"God and the Nature of Time" by Garrett J. DeWeese--A Discussion (Part I)

 Garrett J. DeWeese. God and the Nature of Time. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004.

One of my favorite books about God and time from the pre-Mullins days is the aforementioned work by DeWeese. I would like to discuss some aspects of his book without doing a formal review: if you ever get a chance to read the book, I strongly encourage it, but the work can be expensive in its latest iteration. That is a downside; moreover, DeWeese may not be everyone's cup of tea. 

My comments are based on the 2004 edition of God and the Nature of Time.

On page 2, DeWeese considers some proposed solutions to the problem of God and time. Firstly, he surveys those who think God is atemporal before turning attention to the opposing position, that God is temporal. Some atemporal advocates reckon that God's mode of being is one of timeless duration whereas others think God has no duration at all. The major influence on early thinkers of the church was Neoplatonism. For example, DeWeese contends that the early church theologians derived their belief in divine simplicity through Neoplatonism. A metaphysically simple being is defined as "one of which its intrinsic attributes are identical with that entity's individual essence, so it has no parts" (3). For every intrinsic attribute (F), assuming that God is F, God would then be identical to the divine F-ness.

Some defenders of God's atemporality include Origen of Alexandria, Augustine, Boethius and later, Thomas Aquinas. Divine simplicity, a strong view of immutability, and divine atemporality seem to work in tandem et inter se: one apparently entails the other; additionally, divine timelessness has been used to resolve the intractable dilemmas connected with the divine foreknowledge and creaturely free will debate (3). If God is completely atemporal, then it would seem that God beholds all events as one complete whole: it's as though past, present, and future happen all at once in the eyes of God. Most theologians in the medieval and contemporary periods accordingly have favored divine atemporality. However, some thinkers understand God to be temporal.

The theologian-philosophers whom DeWeese places in the "God is temporal" category are John Duns Scotus (1266?-1308), and William of Ockham (1285-1347); Scotus evidently contends that God is temporal. He frames this idea within the context of his theory of contingency while Ockham posits God's endurance through time as he wrestles with the foreknowledge/freedom dilemma. Nevertheless, Ockham believes that God is immutable though possibly temporal. Developments since the middle ages and modernity have led many contemporary philosophers to favor the view that God is temporal ad intra se et ad extra creationem (3-4).

To facilitate the issue of God's relationship to time, DeWeese eventually turns to a discussion of language theory. Which thesis about language should we accept while seeking to illuminate God's relationship to time? Should we advocate the postmodern approach to language and texts? DeWeese believes that deconstructionism and other postmodern approaches are "self-defeating and unnecessary" (22). He insists that postmodernism entails a "radical relativism" which results in no place being found for metaphysics (theory of ultimate reality). 

Refusing to be distracted by the rise and development of Continental philosophy and postmodernism, DeWeese opts for Anglo-American analytic philosophy as a possible tool for analyzing time and God's relation to it. One reason for the choice is that analytic philosophy is ostensibly more open to metaphysics than its alternative, Continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy likewise posits that language and reality are inextricably conjoined such that one can infer properties of the world from the properties of language (Bertrand Russell). This view has been tagged "the syntactic priority thesis" (22). Yet how does this thesis view fare under close scrutiny?

DeWeese maintains that the syntactic priority thesis must be incorrect (23). The reason is because language we use daily (no matter the language) admits of differing interpretations, and the ultimate determinate of these interpretations is the metaphysical theory that drives the hermeneutical approach. For example, if one is a Platonist, then that one will interpret ordinary language sentences differently than an Aristotelian or Fregean. Some language users quantify over concrete particulars while others quantify over abstract objects: metaphysics supposedly determines how syntax (word order) is to be understood. But what if reality could be derived from words instead of syntactical structures? That would mean the semantic priority thesis is correct. However, Deweese rejects this option too.

The reason why is because words have no meaning apart from their respective contexts. Despite the best efforts of W.V.O. Quine, who suggested that semantics could possibly bring about metaphysical conclusions, the semantic priority thesis seems as doomed to failure as syntactic priority. Yet DeWeese submits there is something potentially salvageable about linguistic theory:  it may help to illuminate our understanding of time and ultimately, how time applies to God. I will deal with this issue in part II of my discussion about God and the Nature of Time.