Chapter 8

William Lane Craig's Hybrid View

Timeless Without Creation, Temporal With Creation

Introduction: A Creative Proposal from a Brilliant Philosopher

Of all the positions in the God-and-time debate, none is quite as creative — or quite as puzzling — as the one developed by William Lane Craig. Craig is, without question, one of the most important analytic philosophers of religion alive today. His work on the cosmological argument, the philosophy of time, and the coherence of theism has shaped an entire generation of scholarship, and his book Time and Eternity remains one of the most sophisticated and carefully argued treatments of God's relationship to time in the literature. When it comes to this particular question, Craig deserves our deepest respect and careful attention, even where we ultimately disagree.

And there is much on which we agree. Craig and I share the conviction that the A-theory of time — the view that temporal becoming is real, that the present is objectively special, and that the past is fixed while the future is genuinely open from the creaturely perspective — is correct. We both agree that God, after creation, is genuinely temporal. We both reject open theism. We both reject the B-theory "block universe" as an adequate account of time. We both hold that relativity theory does not disprove presentism (the view that only the present moment is real), and we both believe that God has exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. On all of these matters, Craig has been a powerful ally for the temporalist cause, and his arguments have been of enormous help to thinkers like me who want to affirm divine temporality without falling into the errors of open theism or process theology.

The disagreement — and it is a significant one — concerns what happened before creation. Or, more precisely, it concerns the question of whether there even was a "before" creation.

Craig proposes something remarkable: a "two-phase" model of God's life. In the first phase, God exists without creation in a state of timelessness — no before, no after, no succession, no temporal becoming. In the second phase, God enters time at the moment of creation and becomes genuinely temporal. The two phases are not related as "earlier" and "later," Craig insists. The timeless phase is at the "boundary" of time, much like the Big Bang singularity is at the boundary of space-time. This is Craig's hybrid view, and it is as ambitious as it is creative.

In this chapter, I want to do three things. First, I will present Craig's view as fully and as fairly as I can. He deserves that, and the strength of his arguments requires it. Second, I will present the major critiques of his position — drawing especially on R. T. Mullins, Garrett DeWeese, and Paul Helm — and add my own concerns. Third, I will explain why I believe the better alternative is the one I have been defending in this book: God has always been temporal, with time as an attribute of His very being, generated by the dynamic perichoretic life of the Trinity.

Craig's View: Presented Fully and Fairly

Let me begin by laying out Craig's position in his own terms. Craig's argument unfolds through several carefully constructed steps, and it is important to follow each one before evaluating the whole.

Step One: God After Creation Is Temporal

Craig begins by arguing — persuasively, in my view — that God, once He creates a temporal world, is genuinely temporal. The argument is straightforward. Once time begins at the moment of creation, God stands in a new relation with the temporal world. He sustains the universe. He coexists with created things. He knows tensed facts — facts about what is happening now, what has happened, and what will happen. All of these involve genuine temporal becoming. As Craig puts it in his essay in God and Time: Four Views, even if God undergoes no intrinsic change in creating, "he at least undergoes an extrinsic change" — He comes into the relation of sustaining the universe, a relation in which He did not stand before.¹

Craig presses this point forcefully: can God remain "untouched" by the world's temporality? It seems not. If God knows tensed facts — if He knows that right now it is April 2026 — then His knowledge changes as the facts change. Yesterday's "now" is no longer now. Tomorrow's "now" is not yet now. A God who knows such facts must exist in time, because the facts themselves change with the passage of time.²

Craig also argues that God's knowledge of tensed facts provides one of the strongest reasons for affirming divine temporality. An omniscient being must know every fact. If there are genuinely tensed facts — facts like "the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor yesterday" — then God must know them. But tensed facts change their truth-value over time. Before December 7, 1941, the tensed fact "The Japanese will attack Pearl Harbor" was true. After that date, a different tensed fact — "The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor" — became true. If God knows these facts, His knowledge must change, and change requires time.³

Craig strengthens this argument further by pointing out that even the relation of sustaining the universe is a real causal relation. It is not merely a so-called "Cambridge change" — a trivial relational change like Socrates becoming shorter than Theaetetus when Theaetetus grows taller. No, sustaining is an active, ongoing exercise of divine power. God holds the universe in existence at every moment, and this is a genuine causal activity that requires temporal location. Craig rightly dismisses Thomas Aquinas's attempt to avoid this conclusion through the doctrine of "no real relations" — the view that, while the world is really related to God, God is not really related to the world. Craig points out that this is simply unintelligible: you cannot have a real effect without a real cause. If the world is really sustained by God, then God is really sustaining the world — and that is a real relation that involves God in time.⁴

There is one more piece of Craig's argument for divine temporality after creation that deserves mention, because it has often been overlooked. Craig notes that the only way a defender of divine timelessness can escape his arguments is by adopting the B-theory of time — the static, tenseless view in which all moments are equally real and temporal passage is an illusion. If all moments exist tenselessly and there are no genuinely tensed facts, then God can be timelessly related to all of them without being drawn into time. As Craig observes, "virtually the only person" who has taken this escape route is Paul Helm, who holds that God created the entire temporal order as a B-series by an eternal act.⁵ But Craig — rightly, I believe — finds the B-theory unacceptable on both philosophical and theological grounds (see Chapter 24 for the full treatment of A-theory versus B-theory). The upshot is that any defender of divine timelessness who accepts the A-theory of time is in serious trouble.

So far, so good. On this part of Craig's argument, I am entirely with him. God after creation is temporal. The question is what comes next.

Step Two: The Kalam Argument and the Finitude of the Past

Here is where Craig's distinctive move comes in. Craig accepts what he considers a powerful philosophical argument: the kalam cosmological argument. The kalam argument, in its simplest form, runs as follows:

1. An actually infinite number of things cannot exist.
2. If the past were infinite, it would consist of an actually infinite number of past events.
3. Therefore, the past is not infinite — it had a beginning.⁶

Craig bolsters this with a second argument: an actually infinite series cannot be formed by successive addition. You cannot count to infinity by adding one number at a time, no matter how long you count. Similarly, you cannot traverse an infinite past by living through one moment after another. If God were temporal before creation, and if He has always been temporal, then God would have lived through an infinite number of past moments — which, Craig argues, is impossible.⁷

Craig also offers a third argument for the finitude of the past. If God had existed through an infinite past before deciding to create, why did He not create sooner? If God had been existing for an infinite amount of time, He would have had an infinite amount of time in which to create — so why did He wait? Why did He create at this particular moment rather than an earlier one? Since every moment in an infinite past is preceded by infinitely many moments, there is nothing special about any particular moment that would give God a reason to create then rather than earlier. This is sometimes called the "sooner argument," and Craig finds it compelling.⁸

Craig illustrates the traversal problem vividly by asking us to imagine a man who claims to have been counting down from infinity and has just finished: "…, −3, −2, −1, 0." Craig asks: why did he not finish counting yesterday? Or the day before? At any point in the infinite past, an infinite amount of time had already elapsed, so the countdown should already have been completed. But if he finished at every point, then at no point in the past do we find him still counting — which contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting from infinity.⁹

Now, this argument has been challenged by many philosophers (and we will look at those challenges shortly), but Craig finds it compelling. And here is the critical implication: if the past cannot be infinite, then God cannot have existed through an infinite past. If God was always temporal — if He has been experiencing real succession forever — then the past would be infinite, which the kalam argument says is impossible.

Step Three: The Solution — Timeless Without Creation, Temporal With Creation

This is where Craig's hybrid view comes together. The solution, he proposes, is that God was not always temporal. Before creation, God existed in a state of changeless, timeless existence. There was no before, no after, no succession. And then, at the "moment" of creation — the first event — time began, and God entered time.

Craig explains this carefully in Time and Eternity:

"In reality God existing without creation is changelessly alone, and no event disturbs this complete tranquility. There is no before, no after, no temporal passage, no future phase of His life. There is just God."¹⁰

Craig reinforces this with a thought experiment. Imagine God existing changelessly alone in a possible world where He refrains from creation entirely. In such a world, Craig argues, God would reasonably be conceived as timeless. But God, actually existing alone without creation, is no different than He would be in such a possible world — even though in the actual world He eventually creates and becomes temporal.¹¹

The two phases of God's life — timeless and temporal — are not related as "earlier" and "later." They cannot be, because the timeless phase has no temporal properties. Instead, Craig says the timeless phase is "causally" prior to the temporal phase. The timeless state somehow gives rise to the temporal state at the moment of creation.

Craig is quite aware that this sounds startling. He writes: "Now this conclusion is startling and not a little odd. For on such a view, there seem to be two phases of God's life, a timeless phase and a temporal phase, and the timeless phase seems to have existed earlier than the temporal phase. But this is logically incoherent, since to stand in a relation of earlier than is by all accounts to be temporal."¹² Craig's response is to deny that the timeless phase is temporally earlier. On a dynamic theory of time, the timeless phase is not "before" the temporal phase in any temporal sense. It simply is — until the first event brings time into existence.

Why Craig Holds This View: Three Motivations

It is worth pausing to appreciate why Craig finds this hybrid view attractive. He has three main motivations, and understanding them helps us see the force of his position.

First, Craig accepts the kalam argument, and the kalam argument says the past cannot be infinite. If God was always temporal, the past would be infinite. The timeless-sans-creation phase neatly solves this problem: there is no infinite past, because there was no time at all before creation.

Second, Craig accepts — rightly, I believe — that God after creation must be temporal. The arguments from God's real relations with the temporal world, His knowledge of tensed facts, and His genuine interaction with creatures are, Craig thinks, decisive. So God must be temporal now.

Third, Craig wants to affirm creation ex nihilo — the Christian doctrine that God created the world out of nothing. If time is somehow eternal, Craig worries, then the distinction between God and the created order becomes blurred. By saying that time itself began at creation, Craig preserves a clear boundary: God alone exists "before" (causally, not temporally) the created order, including time itself.¹³

These are not trivial motivations. Craig is responding to real philosophical pressures, and his hybrid view is a genuine attempt to do justice to all of them. The question is whether it succeeds.

The Critiques: Where the Hybrid View Breaks Down

I believe Craig's hybrid view, despite its ingenuity, faces several serious philosophical problems. Let me present the most important critiques in detail, drawing on the work of R. T. Mullins, Garrett DeWeese, Paul Helm, and others.

Critique One: How Are the Two Phases Related? (Mullins)

The most devastating critique of Craig's view, in my judgment, comes from R. T. Mullins, especially in his book From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. Mullins asks a deceptively simple question: how are the two phases of God's life — the timeless phase and the temporal phase — related to each other?¹⁴

There are, it seems, only a few possibilities:

Not temporally. This is Craig's own insistence. The timeless phase cannot be "before" the temporal phase in any temporal sense, because the timeless phase has no temporal properties. Fine — but then in what sense is it "prior" at all?

Not by mere logical priority. As Mullins points out (drawing on work by Alan Rhoda), relations of logical priority can only hold between things that are mutually compatible and can be co-realized — like the premises and conclusion of a valid argument. But timelessness and temporality are incompatible properties. A being cannot be both timeless and temporal at the same time. So the relation between the two phases cannot be merely logical.¹⁵

Causally? This is Craig's answer: the timeless state is causally prior to the temporal state. The changeless, timeless God somehow causes the temporal world to come into being. But here is where Mullins drives the argument home. Craig himself admits that in the timeless phase, God is not actually exercising any causal power. God's causal activity begins at creation — which is the first temporal event. In the timeless phase, God is merely intending to create, not actually creating. God's causal power is only exercised at the first moment of the temporal phase.¹⁶

But if the timeless phase exercises no causal power, then in what sense is it "causally prior" to the temporal phase? It is not doing any causal work. It is, as Mullins puts it, an idle wheel in the system — a phase that has no temporal properties, exercises no causal power, and does nothing to bring about the temporal phase. If it is doing nothing, why posit it at all?

Mullins sums up the difficulty: "Earlier, I quoted Craig as saying that God's timeless phase is causally prior to creation. Now I have Craig saying that God's timeless phase is not exercising any causal power. God is only exercising His causal power at the first moment of creation, which is simultaneous with the first moment of God's temporal phase of existence. In which case, God's timeless phase of existence is not actually causally prior to creation."¹⁷

This is, I think, a very serious problem. Craig needs the timeless phase to do real work in his system — it is supposed to solve the problem of the infinite past and to explain how God "transitions" from timelessness to temporality. But if the timeless phase has no causal function, it is hard to see what role it plays.

Critique Two: The Apparent Contradiction (DeWeese)

Garrett DeWeese, in his careful treatment of God and time in God and the Nature of Time, raises another troubling objection. The conjunction "God is (tenselessly) timeless AND God is (present tense) temporal" looks very much like a contradiction.¹⁸

Here is the difficulty. If God is tenselessly timeless — if it is true in a tenseless, non-temporal sense that God is timeless — then it should be true now that God is timeless. But Craig also claims that God is now temporal. So we seem to have two claims that cannot both be true at the same time: "God is timeless" and "God is temporal."

Craig's response is to insist that the timeless phase is not simultaneous with the temporal phase. The timeless phase is "over" (in some sense), and the temporal phase is what is happening now. But DeWeese points out that this response has its own problems. If the two phases are not simultaneous, then they must have some relation to each other. If the timeless phase "passed away" (to use temporal language) and the temporal phase "began" (again, temporal language), then we seem to be describing a temporal process — a transition from one state to another. And that transition looks very much like the kind of change that requires time.

As Joe Schmid has pressed this point more recently, it seems like God's timeless phase ceases to exist once the universe comes into existence. In our ontological inventory with creation, we surely should not say that God's timeless phase still exists. So it looks like God's timeless phase passes away, and that looks remarkably temporal.¹⁹

Mullins draws on a distinction from thirteenth-century medieval theology to sharpen this point. Medieval thinkers distinguished between the "priority of nature" and the "priority of duration." Things that are prior merely in nature can exist at the same moment. Things that are prior in duration must exist at different moments. The transition from God's timeless phase to God's temporal phase looks like what the medieval thinkers called "turning" — going from one state to a different, incompatible state. Turning necessarily involves duration and succession. So the very transition Craig describes seems to require the temporality he is trying to deny.²⁰

Critique Three: The Atemporalist's Puzzle (Helm)

Interestingly, the strongest classical atemporalist (defender of divine timelessness) in the God and Time: Four Views volume — Paul Helm — also finds Craig's position deeply puzzling. This is significant: Craig's view is challenged not only by temporalists like Mullins and DeWeese, but also by the very atemporalists he is trying to accommodate.

Helm raises several pointed concerns. First, he notes that Craig's pre-creation "timelessness" is supposed to be understood within the A-theory of time — the dynamic theory. But the A-theory says that temporal becoming is real and that there is a genuine distinction between past, present, and future. How can God exist in a timeless "point" within an A-theory framework, when the A-theory itself says that existence involves real temporal becoming?²¹

Helm writes pointedly: "Bill appears, not surprisingly, to want to have his cake and to eat it too! In the time before the creation, there would be no earlier and later, no waiting, no temporal becoming. So he wishes to say that before creation God exists in a timeless instant. God before the creation occupies an indivisible moment of timeless existence and then becomes temporal."²² Helm's question is whether this makes sense. Can God exist "timelessly" in a dynamic A-series and then "become" temporal? If God "becomes" temporal, has He not already changed — and is not change itself a temporal process?

Helm also raises the problem of foreknowledge. If God exists in a timeless state before creation, does He know what is future to Him? If He does — if He knows that He will create — then He already has knowledge of the future, which seems to require temporality. If He does not, then He is not omniscient in Craig's own sense of the term. Either way, the position looks unstable.²³

Helm concludes that Craig "may be forced to choose either the eternalist or the temporalist option." And I agree. The hybrid view is an attempt to split the difference, but it is not clear that the difference can be split.

What makes Helm's criticism so striking is that it comes from an atemporalist — someone who agrees with Craig that timelessness is a coherent option. Helm's own solution is to embrace full, unqualified divine timelessness, coupled with a B-theory of time. On Helm's view, God timelessly creates and sustains the entire temporal order — past, present, and future all exist tenselessly and are equally real before God. Helm thinks this is coherent (I disagree, but that is the argument of Chapters 5 and 6). What Helm does not think is coherent is Craig's attempt to have God be timeless in one phase and temporal in another. The transition itself seems to require temporality, which means the whole structure collapses.

It is also worth noting that in the God and Time: Four Views volume, Helm challenges Craig's claim that the classical atemporalist position requires the "no real relations" doctrine of Aquinas. Helm argues that one can be an atemporalist without endorsing that doctrine. God can have a real, contingent, eternal relation with the created order without being drawn into time — provided one accepts the B-theory. What Helm denies is Craig's assumption that God's creating the world requires God to "come into" new relations at the moment of creation. For Helm, there is no "moment of creation" in the relevant sense — creation is an eternal act, and the whole temporal series exists as the result of that act.²⁴

Now, I do not agree with Helm's position — as I have argued in earlier chapters, the B-theory faces devastating philosophical and theological objections. But Helm's criticism of Craig's hybrid is well-taken. Craig is trying to combine elements of timelessness and temporality that may not be combinable. The atemporalist says: be an atemporalist. The temporalist says: be a temporalist. Craig says: be both. And the critics on both sides say: you cannot.

Critique Four: The Problem of Atemporal Causation

A fourth difficulty concerns the very idea of atemporal causation — the notion that a changeless, timeless being can cause something to happen. Causing involves bringing about a change: from no effect to an effect. But if the cause is utterly changeless and timeless, how does it produce a new effect? This is not just a puzzle — it cuts to the heart of Craig's hybrid model.

Mullins highlights what Graham Oppy has called the Oppy Causal Principle: there can be no case in which one thing causes a change in another without itself undergoing change. Oppy argues this principle is intuitively obvious and can be defended by empirical generalization — in our experience, every cause involves some change in the causal agent.²⁵

Now, Craig himself actually affirms the Oppy Causal Principle — he agrees that God changes when He creates. That is precisely why Craig says God becomes temporal at the moment of creation. But the problem is that Craig also says that in the timeless phase, God is changeless and exercises no causal power. So the timeless phase cannot be the cause of creation. And the temporal phase begins with creation. So who or what causes creation? The timeless God cannot cause it (no causal power in timelessness). The temporal God only begins at the moment of creation. It seems like the cause of creation falls through the cracks between the two phases.

Some philosophers have pressed this even further. Sam Baron and Kristie Miller have argued that the entire idea of timeless causation is impossible. Without time, causation simply cannot exist. If they are right, then a timeless being — even a timeless God — cannot cause anything at all, which makes the timeless phase even more problematic for Craig's system.²⁶

Craig has tried to respond by appealing to the idea of simultaneous causation — the notion that a cause can be simultaneous with its effect, as when a ball resting on a cushion causes a depression in the cushion at the same moment. But Helm points out that simultaneity is itself a temporal relation. Timeless entities cannot stand in temporal relations to anything, including simultaneity. So this escape route is blocked as well.²⁷

The upshot is that atemporal causation is deeply problematic. And since Craig's entire hybrid model depends on a timeless God somehow causing creation to occur, this is a significant difficulty.

Critique Five: The Molinism Problem

Craig's hybrid view does not exist in a philosophical vacuum. It is deeply intertwined with his broader theological commitments, including his commitment to Molinism — the view that God possesses "middle knowledge" (scientia media) of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. That is, God knows what every possible free creature would do in every possible set of circumstances. And this connection creates further problems for the hybrid view.

Here is how Molinism fits into Craig's picture. In the timeless phase, God has three "logical moments" of knowledge: (1) natural knowledge (knowledge of all necessary truths), (2) middle knowledge (knowledge of what every possible creature would freely do in every possible circumstance), and (3) free knowledge (God's knowledge of the actual world He has chosen to create, based on His middle knowledge). On the basis of middle knowledge, God selects the "best feasible world" — the world that best fulfills His purposes — and creates it.

Mullins raises a pointed difficulty here. At the first logical moment of God's timeless life — the moment of natural knowledge — God is said to be "undecided" about whether to create. He does not yet know the future, because He has not yet decided whether to create anything at all. It is only at subsequent logical moments that God decides to create and which world to create. But how can God be both "undecided" and "decided" in a single timeless state? These are logically contradictory properties. The Molinist logical moments seem to smuggle temporal succession into what is supposed to be a timeless state.²⁸

Beyond this internal difficulty, I have two broader concerns about Molinism that bear on the God-and-time question.

The first is the grounding objection. What makes counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true? If the creatures have not yet been created and the circumstances have not yet obtained, what "grounds" the truth of propositions like "If Jones were in circumstance C, he would freely choose X"? The creatures do not yet exist. The circumstances do not yet obtain. There seems to be nothing in reality that could make such propositions true or false. Many philosophers — including William Hasker, Robert Adams, and others — have argued that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom simply have no truth-value prior to the existence of the creatures and circumstances they describe.²⁹

The second concern is theological. Molinism makes God's creative decision depend on His middle knowledge of what creatures would do. But this gives created beings — beings who do not yet exist — a kind of leverage over God. God's creative options are constrained by what possible creatures would freely do. If no possible world satisfies all of God's purposes, God is stuck with the "best feasible" option — which may be quite far from ideal. This seems to compromise divine sovereignty and makes God's plan for the world contingent on the free choices of creatures who have not yet been created. As I have argued elsewhere, I believe God's exhaustive foreknowledge is better explained by what I call simple foreknowledge with transcendent temporal access — God knows the future because He can see it, not because He runs a cosmic simulation based on middle knowledge (see Chapter 25 for the full treatment).

There is a deeper problem here as well. Molinism seems to require that the Molinist logical moments — natural knowledge, middle knowledge, and free knowledge — have a genuine order. First God knows what is necessary, then He knows what creatures would freely do, and then He decides which world to create. This order looks like a temporal sequence, even though Molinists insist it is merely "logical." But if these are truly simultaneous — if God has all three "moments" of knowledge at once, with no priority — then it becomes unclear how God's free knowledge can be based on His middle knowledge. The "based on" relation seems to require a before-and-after: God first has middle knowledge, and then, on the basis of that knowledge, He chooses to create. But "first ... and then" is temporal language. So either the Molinist logical moments involve real succession (in which case God is temporal, not timeless), or they do not involve real succession (in which case the explanatory structure of Molinism collapses).

Craig is aware of this difficulty and has attempted to respond to it, but I do not find his responses convincing. The deeper issue, I think, is that Molinism was designed for a timeless God — it was originally proposed by the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina as a way for a timeless God to providentially govern a world of free creatures. Craig has adapted it for his hybrid view, but the fit is awkward. If God is temporal after creation (as Craig affirms), then simple foreknowledge — knowing the future by direct temporal access — seems far more natural than the elaborate machinery of middle knowledge. Why would a temporal God need counterfactuals of creaturely freedom to know what will happen, when He can simply see the future through His transcendent temporal access?

Critique Six: The Problem with "Amorphous Time"

Before arriving at his hybrid view, Craig considers and rejects an alternative that some philosophers have proposed: the idea that God existed in a kind of "amorphous" or "undifferentiated" time before creation. This is the position associated with what Craig calls the "Oxford school" — thinkers like Richard Swinburne and Alan Padgett, who hold that God existed in a timeless or quasi-temporal duration before creation, without any measurable metric. On this view, God was temporal before creation, but this pre-creation time was qualitatively different from the measurable, physical time that began at creation.

Craig rejects the amorphous-time option because he believes it still involves an infinite past. Even in an amorphous, metrically undifferentiated time, Craig argues, God would have endured through a beginningless series of longer and longer intervals. The past would still be infinite, just unmeasured. And an infinite past, the kalam argument says, is impossible.³⁰

But Padgett pushes back forcefully in his response to Craig in God and Time: Four Views. Padgett argues that Craig's objection misunderstands metric conventionalism. In a truly metrically amorphous time, there simply are no temporal intervals — no objectively distinguishable lengths. If there are no intervals, then there is no infinite series of intervals to traverse, and the kalam argument's force dissolves. Padgett prefers to describe this pre-creation state not as an "infinite amount of time" (since infinity has mathematical properties that may not apply here) but as a "nonfinite eternity" — an eternity without end or limit but not infinite in a mathematical sense.³¹

More importantly, Padgett offers a philosophical argument that even a changeless God must be temporal in some weak sense. His reasoning is as follows: change requires duration (time). Therefore, if duration exists, change might occur. And since God is a being for whom change is possible — God freely chose to create, and creation involves a change — duration must exist even before the first change occurs. God, being a being capable of change, must exist in time even before He actually changes. Craig cannot consistently claim that God was fully timeless before creation while also claiming that creation was a free act that God could have chosen to perform.³²

I find Padgett's argument compelling. If God is the kind of being who can create — who has the power to bring about change — then He must already exist in some form of time. A truly timeless being could not even potentially create, because creation requires change, and change requires time.

Critique Seven: The Curiosity of "Phases" Versus "Events"

Mullins raises one final, subtle difficulty with Craig's position that I find quite revealing. Craig describes God's timeless existence as a "timeless state of affairs" or a "timeless phase." But what exactly is the difference between a "phase" and an "event"? On Craig's own definition (developed with J.P. Moreland), an event is "the coming, continued possession or going of a property by a substance at or through a time."³³ But notice: time is built into the very definition of an event. An event has an occurrence — a "when." Events presuppose the existence of time.

Yet Craig's timeless phase looks remarkably like an event. At this timeless phase, God has properties. God is supposedly predetermining and foreknowing how history will unfold. God is intending to create. All of this looks very much like a state of affairs that involves something happening — which is to say, it looks like an event. But Craig insists it is not an event, because events require time, and this phase is timeless. Mullins rightly notes: "This is curious, to say the least."³⁴

The deeper problem, as Mullins identifies, is circularity. Craig says events are explanatorily prior to time — time exists because events occur. But events, by Craig's own definition, involve substances having properties at or through a time. So time is built into the definition of events, and events are supposed to explain the existence of time. This looks like a vicious circle, and it undermines Craig's ability to clearly distinguish his "timeless phase" (which is supposed to be non-temporal) from the "temporal phase" (which involves genuine events).³⁵

What Craig Gets Right

Before moving to my positive alternative, I want to be clear about what Craig gets right. It is a lot, and the temporalist cause owes him an enormous debt.

First, Craig is absolutely right that God after creation is genuinely temporal. His arguments from God's real relations with the temporal world, His knowledge of tensed facts, and His genuine interaction with creatures are powerful and, in my view, decisive. These arguments have done more than perhaps any others to shift the contemporary philosophical discussion toward divine temporality.

Second, Craig is right that the A-theory of time — the dynamic, tensed view — is more congenial to theism than the B-theory. The biblical God acts, responds, creates, and intervenes. These are temporal activities that presuppose the reality of temporal becoming. Craig's extensive philosophical work defending the A-theory against its critics has been invaluable.

Third, Craig is right that open theism is wrong. God has exhaustive foreknowledge. The future is not "open" even for God. Craig's arguments against open theism — from biblical prophecy, from the nature of divine perfection, and from the demands of providential governance — are correct, and I share them fully (see Chapters 9 and 32 for the full treatment).

Fourth, Craig is right that relativity theory does not disprove presentism or the A-theory. His extensive work on the Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity has shown that the physics is compatible with a privileged reference frame and absolute simultaneity, even if Einstein's original formulation did not assume them (see Chapter 31 for the full treatment).

Fifth, Craig takes the question of God's pre-creation existence seriously. Many philosophers simply wave their hands and say "God was temporal before creation" without wrestling with the deep questions about what that means. Craig recognizes that the pre-creation phase raises profound puzzles, and he deserves credit for engaging those puzzles with philosophical rigor.

Where Craig goes wrong, I believe, is in his proposed solution to those puzzles. The timeless-sans-creation phase is creative but unnecessary — and, as I have argued, philosophically problematic. There is a better way.

The Better Alternative: God Has Always Been Temporal

I believe the evidence points to a simpler and more coherent conclusion: God has always been temporal. There was never a "timeless phase." Time is not a feature of the created order alone — it is an attribute of God's own being, grounded in the dynamic, perichoretic life of the Trinity.

This is the position defended most rigorously by R. T. Mullins, and I find his case compelling. Let me outline the key reasons why I think this is the better path.

The Trinity Generates Temporality

As I argue in detail in Chapter 26, the intra-Trinitarian relations themselves generate a form of temporality even apart from creation. The Father eternally loves the Son. The Son eternally responds to the Father. The Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son (or from the Father through the Son, depending on one's pneumatological commitments). This perichoretic — mutually indwelling — life of the three divine Persons is dynamic, relational, and active. It involves knowing, loving, willing, and communicating. And these activities, I would suggest, involve at least some form of succession. The Father's love for the Son and the Son's response to the Father constitute a dynamic relation — and dynamic relations generate temporality.

Craig himself recognizes something close to this. In Time and Eternity, he discusses the ancient doctrine of perichoresis and the complete interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity. He writes that there is "a full and perfect exchange of the divine love and knowledge, so that nothing is left undone which needs to be completed."³⁶ Craig concludes that this perfect interpenetration involves no change and thus God existing alone would be timeless on a relational view of time.

But here I disagree with Craig's conclusion. The fact that the Trinitarian exchange is "full and perfect" does not mean it is changeless. Love, knowing, and communion are inherently dynamic activities. Even if nothing new is communicated, the ongoing activity of loving, knowing, and communing is a form of real activity — and real activity involves succession, even if that succession is qualitatively different from the temporal succession we experience in the created world.

Mullins presses this point in both The End of the Timeless God and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. If the Trinity's perichoretic life is genuinely dynamic — if it involves real, ongoing activity — then it generates temporality. Time is not something that God creates alongside the universe. Time is a feature of who God is.³⁷

Let me try to make this as clear as I can with a concrete illustration. Imagine the Father expressing His love for the Son. The Son receives that love and responds with His own love for the Father. The Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, is the very bond of that love. Now, are these relations static or dynamic? Are they frozen in a single changeless instant, or are they ongoing, active, living? I believe they are dynamic. Love, by its very nature, is an activity — it is something that is done, not merely something that is. And an activity, even a perfect and unchanging activity, involves at the very least the continuation of that activity from one moment to the next. The Father does not merely be loving — He loves. And loving is a temporal act.

Think about it this way. When we say "God is love" (1 John 4:8), we do not mean that God is a frozen, static property called "love." We mean that God actively, dynamically, and continuously loves. He loves the Son. The Son loves the Father. The Spirit is the living expression of that love. And this active, ongoing, relational love is the very heartbeat of the divine life — a heartbeat that pulses with a kind of succession, even if that succession is qualitatively different from the tick-tock of a human clock.

DeWeese arrives at a similar conclusion through his causal theory of time. On a causal theory, time is the order of causal relations. If God causally relates to Himself in the intra-Trinitarian life — the Father's love causing the Son's responsive love, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son — then there is a causal order, and where there is a causal order, there is temporality.³⁸

I want to be careful here not to say too much. I am not claiming that the intra-Trinitarian life involves the kind of measurable, quantifiable temporal succession that we experience in the created world. Divine time may be qualitatively different from created time in ways that we cannot fully comprehend. But I am claiming that it involves genuine activity, genuine dynamism, and genuine succession of some kind. And that is enough to establish that God is temporal — that He has always been temporal — even apart from creation.

The connection between the Trinity and divine temporality is so important that I have devoted an entire chapter to it (Chapter 26). Here I will simply note that this Trinitarian grounding of divine temporality provides the foundation for rejecting Craig's timeless-sans-creation phase. If time is an attribute of God's own being — generated by the dynamic, perichoretic life of the three divine Persons — then there was never a time (or a "state") when God was timeless. God's temporality is as essential to who He is as His love, His knowledge, and His power.

The Kalam Argument Does Not Require Timelessness

But what about the kalam argument? Does an eternal divine temporality not require an infinite past — and did Craig not argue that an infinite past is impossible?

This is a genuine concern, and it deserves a thoughtful response. I want to say two things.

First, not all temporalists accept the kalam argument's conclusion that an actually infinite past is impossible. Many philosophers — including DeWeese — have argued that God's pre-creation temporal life may not involve the kind of discrete, measurable, successive events that the kalam argument targets. Divine time before creation may have been amorphous and unmeasured — not a series of discrete moments to be counted one by one. If there are no discrete intervals to traverse, then the kalam argument about "traversing an actual infinite by successive addition" simply does not apply.³⁹

As Padgett puts it in his response to Craig, we should think of God's pre-creation eternity not as an "infinite amount of time" in a mathematical sense, but as a "nonfinite eternity" — an existence without end or limit that is not composed of countable intervals. The mathematical notion of infinity, with its well-defined set-theoretic properties, may simply be the wrong tool for describing God's pre-creation temporal life.⁴⁰

Second, even if we accept (for the sake of argument) that the past is finite in some sense, it does not follow that God was timeless before creation. It could simply mean that God's temporal life had a beginning — that there was a first moment of divine time, before which there was nothing. This would be unusual, certainly, but it is not obviously incoherent. The important point is that the kalam argument, even if sound, does not require a timeless phase. It requires only that the past is not actually infinite. And there are ways to satisfy that requirement without resorting to divine timelessness.

I will be candid: I am cautious about speculating too far into the nature of pre-creation divine time. We are at the very limits of human understanding here, and humility is appropriate. But I lean toward the view that some form of divine temporality — generated by the Trinity's perichoretic life — has always existed, even if this pre-creation divine time was radically unlike the measurable, physical time that began at creation. Whether this divine time extends infinitely into the past or had some form of beginning is a question I do not think we can answer with certainty. But I am confident that a timeless phase is not the answer.

Divine Emotion Requires Temporality

There is one more argument for divine temporality that bears on Craig's hybrid view, and it comes from the closely related question of divine emotion. As I argue in the companion book, The Heart of God, and as Mullins argues in God and Emotion, genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality. If God genuinely grieves over sin, rejoices over repentance, and feels compassion for the suffering, these emotional responses involve a before (the event that triggers the emotion) and an after (the emotional response). A timeless God cannot genuinely respond, because response requires temporal sequence.⁴¹

Now, on Craig's view, God after creation is temporal, so He can genuinely respond to creaturely events in the temporal phase. But what about the timeless phase? In the timeless phase, did God have emotions? Did He love? Did He feel joy? If so, those emotional states seem to involve the kind of dynamic activity that generates temporality. If not, then we have a picture of God in the timeless phase as a cold, emotionless, purely intellectual being — which sits very uneasily with the biblical portrait of a God who is love (1 John 4:8). Either way, the timeless phase creates problems for a robust account of divine emotion.

Craig might respond that in the timeless phase, God has only "essential" emotional states — unchanging, intrinsic dispositions like love — rather than "responsive" emotional states that change in reaction to creaturely events. This is possible, but it still raises questions. Is essential, unchanging love the same as the dynamic, relational love that Scripture attributes to God? Or is it something more abstract and less personal? I worry that the timeless phase forces us into a picture of God that is more like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover than the living, passionate God of the Bible. And that is a picture I want to resist.

Swinburne's Alternative

Richard Swinburne offers perhaps the simplest alternative to Craig's hybrid view: God has always existed in time, and this time before creation was infinite, amorphous, and undifferentiated. Swinburne argues that in the absence of laws of nature and physical events, there would be no temporal distances — no way to measure how long God had been "waiting." But this does not mean God was timeless. It simply means God existed in a different kind of time — a time without clocks, without measurable intervals, but still genuine time involving duration and the possibility of change.

Craig objects that Swinburne's pre-creation time is still infinite and therefore falls afoul of the kalam argument. But as noted above, the force of the kalam argument in this context is disputed. And Swinburne's view has the great advantage of simplicity and coherence: God is temporal, period. No "phase transitions," no mysterious shifts from timelessness to temporality, no idle wheels.

Wolterstorff's Unqualified Temporality

My own position is closest to Nicholas Wolterstorff's. Wolterstorff defends unqualified divine temporality: God is everlasting — He exists through all of time, with no beginning and no end. All temporal language about God should be taken at face value. God acts, responds, creates, redeems, and will consummate all things — and all of these are genuinely temporal activities. Unlike Craig, Wolterstorff does not feel the need to posit a timeless phase before creation. He simply affirms that God has always been temporal.

In the God and Time: Four Views volume, Wolterstorff responds to Craig's essay with characteristic directness. He notes that there is "not much that I disagree with in Bill Craig's discussion — mainly because, on the issues that I articulate and defend, Bill and I pretty much agree." Where they differ is on the pre-creation phase: Craig holds it was likely timeless, Wolterstorff finds the considerations either way "indecisive," and Padgett holds it was likely temporal. All three agree, however, that God with creation is temporal.⁴²

My own position adds a dimension that Wolterstorff does not develop: transcendent temporal access. God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real succession, acts in the present, and responds to events as they happen. But He is not bound by creaturely clock-time. He can see and access all moments of created time — past, present, and future — through His unique divine capacity. This is the position I call "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access," and it is developed fully in Chapter 7 and Chapter 25.

Responding to Craig's Strongest Point

I should not leave Craig's hybrid view without engaging with what I consider his strongest point. Craig asks us to consider a possible world in which God refrains from creation entirely. In such a world, God exists changelessly alone. Craig argues that in such a world, God would be timeless — and that the God who actually exists without creation is no different from this possible-world God, even though in the actual world God eventually creates.⁴³

This is a creative argument, and it has intuitive force. If nothing is happening — if God is utterly changeless — what reason do we have for calling such a state "temporal"?

But I think the argument can be resisted on at least two grounds. First, even in a world without creation, the Trinitarian life of God is not "nothing happening." The Father loves the Son. The Son responds to the Father. The Spirit proceeds. These are real, ongoing, dynamic relations — and I have argued that they generate temporality. So even in a world without creation, God is not utterly changeless. The perichoretic life of the Trinity is always "happening."

Second, Padgett's argument about the possibility of change applies here. Even if God is changeless in a possible world without creation, He is still a being for whom change is possible. He has the power to create. He has the capacity to bring about something new. And as Padgett argued, a being for whom change is possible must exist in time, at least in some weak sense. A truly timeless being — one for whom temporal categories are entirely inapplicable — could not even potentially create. The very possibility of creation presupposes temporality.

There is a third response as well, and it relates to the incarnation. As I argue in Chapter 27 (and as Ryan Mullins argues at length in God, Time, and the Incarnation), a timeless God cannot become incarnate. The Incarnation — God the Son entering human history, being born at a particular moment, growing, suffering, dying, rising, and ascending — is an irreducibly temporal event. If Craig holds that God was timeless before creation, then the Incarnation becomes even more puzzling: God not only "transitions" from timelessness to temporality at creation, but also, in the person of the Son, enters into the most intimate possible union with temporal, human existence.⁴¹ The weight of the Incarnation — which is central to Christian faith — pushes strongly in the direction of affirming that God has always been temporal. A God who can become incarnate is a God for whom temporal categories are not foreign or alien, but deeply congenial to His nature.

Finally, I would point to the near-death experience literature as offering a suggestive (though not decisive) analogy. As I discuss in Chapter 33, many near-death experiencers report that during their experience, time operated in radically different ways. Events could be experienced both sequentially and simultaneously. Time could be compressed or extended. The temporal structure of the experience was qualitatively different from ordinary clock-time — yet it still involved genuine sequence, genuine experience, and genuine succession. These reports illustrate, at the very least, the conceptual possibility of a mode of temporal experience that is radically unlike our own while still being genuinely temporal. And that is precisely what I am claiming about God's pre-creation temporal life: it was qualitatively different from created time, but it was still genuinely temporal. If human beings can experience time in radically altered modes during NDEs, how much more might the infinite God experience time in a mode that transcends our categories while still involving genuine dynamic activity?

The Significance of Craig's Contribution

Despite my disagreements with Craig's hybrid view, I want to close this chapter by reaffirming the significance of his contribution to the debate. Craig has done something that few other philosophers have managed to do: he has made the God-and-time question accessible, rigorous, and deeply relevant to the wider theological conversation. His defense of the A-theory, his arguments for divine temporality after creation, his critique of the B-theory, his engagement with relativity theory, and his rejection of open theism have all been enormously valuable. The fact that his hybrid view ultimately does not succeed does not diminish the importance of his work. It simply means that the question he raised — how do we account for God's pre-creation existence? — demands a different answer.

I also want to acknowledge something personal. Craig's work was one of the first things I read when I began studying the God-and-time question, and it shaped my thinking profoundly. His Time and Eternity is a masterclass in analytic philosophy of religion — clear, rigorous, and deeply engaged with both the philosophical and theological dimensions of the question. Even where I disagree with his conclusions, I have learned enormously from his arguments. Any serious student of the God-and-time question must grapple with Craig's work, and I am grateful for the intellectual challenges it has posed.

It is also worth noting that Craig's hybrid view has been enormously influential in evangelical circles. Many thoughtful Christians who are not professional philosophers have adopted Craig's position because it seems to offer the best of both worlds: God is timeless in eternity past (preserving the transcendence of the classical tradition) and temporal in the created order (preserving the personal, relational God of the Bible). I understand the appeal. But I believe that once we see the philosophical difficulties with the two-phase model — and once we recognize that divine temporality does not compromise God's transcendence, sovereignty, or perfection — the motivation for the hybrid view largely disappears. A God who has always been temporal is no less transcendent than a God who was once timeless. He is simply more personal, more relational, and more consistent with the full biblical portrait of a living, acting, responding God.

This connects directly to the arguments I have developed in my companion books. In The Heart of God, I argued that genuine divine emotional responsiveness — God's real grief over sin, His real joy in redemption, His real compassion for the suffering — requires temporality. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to anything, because response requires a before and an after. Craig's hybrid view partially addresses this by making God temporal after creation, but it leaves the question of divine emotion in the timeless phase unresolved. In The Word Made Flesh, I argued that the Incarnation — God the Son becoming human, being born, growing, suffering, dying, and rising — is incompatible with divine timelessness. Again, Craig's hybrid view partially addresses this, since the Incarnation occurs in the temporal phase. But the very fact that the Son could become incarnate — that temporality is not foreign to His nature — suggests that temporality is an essential attribute of God, not an acquired one.⁴⁴

And that answer, I believe, is this: God has always been temporal. Time is not a creature. It is an attribute of God's own being, generated by the perichoretic life of the Trinity. God did not need to "enter" time at creation, because He was already temporal. What God created at the beginning was not time itself, but created time — measurable, physical, clock-time. Divine time and created time are qualitatively different, just as God's knowledge and creaturely knowledge are qualitatively different. But both are genuinely temporal.

This is the position that Mullins defends with such rigor, that DeWeese develops through his causal theory, that Wolterstorff affirms with characteristic clarity, and that I believe the full weight of biblical, philosophical, and theological evidence supports. Craig's hybrid view was a noble attempt to split the difference between timelessness and temporality. But in the end, the difference cannot be split. God is temporal — and He always has been.

Conclusion

We have now examined what is perhaps the most sophisticated attempt in the literature to hold together both divine timelessness and divine temporality. Craig's hybrid view is a masterwork of philosophical creativity. It acknowledges the force of the arguments for divine temporality after creation while attempting to preserve a role for timelessness before creation. And it does so with a level of philosophical rigor and precision that commands respect.

But I believe the critiques are decisive. The two-phase model faces the idle wheel problem (the timeless phase does no causal work), the apparent contradiction between timeless and temporal predications, the problem of atemporal causation, the difficulties of Molinism, and the curious circularity in Craig's understanding of events and time. Every respondent in the God and Time: Four Views volume — Helm, Padgett, and Wolterstorff — finds significant problems with the hybrid view, even though they come from very different perspectives. When atemporalists, mediating temporalists, and unqualified temporalists all find problems with the same proposal, that is a strong signal that something has gone wrong.

The better path, I am convinced, is to embrace divine temporality fully and without qualification. God is temporal, and He has always been temporal. The Trinity's perichoretic life generates temporality even apart from creation. What God created at the beginning of the universe was not time itself — which is an attribute of His own being — but the measurable, physical, created time of the material world. This view avoids all the difficulties of Craig's hybrid model while preserving everything that Craig rightly defends: divine temporality after creation, the A-theory of time, exhaustive foreknowledge, and the rejection of open theism.

In the next chapter, we turn to open theism — a position that, like Craig's, affirms divine temporality, but goes too far in denying God's exhaustive foreknowledge. If Craig's hybrid view represents one kind of overreach — trying to preserve timelessness where it is not needed — open theism represents the opposite kind: abandoning foreknowledge where it is not warranted. The truth, I believe, lies between them: a God who is genuinely temporal, who experiences real succession, and who knows the future exhaustively — not because the future is already "there" in a block universe, but because He has a unique, transcendent capacity to access it.