end p.52
Begin by taking the notion of part in its most familiar sense. Theists believe that God has
no physical or material parts. Because the physical is bound so tightly with space, theists
are disinclined to attribute spatial dimensions to God. At the same time, it is important to
theists to be able to say that God is at or present to various regions of space, indeed, all of
them. As Xenophanes put it, it is “not fitting” for God “to go now here now there”; not
fitting, because God already is here and there. Theists have insisted, moreover, that
however this notion of divine spatial presence is to be understood—here we might expect
the thesis of divine conservation to elucidate the notion—it does not entail that only a
part of God is in one place and another part in another. It is, rather, that God is present as
a whole, in his entirety, at every spatial region (see Augustine 1960, 85).
Can a parallel case be made for God's relation to time? To be parallel, the case would
have to exhibit two features. Just as God is everywhere, so God is everywhen, that is,
there is no instant of time at which God is absent. If time is infinitely extended, having no
beginning or end, then God has a beginningless and endless life. But suppose that time is
not infinitely extended. Suppose, as some theories in physical cosmology maintain, that
there was a first moment of time, or that there will be a last moment. Are we then to
conclude that God's life is finitely circumscribed?
A theist who holds a reasonably strong version of God's sovereignty will remind us that
time, as a feature of creation, depends for its existence on God, not vice versa. For such a
theist it should not be the case that questions about the character of God's life depend for
their answers on the nature of time, any more than they depend for their answers on the
nature of space. That God is everywhen is the first of the two features necessary to
construct an account of time parallel to the theist's account of space. The second is that
God in his entirety is present at every instant of time. It is not the case that one temporal
part or stage of God is present at one moment of time and another at another. Ordinary
creatures live their lives successively, one moment at a time, passing from past to present
to future. God, in contrast, lives his life comprehensively, taking in all of a creation that
may be infinitely extended in time in one simultaneous act of comprehension. Taken
together, the two features, everywhenness plus comprehensiveness, yield a doctrine about
God's eternality, or mode of existence in eternity, defined by Boethius as “the complete
possession all at once of illimitable life” (1973, 422; see Stump and Kretzmann 1981,
431).
The doctrine of God's eternality comports nicely with the doctrine of God's simplicity.
Simplicity rules out temporal parts or stages. Eternality emphasizes that “x has no
temporal parts or stages” does not entail “x exists for only an instant.” A theist, armed
with the doctrine of God's eternality, now can reply to the persistent critic's dilemma
concerning God's memory. Memory is a faculty only of time-bound creatures. The theist
can cheerfully agree that God has no memory because nothing that has happened is past
to God. All is present—literally pres
end p.53