God and Time

I did a short response to Dr. William Lane Craig's model of divine eternity:

Providentially this reply is fitting for WLC's newest podcast on God and time.  

Universals

If universals exist in God's mind---as conceptual realism maintains--then relations would exist in God's mind prior to Him instancing them. Would not the same be said of concrete things then? If so, then the force of Bill Craig's "real relations argument" against an Atemporal conception of Divine Eternity looses sway. 

Just a thought!      

Questions and Reflections on Craig's Model

Questions and Reflections

If, it is as Bill Craig argues, God is timeless prior to creation and temporal with creation, how precisely is it that God can be temporal? Did He already possess the properties necessary to be temporal prior to creation? What are those properties? How are we to understand God being temporal and yet immutable (without falling into a minimalist position)? Did God in His essential nature change with creation? Why not postulate a model similar to the incarnation with Christ’s hypostatic union? Is it logically possible that God has two eternal natures: one essential the other contingent? If such a view is even logically possible, then wouldn’t this model affirm both God is timeless (in one nature) and temporal (in another)? What would such a view even look like? God would have two natures, like the incarnation, in which God would exist with all the properties of both natures attributed to the three persons without confusing the two natures. But what would these natures and properties be?  The first nature, that is uncontroversial, would be the traditional understanding of God’s essence with all the properties that should properly be attributed to God (which would include timelessness). The second nature, somewhat controversial, would be, in some sense, spatial and therefore temporal. The nature need not be thought of as physical. It could be similar to that of angelic beings who are some how incorporeal, spatial, and temporal.