Tim Powers on God and Time

A J.K Potter illustration from
one of Powers' stories

Anthony here. I just discovered that one of my favorite writers, Tim Powers (who writes awesomely weird and weirdly awesome stories) has commented several times over at Jimmy Akin’s blog. I’ve spent a fun few minutes using my wizard librarian search skills (site:http://jimmyakin.com “tim powers”) to read his comments. Some fun Tim Powers-ish moments resulted (as when he speculates on the existence of an “anti-purgatory” — now I’m waiting for that to show up in one of his stories).

One comment jumped out at me because he sets out in a clearer way than I can the distinction between how God sees time and how we do. He’s responding to one “Realist” who quoted the new age-y theologian Schillebeeckx who said,

“The historical future is not known even to God; otherwise we and our history would be merely a puppet show in which God holds the strings. For God, too, history is an adventure, an open history for and of men and women.”

There are echoes of Teilhard de Chardin here, with God and humanity evolving together towards an “Omega Point” of perfect thought and consciousness. (It’s easy to see where we got the idea, implicit in many of our attitudes today, that God can learn from us!) There’s also the problem of free will: if God knows what I’m going to do before I do it, is it really freely done?

Tim Powers’ response neatly disentangles all this:

Hello, Realist! 

Unless his context led in a different direction, Schillebeeckx was weirdly wrong. For one thing, the Catechism says (paragraph 600) “To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of ‘predestination,’ he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace.” 

I’ve always thought that the whole problem of predestination and free will derives from “If God knows what I’m gonna do next Tuesday, then I’m not free to choose what I’ll do next Tuesday.” But this implicitly assumes that God experiences time sequentially, as we do — “now it’s 2006, it used to be 2005, soon it’ll be 2007 …” 

Actually, God doesn’t “remember” or “foresee” anything. It’s all happening live, now, from His perspective. God is no more locked into being exclusively in 2006 than He’s locked into being exclusively in Chicago. He’s in all times and all spaces at once. The moment of me typing is no more “now” to Him than the moment of my birth — or of my death. He’s looking at the whole show at once, and observing each free choice we make as we make it. 

It’s crazy to imagine, as Schillebeeckx apparently did, that God can be surprised by what happens “next”!

Properly understanding God’s relationship to time has all sorts of implications for things like free will, predestination, prayer, and creation. A lot of our difficulty in grasping these subjects comes from our impulse to put God within our own time-bound cause/effect system. Once we see that He who creates and upholds time is not the least bit conditioned by it, the problems drop away.