We’re using the book “Handbook of Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to go over the arguments for the existence of God. We will now begin covering the attributes of God. Dr. Kreeft teaches logic in two major universities, so his arguments tend to be clear, concise and very helpful.
This week we’ll go over God is Eternal:
Since God is not material, he is not spatially limited. That must be true, for God is the Creator of space and all the constantly changing material things which occupy it. Now the measure of that change is what we call “time.” Is God in time? Can he be temporally limited?
We experience ourselves as temporally limited. But most of us believe that human beings are more than just material things, and that something more is what we call “spirit.” But our spirits or souls are finite in nature and tied to our body’s matter. And therefore time is an intimate part of the way we experience our being—even our spiritual being. It takes time to think, as well as (for us) to be. That is why we can often feel separated from ourselves by vast physical, intellectual and moral distances in time (“How small—naive—carefree I was back then!”).
God cannot be subject to time. For God is the Creator of everything that changes: everything that raises a question about its own being. All beings subject to time raise that question. God cannot be like that.
This unboundedness by time is called “eternity.” Boethius’s famous definition of eternity goes like this: Life without limits, possessed perfectly and as a simultaneous whole. His words are very suggestive. But they clearly convey one essential thing: God is not bound by the kind of changing being which time measures. That is what we mean in the first place when we say that God is eternal (nontemporal).
The Incarnation does not contradict this; rather, it presupposes it. The Incarnation means that God took upon himself, in Christ, a human nature, which included time, space and matter. This presupposes that the divine nature is different from human nature. Part of that difference has traditionally been seen as God’s not being limited by time, space and matter. Only if a bird doesn’t swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal, can he become temporal.
Kreeft, P., & Tacelli, R. K. (1994). Handbook of Christian apologetics: hundreds of answers to crucial questions (p. 93). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.