Creation and the Timeless God

The doctrine of creation has many implications, not only to do with the scientific facts of the universe, but there are other, more subtle, issues at stake.  One of those has to do with the idea of the eternal, or timeless, God. This essay looks at the arguments for a temporal God and offers suggestions why they are inadequate. As a result, it concludes that the idea of the eternal God who created time “In the beginning” is still the only view that makes sense not only of the Biblical data but what we observe in the universe around us.

When Chalcedon launched its Journal of Christian Reconstruction in 1974, the first edition was on creation. So central is creation to the Biblical narrative, that without it, the Bible’s message is drastically altered. Dr. Rushdoony saw this, which is why he was influential in getting Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood in print.

My purpose in this essay is to explore one aspect of the idea of creation—time. Dr. Rushdoony has a discussion on time in his second volume of Systematic Theology. There he identifies time as a moral issue, not a metaphysical one.¹ In this essay, however, I’ll explore the idea of a temporal God as proposed by Open Theists. It raises some questions.

Is God getting older? This appears to be a legitimate question if God is in time, as some people claim, and we shall soon identify who these “some people” are. That may seem a strange notion to many Christians who believe God is outside of time. For most Christians who hold the traditional view about God and time, according to the Bible (1 Tim. 1:17; Heb. 9:14), God is an “eternal” Being and the traditional view accepts this as indicating God is outside of time—eternal. Yet, so prolific has the notion of a temporal God become that John Frame can write, “So at present one may speak of a consensus among theistic philosophers that God is in time.”²

Since the time of the early church, there has been discussion on the nature of time and God. Augustine, Aquinas and Boethius all contributed to the discussion in some form or another. In recent years, the discussion gained new impetus with the views of proponents of Open Theism. They ask whether time is something created? If so, does it entail that God is a timeless God, or is time “eternal,” thereby implying God is temporal?

When it comes to things eternal, it is helpful to remember what the Bible has to say on the matter:

He has made everything suited to its time; also, he has given human beings an awareness of eternity; but in such a way that they can’t fully comprehend, from beginning to end, the things God does. (Eccles. 3:11)

Concepts such as past, present, or future are everyday concepts. At least it was for me yesterday, is still so today, and I expect it to be the same tomorrow. And it is the same for most humans. But in the traditional view of theology, God is beyond time, being “eternal.” Some people think of time as if it were a river, God is upstream, downstream, and right in front of you all at the same time. No matter how we think of time, the key point is this: God transcends time as humans know and experience it. But how does He transcend time, or in what ways does He transcend time? And if God transcends time, how can it be said that He is “in time”—a temporal God?

You begin to get an inkling of the problem when you think of “In the beginning … “ (Gen. 1:1). Traditionally, this has been thought of as the beginning not only of the existence of the universe but of time itself. When you think like this, you soon begin to think of God as existing before the creation of time. But what meaning can it have to think of before time began, if indeed it had a beginning? For words such as “before” or “after” are time-related words. Is it even possible to conceive of God as “before” time? And what would that “before” look like? God is usually said to be transcendent, somehow over and above His creation. R.C. Sproul explains transcendence this way:

When the term transcendent is applied to God, however, it does not refer to God’s location or physical stature. It does not mean that God is bigger, fatter, or taller than creatures. Nor does it mean that he lives way up in the sky somewhere east of the moon and west of the sun. The term refers specifically to the order of being God represents. It refers to his ontological status. When theologians say God is a transcendent being, they mean that he transcends every created thing ontologically. He is a higher order of being precisely at the point of his being. The specific point is that he is a self-existent and eternal being who has the power of being in himself. He is uncaused. He is self-existent.³

So if God is ontologically different, does that include a difference in relationship to time? Traditional theology affirms that is so, but this is being challenged.⁴

William Lane Craig suggests that God was atemporal “prior to” the creation of time, but now he is temporal—within time. He argues, “if all events exist timelessly in God’s eternal reference frame, then none of them can exist earlier than, simultaneously with or later than another event, for these are temporal relations.”⁵ In the view of the temporalists, if God is simultaneously upstream, downstream and in front of you, it is not possible for God to speak of upstream and downstream, past or future events.

Some people have raised the notion of “person” to determine the meaning of the being of God and time. What does it mean to be a person? Can a person exist out of time? The following passage is often quoted as a way of getting the discussion off the ground:

Surely it is a necessary condition of anything’s being a person that it should be capable (logically) of, among other things, doing at least some of the following: remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, intending, and acting intentionally. To see that this is so one need but ask oneself whether anything which necessarily lacked all of the capacities noted would, under any conceivable circumstances, count as a person. But now an eternal being would necessarily lack all of these capacities in as much as their exercise by a being clearly requires that the being exist in time. After all, reflection and deliberation take time, deciding typically occurs at some time—and in any case it always makes sense to ask, ‘Where did you (he, they, etc.) decide?’; remembering is impossible unless the being doing the remembering has a past; and so on. Hence, no eternal being, it would seem, could be a person.⁶

This proposed “definition” of what it means to be a person, though interesting, is not necessarily complete. A key issue in the doctrine of the Trinity is the matter of relationality or interpersonal relationships. Is it possible to be a person without any relationships with other persons? The Coburn definition (in the quote above) of “person” is inadequate because it mentions nothing about relationships, and therefore is an incomplete basis on which to draw conclusions about the nature of God.⁷

Craig does not quote Coburn to agree with his conclusion, as does Dr. Skip Moen. Moen concludes, “The analysis of the logic of personal capacities seems to destroy any hope of speaking of an essentially timeless person.” On the other hand, Craig concludes, “Now even if Coburn were correct that a personal being must be capable of exhibiting the forms of consciousness he lists, it does not follow that a timeless God cannot be personal. For God could be capable of exhibiting such forms of consciousness but be timeless just in case he does not in fact exhibit any of them.”⁸

At this point, it is not necessary to accept Craig’s version of a timeless God. But what Craig has done is establish the framework for identifying a false argument. Consider this:

P1: If God were in time, He would be capable of remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, etc. P2: God is capable of remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, etc. Conclusion: Therefore, God is in time.

Craig, by providing another explanation, exposes the argument in its current form as the fallacy of affirming the consequent.⁹ This fallacy could be avoided if it can be shown that the explanation identified is the only possible explanation. Craig shows it is not the only possible explanation, thus the fallacy is committed by temporalists such as Skip Moen. But it is more than this.

Having established the idea of person this way, these criteria are then “read back” into God by the temporalists. And the conclusion is that in order for God to be a person, He cannot exist timelessly, since all these conditions require a temporal state of being. Their logic works something like this (or doesn’t work, as the case may be):

P1: A temporal person remembers, anticipates, reflects, deliberates, etc. P2: God is a person who remembers, anticipates, reflects, deliberates, etc. Conclusion: Therefore, God is temporal.

The conclusion simply begs the question, however. Why can’t an atemporal being remember, anticipate, reflect, deliberate, etc.? Such a possibility is simply ruled out, a priori. Yet how it would be possible to know this about an eternal God is problematical. And what has happened to transcendence? It seems to have disappeared. Such a position assumes an ontological similarity about the idea of person, that God and man have some kind of identicalness in their being. But it also assumes that eternity and time are somehow similar to one another so that time is a correlative to eternity. This assumption, however, is up for a serious challenge.

At once we are thrown into a discussion about God and the nature and attributes of God. But the key to understanding the resolution to these issues is to find the proper beginning in the chain of systematic thinking that is behind the discussion of God and time.

What is the proper starting place in human thinking of any kind? The proper starting place is with God and man created in His image. But this already imposes a two-level theory of reality or being. God’s being is uncreated while man is created.¹⁰

Here we are back at the transcendence question once again. But if the starting place is God the uncreated being, what attributes must He have in place to be that starting point? Can a temporal God be self-existing and self-determinative? What would be His relationship to time, one of dependency? Can a temporal God qualify as the starting place in human predication? Or it could be put this way: is true meaning found in time or eternity?

When the question about meaning is asked this way the word eternal is contrasted with the word time. In traditional theology, eternal means outside of time, beyond time, or some such notion. But our problem as creatures is that we have no way of knowing what “beyond time” might be or mean. We are, after all, creatures of time, and even though we are offered eternal life, eternal here is not the same quality that is usually attributed to God. If man could become eternallike God, he would begin to participate in divinity. But if God is a temporal God, does that mean mankind is already participating in divinity?

Thus, the question of the timeless God is ultimately a question about the nature and character of God as well as the nature and character of time itself. When God declares “I change not” (Mal. 3:6), this has been traditionally understood that He does not change in His essence. From that, some questions then follow:

If God is limited by time, is He also limited in His knowledge and His power, for example? For man, time is a limitation. Is it also a limitation for God? For man, time is the theater of change. Is God changing? If so, in what ways is He changing? For man, time is the theater of aging. Is God getting older? If He’s not getting older or He’s not limited by time, then God obviously transcends time in some manner. In which case it appears reasonable to ask: In what way is God temporal if, in fact, He is temporal at all?

Consider the philosophy of being. When Parmenides and Heraclitus locked horns over the nature of change, the question arose whether humans are being or becoming? A being that has yet to reach its full potential is becoming.¹¹ The existence of the universe is only explained by a being that has the power of existence within him and therefore is not caused to exist by something else. Such a being is self-determinative, and self-determination implies no change. For if God were subject to change, it would imply something else must have existed besides God that influenced change within Him. And that would mean God has not yet reached His full potential—He is becoming.

You can see from the questions and the possible answers that the difference between created and uncreated being is at the center of the discussion. Is God really potentially and actually fully realized? Or is there some aspect of God which has not yet reached its potential? For example, His knowledge. Does God know everything, or is He still learning? Some people suggest He is still learning, that the only things He can know now are things that are timelessly true. Other things, such as what you will be doing tomorrow, are not timelessly true according to one writer, they are contingently true, and God does not know what you will do until you do it.¹²

Gregory Boyd is quite adamant when he says, “the only remaining issue from God’s perspective is how He might strategically weave the wicked character of these ‘sons of perdition’ into His divine plan.”¹³ In other words, Boyd attributesprocess into the being of God. If this is a true representation of God, then the whole question of God’s self-determination is called into question. If God is still learning things (what people will do in the future), then ontologically He is still in the category of becoming, not fully actualized. Though He may know all the possible actions you might take, He does not know which actual one until you make it. At which point, God becomes the great super-reactor to the actions of man. “Perhaps,” suggests Paul Helm in his defense of a timeless God, “God is only an enlarged and magnified human being.”¹⁴ But if God, like man, is still learning new things, how can He be totally self-sufficient? Apparently He needs the libertarian free will decisions of His creatures in order to finally discover what His next course of action will be.

Boyd, however, explains himself when he writes, “God can at some point predetermine and/or foreknow some things about the future without eternally predetermining and/or foreknowing everything about the future.”¹⁵ But this is confusing. Consider this: How can God predetermine some thingsunless He predetermines and controls all things? Without total control, God’s attempts at predetermination or foreknowledge would become merely a “best guess” by a now divine being who appears as a lame duck in the futures game. God, apparently, is no more than a player in the cosmic game of chance or probability: sometimes He wins, sometimes He loses. Somehow, however, He can overcome the adversity and eventually get what He wants. But here we see God merely as the great cosmic reactor, a Super Genie able to overcome all adversity in a single leap—but unable to bring human future events into reality with any certainty. In other words, God is subject to chance or random activities foreseen as potential acts by Him but beyond His control, which makes time-bound human events the ultimate dictator of God’s activities. Such a God cannot be self-sufficient or self-determinative.

For Gregory Boyd or Skip Moen, it is time that determines everything. All the events of the universe obtain their meaning from the existential and libertarian free-will actions of man.

The question must be asked, however, what drives the conclusions of Moen and Boyd and the open theists?

Behind the debate over God and time is the notion of free will and infallibility. For open theists, man does not have a free will if God knows infallibly today that you will be run over by a bus at 2:37 p.m.tomorrow afternoon. If God knows this infalliblytoday, then there is nothing you can do, apparently, to avoid the catastrophe. But already you can see a good part of the problem: it assumes God acts in a time-tensed environment, that His thoughts are sequential in some fashion. Sequence, however, presupposes time. Thus, Dr. Moen concludes

Since we have argued that timelessness is not only inconsistent with the idea of personhood, it is internally incoherent in relation to acts of cognition, it should be obvious that the only logically acceptable view of omniscience for a Christian God is one in which God logically cannot know the definite truth-values of propositions about some future events.¹⁶

But there is a lingering question raised by Moen when he suggests that God has somehow limited His knowledge. How could He who knows everything limit His knowledge? By pretending He does not know things? That’s not a limitation of knowledge; that’s just making a pretense about one’s knowledge of certain future events.

The idea of the absolute sovereignty of God implies that God micromanages the events of the world. But such a view, contends Gregory Boyd, would demean God’s sovereignty.¹⁷ For Boyd, God knows and determines some events in the future, but not all of them. Apparently He has taken a deliberate policy of limiting His knowledge in order to make room for human free will. But the question then is this one: Can God limit Himself?  And would any such limitation mean that He is no longer God? You can begin to see what is at stake in the discussion, and the traditional view has always attempted to hold on to God’s character as the bedrock of systematic theology.

Dr. Moen sees the discussion as one that is to be controlled by logic. Saying that the discussion should be controlled by logic, however, explains very little. Human beings, made in the image of the God who is Ultimate Rationality, are always logical to their presuppositions, though their premises are often faulty. So when Dr. Moen asks for logic, he is really asking that all the decisions be made on the basis of his presuppositions. And therein lies the real matter of debate: who has the correct presuppositions about God, free will, omniscience and infallibility?¹⁸

The real discussion, then, is the relationship between the eternal and the temporal. Here, Van Til provides an answer:

Again, if we are asked, What do you think of the relation of the eternal to the temporal?, we reply that the eternal for us does not exist as a principle but as a person, and that as an absolute person. Accordingly, we do not use the eternal as a correlative to the temporal; we use the notion of the eternal God as the personal creator of the temporal universe. Once more, if men ask us as to which is first,becomingor being, we reply by saying first of all that the term becoming cannot be applied to God. God’s being is not subject to becoming. He is eternal being. And as for created being, it is in the process of becoming by virtue of the plan of God. God’s being is therefore “before” the becoming of the created universe. The eternal One-and-Many are “prior to” in quotation marks. It will readily be seen that if our theory of reality is true, we cannot simply say that God is prior to the universe, meaning by “prior to” temporal priority. Inasmuch as God is not subject to time, we cannot enclose him in the calendar. God is the creator of time itself as a form of created being. On the other hand, if we say that God is “prior to” the created universe we do not simply mean what is usually meant by logical priority. God is, to be sure, logically “prior to” the created universe but he is logically prior by virtue of the fact that he has actually created the universe with its temporal form out of or into (sic) nothing.¹⁹

So God’s nature is the unmovable point in theology. This is why, for example, the Cosmological Argument, in order to be carried, requires a God who is a necessary being, who has within Himself the power of existence. Sproul concludes, “Something must have the power of being within itself (self-existence or aseity) or nothing would or could possibly exist … An ontologically necessary being is a being who cannot not be. It is proven by the law of the impossibility of the contrary.”²⁰ This means, among other things, that God is self-existent, or self-determinative. And conservative Christianity has always attempted to maintain the difference between that which is created and that which is uncreated. Thus, “For the orthodox Christian the triune God is ultimate, and the whole of creation is His handiwork and thus derivative. It does not undercut the reality of the creation, and thus of time, to say that it is created: rather, it simply identifies the kind of reality it is.”²¹

Paul Helm comes to a similar conclusion: “Why cannot divine timelessness consist in a manner of existence which sustains no temporal relations with human time? If God timelessly exists he is neither earlier nor later nor simultaneous with any event of time. He exists timelessly.”²²

If time and eternity are equated as a series of chronological events, then man is already living in the eternal and God and man have an equality of “being” at this particular point. Now traditional theology points out that man is made in the image of God. But in what way is man in the image of God? The answer implies that man is an analogy of God in some way. But if you consider the arguments of the open theists, they try to make God an analogy of man. It’s a reverse via negativa. This is how they get to the point of arguing that in order for God to be a person He must be within the temporal order, for the only persons they can identify are those like you and me. We exist as persons, so therefore God must exist as we do—temporally. And that is simply logic of the worst kind, a non sequitur.

There is yet another issue, and that is the meaning of history itself. If time is eternal, then history becomes meaningless. In the traditional view, time, a created reality, serves the purposes of God. Thus instead of a cyclical history of meaninglessness, history becomes the theater where God achieves His ultimate eschatological events. Attempting to make time ultimate, however, leads to broader philosophic problems. Not surprisingly, those “philosophies which have as their premise the ultimacy of time end in a world and life negation and a desire to escape from life into a nirvana of nothingness.”²³

We are left to ask: what happens to the transcendent God if God is temporal, that His knowledge of future events is limited and so His knowledge is still growing? The answer is that the transcendent God disappears. But this has broader implications.

The basis of science is a rational universe, a universe where every item has its meaning from the God who created all things. Each fact or event occurs where and when it occurs because it was designed to be that way. Without design, however, the idea of brutefactuality is introduced. Brute factuality implies unique events—randomevents. These are the kind of events required by Dr. Moen and the open theists who have challenged the traditional view of God and time. For them, the notion of free will requires random events. So, if you do get run over by a bus at 2:37 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, that event was random, unplanned, and while it may be a possibility in God’s mind, it was not an actual event to God until it happened.

Thus, chance, or magic, or superstition becomes the center of the discussion. If there is no transcendental meaning, then man’s only recourse is to his own private opinions.

Dr. Moen explains, “Apparently the only avenues open to a theistic proponent of free will are modifications of one or both of the key doctrines—omniscience and infallibility.”²⁴ For Dr. Moen, it also requires a modification to the idea of a timeless God. There is, of course, yet another possibility. And that is his definition of free will is defective in the first instance. For if libertarian free will is denied in favor of the idea of the free will of secondary causes, to quote the language of the Westminster Confession, John Frame’s conclusion is valid: “[I]t seems to me that once we deny the existence of libertarian freedom, all the relevant considerations favor atemporality, and none favor temporality.”²⁵

In other words, the debate about time and God, His alleged lack of omniscience and the denial of His infallibility, are built on the bed of a philosophical discussion about the nature of free will. Libertarian freedom implies the idea that man is totally beyond the control of God when it comes to free-will choices. To deny infallibility, however, is to eliminate the possibility of any truth claim, for every truth claim has an explicit or implied infallibility.

Consider the argument:

(P) If libertarian free will exists, it will demand (Q) modifications to omniscience or infallibility or God’s atemporality. (Q) Modifications to omniscience, infallibility and atemporality are identified. Therefore, (P) libertarian free will is proven.

This is the argument constructed by those who oppose the traditional view of God. Put in this form, it can be seen that the argument is a fallacy. And that is because the proposed modifications are neither essential nor necessary. For if the definition of “libertarian free will” is in reality a faulty definition then no amount of modifications to the traditional views about God can rescue that bad definition.

A question has to be asked about the relationship of a temporal God to time and infinity—and logic. The temporalists are suggesting that God has existed infinitely in time. Their view requires the existence of time before the creation of the universe. But here they come into conflict with the idea of an actual infinite. In the temporal view, there must be an infinite series of events that have taken place up to this present point in time. This, however, is a logical impossibility. You cannot have an infinite series of events and then attempt to add yet another event into the chain. For if you are still adding to the chain of events then the series is not infinite. In the words of Craig, “the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition is impossible because one can always add one more.”²⁶ If the time-clock is still ticking away, then you have not yet reached an infinity in time, and therefore, if the idea of a temporal God was accurate, both time and God had a beginning.

Thus, in the temporal view, since the series of events is not yet complete and therefore not infinite, God must have had a beginning. And if God had a beginning, He is not God.²⁷

Who is God? What kind of attributes are necessary for the God who does all that is revealed in the Bible? Historically, the theologians came down on the side of a timeless God, not a temporal God.

Since both God and time become finite on the temporalist view, the alternative and traditional view remains intact. Time was created.

The doctrine of creation and the Genesis record thus provide the important backdrop for establishing the character of God and the nature of time.

It is unfortunate that so many people struggle with the absolute sovereignty of God. But that is the issue in the discussion about the timeless God. In the Augustinian–Calvinist view, it is the absolute sovereignty of God that establishes the “liberty or contingency of second causes.”²⁸ Man’s actions only obtain their true meaning when viewed against the backdrop of the absolute plan of God. Otherwise, man’s actions are merely person-relative in terms of their meaning. Without a transcendental place to establish the meaning of man’s actions, man’s “free will” drifts into the vast ocean of chance with no guarantee that free will has any meaning whatsoever. And thus history itself becomes a meaningless series of events rather than the theater where God achieves his purposes without fail.

1. R. J. Rushdoony, Systematic Theology in Two Volumes Volume II (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1994), p. 1079ff.

2. John M. Frame, No Other God: A Response to Open Theism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing Co., 2001), p. 146.

3. R. C. Sproul, and Keith A. Mathison, Not a Chance: God, Science and the Revolt Against Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1999] 2013), Kindle Edition, loc. 1950–52. This is a recent update and expansion of Sproul’s book, originally published in 1999 with the title, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology.

4. Gregory E. Ganssle, ed.,God & Time: Four Views (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001). Contributors include William Lane Craig, Paul Helm, Allan Padgett, and Nicolas Wolterstorff.

5. Craig in Ganssle,ibid., p. 144.

6. Robert Coburn, “Professor Malcolm on God,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 41 (June, 1963), p. 155, quoted by William Lane Craig in Ganssle, ibid., p.138. See also Skip Moen, God, Time and the Limits of Omniscience, (Dr. Moen’s Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University (1979), self-published in 2010), p. 180. Dr. Moen obtained his M.A. degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School when Clark Pinnock was lecturing there. Pinnock went on to become a leading voice in the open theism movement.

7. This theme is picked up by Colin Gunton in his book, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Gunton’s thesis is that a defective view of creation and the Trinity helped create the rejection of Christianity which is the key to understanding modernism. See also B.A. Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, (Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition, 2014). It is a key failure of Unitarianism to address the question of relationships and whether the idea of interpersonal relationships has a transcendent origin. Under the Unitarian view of God, God had no relationships with other persons at all until He created other personal beings. But in what sense, then, could it be said that a Unitarian monad is a person? Unitarianism ultimately takes us down the path of an impersonal God.

8. Moen, ibid, p. 181; Craig in Ganssle, idem., emphasis in the original.

9. The argument has the form:

If P then Q,

Q,

therefore P.

See http://creation.com/loving-god-with-all-your-mind-logic-and-creation. The fallacy is avoided when (P) is the only possible explanation for (Q).

10. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1979), p. 29.

11. An excellent introduction to these concepts is given by R.C. Sproul (Snr) in his DVD lectures and book by the same title, The Consequences of Ideas.

12. Moen,ibid, pp. 310ff.

13. Boyd, Gregory A., God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), Kindle edition, loc. 329.

14. Paul Helm. Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time (Oxford University Press, [1988] 2002), Kindle edition Loc. 96.

15. Boyd, ibid., Loc. 356, emphasis in original.

16. Moen, ibid., p. 313.

17. Boyd, ibid., loc. 259.

18. An excellent discussion on the nature of free will can be found in Gordon H. Clark, Religion, Reason and Revelation (Nutley: NJ: Craig Press, 1961), chapter 5, “God and Evil.”

19. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, p. 29, emphasis in original.

20. Sproul and Mathison, Not a Chance, Kindle locations. 1923 and 1983.

21. R. J. Rushdoony, Systematic Theology in Two Volumes: Volume II (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1994), p. 1084.

22. Paul Helm, ibid., (Kindle Edition), Locations 375–376.

23. Rushdoony, Ibid., p. 1085.

24. Moen, ibid., p. 259.

25. Frame, No Other God, p. 156.

26. William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1979. Previously published by the Macmillan Press, LTD), p. 109.

27. William Lane Craig attempts to avoid this problem of infinite time by claiming that God was atemporal before creation, but became temporal at the time of His creation.  Can God, however, change His essential nature, His essence? No! He cannot! He is light, in Him is no darkness; He is the truth, and He cannot lie! He is unable to repent, because He is perfect (Matt 5:48). Or can He become, what He was not? Is God now getting older, whereas before He was ageless? And then we’re back into the discussion of being and becoming, and the nature of God.

28. Westminster Confession of Faith, III:I.