Moments and Divine Eternity

Currently reading:
Apology for Apologetics
   by Paul Griffiths

In my last post, I ended with a couple mentions of "moments" (including the ever-popular quotation marks). It might be wondered what meaning a moment could have for an immutable and/or eternal being. I really don't have much background in philosophy of time, but I think that I have a concept which performs enough explanatory work to be worth considering. A moment, of any kind (temporal, logical, or natural) has to do with what is present to something at that moment. Different moments indicate different contexts, as it were.

I'm borrowing an idea more or less from science and mathematics (though I'm sure it goes far beyond that; I think that the intuitions have been around throughout intellectual history) of local phenomena. To give an example, consider the Game of Life. Each square lives or dies based solely on the surrounding squares. There can be complex, board-wide phenomena arising out of a rule that only focuses on these local conditions.

This seems to fit our own spatio-temporal moments; as we move either in space or time, what is immediately present to us (what is local to us) changes. Spatial movement is one form of movement, and temporal is another, but both require the temporal movement (I can't spatially move within the same moment of time; I would simply be spatially present at more locations within that moment. My local conditions would be more comprehensive.). Therefore, the temporal notion of "moment" I hold to be logically prior to a spatial notion of "position." But I think that both are good analogies for what I am discussing; we might simply define a "position" as a "spatial moment" and a "moment" as a "temporal position."

Further, the issue of logical and natural moments sometimes arises, especially in theological discussion concerning God's decrees. Using the current definition of moment, we would be looking at the what immediately precedes and follows each proposition about God's knowledge, and this would form the logical moment of each proposition, even though it all occurs in a single moment of another sort. So, for example, we could say that the logical moments involved in creation are such: (1) God knows all possibilties, then (2) God knows what would actually happen giving any world-actualization, and then (3) God actually creates the world (where "creates" is shorthand for being the efficient and final causes as well as sustainer). Each of these could not be said to be in separate temporal moments, but they occupy a specific ordering amongst themselves; (1) has as its context the logical step of leading to (2), which has as its context building on (1) while leading to (3), which has as its local context being more particular than (and so logically posterior to) (2).

Scotus' account of the will posits multiple natural moments within each temporal moment; the first natural moment is one in which an agent is doing x but still could possibly do not-x, and the second is when the agent has actually done x. Therefore, things are contingent at the temporal moment in which the occur. A natural moment is the local causal conditions surrounding each act, even if the acts are simultaneous. We may want to collapse natural and logical moments, depending on our metaphysics, but as long as we can talk of immediate causes and entailments, it seems that there is ground for adopting the language.

Now we come to the notion of God's eternity. One classical way of expressing this is as an "eternal present." Under my notion of "moment," this is exactly what is going on: God's local context includes everything. All things are present to God temporally, and spatially as well (and so eternity subsumes omnipresence). Seen in this light, it is hard to refute the doctrine without appearing heterodox, and yet there is no reason to affirm that God is merely a static concept. In addition, eternity and immutability are two aspects of one truth about God (leading to divine simplicity?).

In other news, I'll be reopening another blog to jot down my reading notes again; I'm posting too much on here for readers to keep up with, I suspect, but the act of writing things down in public keeps me motivated and thinking.