Traditionally, the term ’God’ has been understood either as a proper name or as a description. However, according to a new view, the term God’ in a sentence like "Jesus Christ is God" functions as a kind term, much as the term ’tiger’ functions in the sentence "Tigger is a tiger." In this paper I examine the claim that divinity can be construed as a ’supernatural’ kind, developing the outlines of an account of the semantics of God’ along these lines, (...) and suggest that it might solve an important philosophical problem concerning the Incarnation. (shrink)

It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies (...) is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise—assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed—to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case. Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.. (shrink)

All Christian theologians agree that God is without beginning and without end. The vast majority have held, in addition, that God is eternal, existing outside of time. Only a small minority have contended that God is everlasting, existing within time. In what follows I shall take up the cudgels for that minority, arguing that God as conceived and presented by the biblical writers is a being whose own life and existence is temporal.

Four principles about Time have the consequence that God must be everlasting, and not timeless. These are 1) events occur over periods of time, never at instants, 2) Time has a metric if and only if there is a unified system of laws of nature, 3) The past is the realm of the causally unaffectible, the future of the causally affectible, 4) Some truths can only be known at certain periods. Yet God is not Time’s prisoner’, for the unwelcome features (...) of Time--the increase of unaffectible events, the cosmic clock’ ticking away--only occur if God so chooses. (shrink)

W. Kneale; VI—Time and Eternity in Theology, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1 June 1961, Pages 87–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

Among the many controversial contributions of E. A. Milne to cosmology, the only one which is taken seriously today (to the extent that it has been absorbed as a premise in most scientific approaches to the problem of the universe as a totality) is his early suggestion that a formal equivalence may be made between Newtonian and Relativistic cosmology. My own paper suggests that, over and above any logical validity in the alleged equivalence, the actual way in which it has (...) subtly insinuated itself into nearly all contemporary speculation reveals as few things could some of the epistemological foundations that underlie the current assumptions in cosmological science. (shrink)

WHAT do we mean by saying that a being, God for example, is omniscient? One way of answering this question is to translate ‘God is omniscient’ into some slightly more formalised language than colloquial English, e.g. one with variables of a number of different types, including variables replaceable by statements, and quantifiers binding thes.

In this paper I present and defend two arguments which purport to show that the doctrines of timelessness and the Incarnation are incompatible. An argument similar to the first argument I consider is briefly discussed by Stump and Kretzmann in their paper "Eternity." I argue that their treatment of this type of objection is inadequate. The second argument I present is, as far as I know, original; it depends on a certain subtlety in the doctrine of the Incarnation, viz., that (...) the Son took on or assumed a human nature. It seems that there is no way to understand what it is for the Son to take on a human nature that doesn’t entail his mutability; and mutability entails temporality. Thus, since Christ is said to take on a human nature, an orthodox Christology must maintain that the Son is temporal. I conclude by considering whether the Son’s temporality entails the temporality of the Godhead. (shrink)

I would like to present a partial account of an investigation into scientifically and philosophically significant changes which quantum physics has made necessary in our views of time. In some cases, these changes resulted from discoveries of new aspects of time, as illustrated by the so-called “T.C.P. Theorem” due to Schwinger, Pauli and Lüders. Their finding determines the transformation of the quantum state of any physical system resulting from a reversal of the direction of time, followed by a reorientiation of (...) the dimensions of space and the replacement of each particle in the system with its antiparticle. A relativistic interpretation of the T.C.P. Theorem in Section III will show that it amounts to the universal interrelatedness of time, space and matter. In other cases, the changes in the scientific concept of time follow from the availability of new methods provided by quantum physics rather than from discoveries of unknown aspects of time. These methods may be applied to issues which bothered philosophers and physicists obsessed with the enigma of time long before Planck’s quantum of action started our century. The quantum approach of von Neumann, Pauli, Fierz and Lüdwig to the second law of thermodynamics and the associated irreversibility or asymmetry of time illustrate the use of the new methods for the solution of old problems of time. The relevance of quantum physical methods to the problem of reality of time will be shown in the last section of this paper. (shrink)