Theists often conceive God as an disembodied mind who is in a realm where there is no change, no temporality (even not a metaphysical time!).
But (let’s assume a mind doesn’t necessarily depend on a material brain) is their concept of atemporal mind coherent?
Posted: December 24th 2010
Reed Braden www
No.
Posted: January 5th 2011
brian thomson www
Without a temporal dimension, what happens to causality – actions followed by consequences? There could be no such thing as free will, a central concept in religious morality; an atemporal god wouldn’t be able to understand it, and nothing we people do would make any difference. People could never “sin”, since there would be no “after” to compare with “before”: the god would never see anything change.
Posted: December 29th 2010
Steve Zara www
What is mind? Mind comes from life, and like life it is dynamic. Minds grow, they learn, they love, they desire, they feel joy and sorrow, and then they age and die. Perhaps not all minds in future will suffer ageing and death, and perhaps not all minds will come from life. But the one thing minds do that makes them what they are is to experience. Experience of necessity means change, new thoughts, new memories.
What is God supposed to be? A mind with no body, outside time, outside space, beyond rules.
This is not incoherent. Stronger words need to be used. It’s a lie, a deception. It may be a lie to oneself, but it is still a lie. Anyone who has thought for even a minute about the nature of their mind knows that it is a child of time, so to talk of timeless mind is nothing more than the desperate need to believe in that their mind won’t be another victim of time.
A mind without time could not learn, could not think, could not remember; it would not be alive.
Posted: December 29th 2010
Eric_PK
Speaking of “existence” outside of time doesn’t make much sense, but theists rarely let definitional issues get in the way of a conclusion they want to reach.
Posted: December 29th 2010
George Locke
In order for it to be coherent, the relationship of atemporal existents to temporal ones would have to be made clear. In particular, how can an atemporal being interact with the temporal world? I can’t imagine anything atemporal that could create the world or cause miracles. It seems incoherent for an atemporal entity to respond to or be aware of events.
I can imagine something atemporal whose existence is manifested somehow in the qualities of our world. For instance, the color brown is manifested in brown things. I find it hard to identify such an atemporal something as a “god”.
So, the theist who claims god is atemporal has to do some twisty metaphysics to convince me either that something atemporal could interact with the world or that it makes sense to identify a quality as a deity.
Posted: December 28th 2010