Infinitely Old Time

This is a Q&A blog post by our Visiting Scholar in Philosophy, William Lane Craig.

Question

I’m a big fan of your work, and I have argued with the Kalam for a while now, but I’ve recently started to question the argument, and whether time might actually be infinitely old, because of this line of reasoning:

1. Any decree from God that is made outside of time, is eternal.

2. God’s decree to make time was(is?) outside of time, so God has “eternally” been making time.

3. Therefore, time has to be eternal or infinitely old.

I’m probably making some dumb mistake, so I’d love if you could give me some clarity, and help me understand why the kalam still works, and why the universe isn’t infinitely old. Also, I realize that an infinitely old universe is a logical contradiction, which just makes this confuse me more.

William Lane Craig’s Response

These are thought-provoking questions, Asher, that require us to define our terms carefully.

Premiss (1) is correct if we define “eternal” to mean “without beginning and end.” Something may be without beginning and end either by being timeless or by existing throughout time. While God’s timeless decrees are, by definition, timeless and therefore eternal, they are obviously not eternal in the sense of existing throughout time.

Now in order to avoid the fallacy of equivocation, we must hold the meaning of our terms constant. But in premiss (2), you seem to switch to the other meaning of “eternal.” For in order to get your conclusion that “time has to be eternal or infinitely old,” you must understand “God has ‘eternally’ been making time” in the sense that He has been doing this throughout beginningless and endless time. But then you’re equivocating on the meaning of “eternal.” If, on the other hand, premiss (2) means that God has timelessly been making time, then—apart from the inappropriateness of using tensed verbs—proponents of divine timelessness would agree that God timelessly creates time.

There is a way of rescuing your argument, I think, and that would be by claiming that on a tensed theory of time, God cannot timelessly create time. For the origin of time would involve at least a relational change in God, as He comes to exist with time, thereby implying His temporality; and His knowledge of tensed facts like “It is presently 3:00 o’clock” would similarly imply His temporality. So even if God could timelessly decree that time should exist, He cannot timelessly make time exist without time’s being beginningless, or infinitely old. It is precisely for that reason that I have come to adopt an unusual hybrid model according to which God is timeless sans creation and temporal since the first moment of creation. That permits time to be finite in the past and so merely finitely old, even though it was created by a timeless being at the first moment at which He existed.

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