Argument

God Cannot Exist Outside Time Objection Defeater

Intro

The objection goes like this. To exist, a thing has to be around for some amount of time. Christians say God is outside time. So God was never around for any time at all, which means God never existed.

Part of this is true, and Christians said it first. God does not exist the way a tree, a person or a planet exists. Those things begin, last a while, change, and get their existence from something else. God does none of that. In that sense, the word "exist" as we use it for creatures does not fit God.

But that is not because God is less real than creatures. It is because God is the reason anything exists at all. The Bible says the Son is "upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3, ASV), and that "in him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17, ASV). God is not one more thing inside existence. He holds existence up.

Think of a city's light bulbs and the power plant. Every bulb in the city is lit because the plant supplies it. It would be strange to say, "The plant is not a lit bulb, so the plant has no power." The plant is the source of what the bulbs have. In the same way, "God is not a thing that exists in time" does not mean "God is nothing." It means God is the one everything in time depends on.

So the objection is half right and not a gotcha. It correctly sees that God is not a creature. It then wrongly treats "not a creature" as "not real."

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In full

The objection is a valid-looking syllogism: (1) whatever exists, exists in time; (2) God does not exist in time; (3) therefore God does not exist. Its conclusion is usually voiced in the past tense, "God never existed."

The defeater runs in five moves:

• Grant the true half (P1). On classical theism God does not have creaturely existence: received, bounded, temporal, successive. Aquinas, Dionysius and even Tillich say as much. The objection restates a Christian claim and then misreads it.
• The source of existence is not one more existent (P2). God's essence is to be, and He conserves every creature in being at every moment. A cause of existence does not need to be given existence in time; demanding that it must treats the source as one of its own products.
• The universal premise is false and self-undermining (P3). "Whatever exists, exists in time" cannot be applied to time itself without a regress, fails for truths of logic and mathematics, and confuses the tenseless "there is" with the tensed "is around at a time."
• It costs the objector more than it costs the theist (P4). If time had a beginning, as standard cosmology strongly suggests, then whatever accounts for that beginning is not in time. The premise forces the objector to say time came from nothing.
• Even granted, it does not reach atheism (P5). At most it refutes the timeless view of God, which Christians already debate. Many Christian philosophers hold that God is everlasting, or timeless without creation and temporal with it.

Argument structure

Form

Defensive. The objection is valid in form, so the reply attacks premise (1) and the ambiguity in "exists" that makes premises (1) and (3) look like they use the same word. The lead move is not a rebuttal but an agreement: the objector has found something true about God and drawn the wrong conclusion from it.

Cheatsheet

The 30-second reply (read aloud). You are half right. God does not exist the way you and I do. We begin, we last a while, we change, and we get our existence from somewhere else. God does none of that. But that is not because God is less real than us. It is because God is where existence comes from. The Bible says He is "upholding all things by the word of his power." He is not one more thing inside time that needs time to keep going. He is what keeps time and everything in it going. So "God is not a creature" is true. "God is not real" does not follow from it.

The 5 fast facts:

1. Aquinas: God's essence is His existence. In everything else, what a thing is and the fact that it is are two different things. In God they are one (Summa Theologiae I q.3 a.4). His most proper name is "He Who Is" because it signifies "existence itself" (I q.13 a.11).
2. God holds everything in being, moment by moment. "As long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being" (Summa Theologiae I q.8 a.1). Creation is not only a starting event; it is ongoing dependence.
3. Scripture says the same. "Upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3, ASV); "in him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17, ASV); "in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28, ASV).
4. Christians already said "God does not exist" in this sense. Dionysius called God "beyond being." Paul Tillich wrote: "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence" (Systematic Theology I, 1951). Both meant God is not one item among others, not that He is unreal.
5. The premise eats itself. If everything that exists needs time to exist in, then time needs a time to exist in, and that time needs another. Either the chain never ends or something exists without being in time.

The 3 strongest counter-moves:

• "Does time exist?" If yes, is it in time? If it is not, the premise is false. If it is, ask which time, and repeat.
• "Is it true that 2 + 2 = 4? Since when?" Truths of arithmetic and logic do not start, last or stop. If they count as real, the premise is false.
• "What caused time to begin?" If the objector accepts that time had a beginning, its cause cannot be inside time. The premise leaves only "nothing caused it."

Reciprocal concessions (grant the small point, then collect a bigger one):

• Grant: God does not exist the way creatures exist. Now collect: that is the Christian doctrine, stated by Aquinas and Dionysius centuries ago. You have not found a hole in theism; you have found its teaching on aseity. The question left is whether the source of all existence is real, and denying that leaves everything else without a source.
• Grant: "God never existed" is strictly the wrong way to talk about a timeless God, and so is "God existed before time." Now collect: both sentences use a past-tense verb for something outside time. Your conclusion is ruled out by the same grammar point as the sloppy Christian phrasing. The correct sentence is the one Scripture uses: God is.
• Grant: we cannot picture timeless existence. Now collect: we cannot picture the beginning of time, curved spacetime, or a number either. Failure to picture is not evidence of nonexistence.

The closing line. You are right that God is not one more thing that exists in time. He is the reason anything does. Take Him away and you do not get a world without God; you get no world.

P1, God does not have creaturely existence

Affirmative case

1. Creatures receive existence. A tree's existence comes from seed, soil, light, and ultimately from causes outside it. Nothing in what a tree is guarantees that it is. Its existence is on loan.
2. Creatures exist successively. A creature has a past it no longer has and a future it does not yet have. Its existence is spread across time and lived one moment at a time.
3. Classical theism denies both of God. God's existence is not received: He is a se, from Himself (see Aseity). And it is not successive: Boethius defined eternity as "the complete possession all at once of unending life" (Consolation of Philosophy V.6). Nothing of God's life is behind Him or ahead of Him.
4. So the objector's first insight is correct. If "to exist" means "to receive being and live it out moment by moment," God does not exist in that sense. Christians do not hide this. Dionysius the Areopagite calls God "beyond being" (Divine Names); Paul Tillich, stating it as starkly as anyone, wrote that "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence" (Systematic Theology I, 1951).

Anticipated objections

1. "Then you admit God doesn't exist. Thanks."
2. "This is just redefining God out of reach so nothing can touch Him."

Rebuttals

1. Admitting God is not a creature is not admitting God is unreal. The claim is that creaturely existence is too small a category for God, not that God falls short of it. Tillich's point in the same passage is that God is being-itself, the ground of every being, rather than one being alongside others. Reading "beyond existence" as "less than existence" reverses it.
2. It is the oldest definition, not a new one. Augustine, Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas all held it long before modern objections. The view is also not out of reach: it makes testable claims, for example that the universe is contingent and needs a cause, and that time had a beginning (P4).

P2, The source of existence is not one more existent

Affirmative case

1. In God, what He is and that He is are one. Aquinas argues that in every creature essence and existence differ, which is why creatures need a cause to exist. In God they are identical: "His essence is His existence" (Summa Theologiae I q.3 a.4).
2. That is why His proper name is "He Who Is." Aquinas calls it the most proper name of God because "it does not signify form, but simply existence itself" (Summa Theologiae I q.13 a.11), taking it from God's self-naming to Moses, "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14, ASV).
3. God does not only start things; He upholds them. "As long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being" (Summa Theologiae I q.8 a.1). Creation is the continuing dependence of every creature on God for its being at every moment, the way a song depends on the singer for as long as it lasts.
4. Scripture states the upholding directly. The Son is "upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3, ASV). "He is before all things, and in him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17, ASV). "In him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28, ASV). "For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things" (Romans 11:36, ASV).
5. The source does not need what it gives. A thing that receives existence in time needs time to have it. The one who gives existence, including the existence of time, does not receive it, so the requirement does not apply. To demand that God be given existence in time is to demand that the source become one of its own products.
6. An author is not a character. A novel's characters exist in the story's time, on its pages. The author is on no page of the book and appears in no chapter, but every page exists because of her. Searching the story's timeline for the author and concluding she does not exist gets the relationship backwards.

Anticipated objections

1. "You can't just say God's essence is existence. That's a word trick."
2. "Upholding is an action. Actions happen in time. So God is in time after all."
3. "The author analogy fails: authors exist in their own time."

Rebuttals

1. It is an argument, not a stipulation. Anything whose essence differs from its existence needs a cause of its existence, because its nature does not explain why it is. A chain of such causes, each holding the next in being right now, cannot be explained by adding more members that need the same thing. It ends in a being whose nature is to be. That conclusion is the classical cosmological argument from contingency at work; the objector is free to reject it, but then owes an account of why anything exists at all.
2. The effect is temporal; the act need not be. A creature exists at this moment and that one, and God's upholding is present to each. Aquinas's point is that God's single act has temporal effects without God being stretched across time, as God Changed When He Created Objection Defeater argues at length.
3. Analogies fit at the point they are used. The analogy is not that God is a writer in a bigger time. It is that the cause of a world is not found as an item inside that world, which holds whatever the author's own situation is.

P3, "Whatever exists, exists in time" is false as a universal

Affirmative case

1. The premise regresses on time itself. If everything that exists needs a time to exist in, then time, if it exists, needs a time to exist in. That second time needs a third, and so on. Either there is an endless stack of times, or time itself exists without being in time. The second option already gives up the premise.
2. Truths of logic and mathematics do not happen in time. "2 + 2 = 4" did not start being true in some year and will not stop. Whatever one's view of numbers, the premise has to treat their truth as either unreal or timeless, and most objectors will not call arithmetic unreal.
3. "There is" does not take a tense. In logic, saying something exists means there is something that fits the description. W. V. O. Quine's famous slogan was that "to be is to be the value of a variable" ("On What There Is", 1948). Nothing in that requires a date. "Exists" in the objection slides between this tenseless "there is" and the tensed "is around at a certain time."
4. Many physicists hold that time does not flow. On the block-universe view, the whole of spacetime is equally real, and the passage of time is a feature of experience rather than of reality. Einstein, writing to the family of his friend Michele Besso in 1955, called the distinction between past, present and future "only a stubbornly persistent illusion." On that view the universe as a whole exists without existing at a time.
5. The conclusion is phrased in the very sense in dispute. "God never existed" uses a past-tense verb. For a timeless being, "existed" and "never existed" are both the wrong tense; the correct form is the one Scripture uses, the present without a before: "from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Psalm 90:2, ASV).

Anticipated objections

1. "Numbers and logic aren't things. They're just descriptions we use."
2. "Time doesn't need to be in time because time just is the dimension. That's special pleading."

Rebuttals

1. Then the premise still fails. If true statements about numbers describe nothing, the premise was never about them. But the premise is "whatever exists, exists in time," and the objector now needs a separate argument that nothing timeless is real. That separate argument is the whole question, which the premise was supposed to settle.
2. The exception is the point. If time can exist without being in time because of what time is, then "whatever exists, exists in time" is not a universal law. It admits exceptions based on the kind of thing in question. The theist claims exactly that: the cause of time is an exception because of what it is.

P4, The premise costs the objector more than it costs the theist

Affirmative case

1. Time very probably had a beginning. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003) shows that any universe that has, on average, been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past. Standard cosmology traces our universe to a beginning. See Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem and Kalam Cosmological Argument.
2. The cause of time's beginning is not in time. If time began, whatever accounts for that beginning did not come before it in time, because there was no before. This is the core of the Argument from the Creation of Time.
3. The premise rules out every such cause. If nothing can exist outside time, then nothing accounts for time's beginning. The objector is left saying time, space, matter and energy began from nothing and for no reason.
4. That is a harder position than the one being attacked. Theism says time began because a non-temporal cause brought it about. The objection's premise says time began with no cause. The theist's claim is at least an explanation.

Anticipated objections

1. "Maybe time didn't begin. Maybe there's a multiverse or a cycle."
2. "Saying 'God did it' is not an explanation either."

Rebuttals

1. Then the objector has moved to a different debate. Past-eternal models face their own problems, which the Kalam Cosmological Argument page covers. But notice the cost: to keep this premise the objector must also commit to a past-infinite universe, which is a large bet the original slogan did not mention.
2. A cause with the right properties is an explanation. A cause of time and space must be outside time and space, enormously powerful, and able to bring about an effect without a prior physical trigger. Those are the attributes classical theism assigns to God before any of this physics was known.

P5, Even granted, the premise does not reach atheism

Affirmative case

1. Christians disagree about God and time. The timeless view is classical, but not the only Christian view (see Eternity (Divine) and A-Theory vs B-Theory of Time and Divine Foreknowledge).
2. Everlasting God. Nicholas Wolterstorff ("God Everlasting", 1975) argued that God is in time, without beginning or end. If the premise is right, it supports this view, not atheism.
3. Timeless without creation, temporal with it. William Lane Craig (Time and Eternity, 2001) holds that God is timeless without creation and enters time at creation. That view also survives the premise.
4. So the most the objection can show is a correction inside theism. It would trim one model of God's eternity. It cannot reach "God never existed."

Anticipated objections

1. "A temporal God would be just another being in the universe."

Rebuttals

1. Being in time does not make God part of the universe. On the temporalist views God is still uncreated, necessary and the creator of the physical world. The objector would need a new argument that a temporal creator is impossible, and the time objection has nothing to say about that.

Master objections to the defeater

MO1: "You are just saying God is too mysterious to talk about."

• No. The reply makes definite claims: God's essence is existence, He conserves all things in being, and time had a beginning that needs a non-temporal cause. Each can be argued for and argued against. What it refuses is the shortcut from "not a creature" to "not real."

MO2: "If God doesn't exist the way things exist, how can you say He's real?"

• "Real" is wider than "exists in time." Most people already count logical truths, the laws of physics and time itself as real without placing them inside time. God is real in the strongest sense: He does not depend on anything for being, and everything else depends on Him.

MO3: "Causing requires time, so a timeless God can't cause anything."

• That is a different objection with a different answer: the effect is temporal and the cause need not be. See God Changed When He Created Objection Defeater and Argument from the Creation of Time. Note too that even in physics, causes need not come before their effects in time; a weight resting on a cushion causes the dent for as long as both are there.

Honest limits

• Christian philosophers disagree about whether God is timeless, and this page uses the classical view as its main reply because it answers the objection most directly. P5 covers the alternative.
• The block-universe point in P3 depends on a contested view of time. The regress and logic points in P3 do not.
• Saying that God's essence is His existence does not mean anyone understands that fully. Aquinas himself held that we know that God is, not what God is in Himself.

Tactical opening / closing

• Opening. "Honestly, you've got hold of something true. Christians say God doesn't exist the way you and I do. So let's be careful about what follows from that."
• Closing. "You've shown God isn't a creature. Christians agree. What you haven't shown is that anything exists without Him, and the Bible's claim is that nothing does."

Connection to Scripture

• "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14, ASV). God names Himself with the verb "to be" (Hebrew hayah, H1961) rather than with a description of a creature. The Greek Old Testament renders it egō eimi ho ōn, "I am the one who is."
• "Before Abraham was born, I am" (John 8:58, ASV). The sentence sets two verbs against each other: genesthai, an aorist form of ginomai, "come into being," for Abraham, and the present eimi, "I am," for Jesus. Abraham came to be; the Son simply is.
• "From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Psalm 90:2, ASV). The psalm frames God's existence in the present tense across all ages.
• "Upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3, ASV). Pherōn is a present participle: the upholding is ongoing, not a single past act.
• "In him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17, ASV). Synestēken, a perfect form of synistēmi, describes a standing state of holding together.
• "In him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28, ASV). Paul says this to philosophers in Athens, placing every creature's existence inside God's sustaining, not God inside the world's time.

Live-cite kit

Scripture (strongest first):

• Hebrews 1:3, "upholding all things by the word of his power"
• Colossians 1:17, "in him all things consist"
• Exodus 3:14, "I AM THAT I AM"
• John 8:58, "Before Abraham was born, I am"

Scholarly and classical:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.3 a.4 (God's essence is His existence); I q.8 a.1 (God present to all things as giving them being); I q.13 a.11 ("He Who Is")
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy V.6 (eternity as "the complete possession all at once of unending life")
• Augustine, City of God XI.6 (the world made "not in time, but simultaneously with time")
• Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (1951): "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence."
• Borde, Guth and Vilenkin (2003), past-incompleteness of expanding spacetimes

Aphorism:

• "God isn't one more thing that exists. He's why anything does."
• "You don't find the author by searching the story's timeline."
• "If you need time to exist, so does time. Then you need another time, and another."

Cross-examination

Round 1, Agree first

• Q: "So you think existing means lasting through time?" A: "Yes." Q: "Then we agree God doesn't exist in that way. Christians have said so for fifteen hundred years. The question is whether that makes Him unreal or makes Him the source."

Round 2, Turn the premise on time

• Q: "Does time exist?" If yes: "Does it exist in time?" If yes: "In which time, and does that one exist in time?" If no: "Then something exists without being in time."

Round 3, The beginning

• Q: "Did time have a beginning?" If yes: "What accounts for it?" If "nothing": "So your view is time came from nothing for no reason, and mine is that it came from something that isn't in time. Which is the bigger leap?"

Dodge table

See also

• Eternity (Divine), the doctrine of God's eternity and the main views
• Aseity, God's existence from Himself
• Argument from the Creation of Time, why the cause of time is not in time
• God Changed When He Created Objection Defeater, the sister objection about change and creation
• Kalam Cosmological Argument, the beginning of the universe
• Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, the physics of past-incompleteness
• Expansion of the Universe, the same point for space: the universe is not expanding into an outside region
• A-Theory vs B-Theory of Time and Divine Foreknowledge, competing views of time
• Anselms Four-Dimensionalist Eternity, an early theory of eternity enclosing all of time
• Classical Theism, the cluster of attributes this reply draws on
• Equivocation, the fallacy at the center of the objection
• Atheism, master hub