Knowing the End from the Beginning

Abstract

There is an objection posed against Brian Leftow’s conception of a timeless God which claims that God cannot know the temporal order of events, with Craig going so far as to assert that on Leftow’s view God’s life will be chaotic. If this objection is right then Leftow’s God cannot know the end from the beginning. This paper sets out the objection, describing how it arises from Leftow’s Anselmian view of God’s relationship to Creation and then shows several ways in which the objection can be overcome. Much of this centres around discussions of the direction of time and how Leftow’s God could know this direction. The paper then concludes by noting that what has come before can be modified so that other conceptions of divine timelessness can also explain how God knows the temporal order of Creation’s events.