has God knowing free choices in the future. It ties God’s knowledge of everything to God’s omnipresence in every moment, which is “all at once”, which means God knows everything “all at once.” That would explain, I suppose, why whatever is being promoted seems to have so many glaring logical problems to it. (Don’t get me started!) I think the word omnitemporalhas probably been co-opted to make it sound like it’s making God “more” rather than “less”.