Readers may recall that we have sometimes addressed the reasons that there cannot be a past infinity of time fort his universe, whether positive or negative (minus numbers).
It is more of a logic issue than a science issue: We would have been buried an infinity of time ago under the weight of all the events that had already occurred. One outcome is that most theorists who entertain the idea of an infinite universe in the past assume that there were previous universes (whose data gets wiped instead of cumulated).
But what about divine timelessness, the idea that God is not in time? Lydia McGrew explains and defends the idea, disagreeing with William Lane Craig:
We have seen above that anyone who holds that time had a beginning must have a somewhat counterintuitive notion of “beginning.” But what Craig says here goes well beyond that. At least when we say that time had a beginning we are not forced to say that an existing entity, the universe, changed from not existing to existing. What Craig here asserts is that God Himself underwent a change but that that change did not occur in any timestream whatsoever, since it was a change from not being in time to being in time. What could this mean? At a minimum, a change seems to require that an entity has existed at two different points in some timestream and has had one set of properties (though perhaps only relational properties) at one point and a different set of properties at a different point. But the change from being timeless to being in time cannot be of this sort, so what is the meaning of “change” as Craig is using it here?
The apparent incoherence is especially evident when Craig says, “[A]t the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which He did not stand before (since there was no ‘before’).” Since, as Craig says, there could be no “before” in this scenario, in what sense is the relation new? Craig says that God did not stand in this relation before, but he does not mean that claim in the sense that is necessary for a change or something new. We can argue from “God did not stand in this relation before” and “God stands in this relation now” to “this relation was new at some point” only if we are saying that there actually was a time before God stood in the present relation. To say that the very concept of “before” is meaningless in the scenario envisaged is to remove all the meaning from the claim that God entered into a new relation at the creation of the world and hence that the creation constituted a change in God. I can see no way for Craig consistently to maintain both that God is timeless sans creation and that God underwent a change at creation.
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