{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.031096563011456628, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012684124386252046, 'mean_word_length': 4.2243589743589745, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
William Lane Craig God, Time and Eternity. The Coherence of Theism II: Eternity. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). Pp. xi+321. £74.00 (Hbk). ISBN 1402000111.

The years since the publication of Nelson Pike’s God and Timelessness (1970) have seen a very considerable number of books and articles in the AngloAmerican philosophical tradition on the issue of God’s relation to time, easily divisible without borderline cases into supporters and opponents of the view that God is outside time. Craig has the unusual view that God is timeless ‘ when ’ there is no universe, but exists in time since the universe came into existence. Yet, although this is his view, most of the book is devoted to establishing the latter claim – as long as there is time (which according to Craig is as long as there is a universe), God exists at every moment of that time – He is everlasting. Craig’s Part I covers well-worn ground. He acknowledges that there is one good philosophical argument for God being timeless – that God would be more perfect if He possessed His life all at once, and Craig claims that it is coherent to suppose that there might be a timeless person, so long as he does not cause or know about a changing universe. But the universe could not be dependent on God as it exists, nor could He know about it as it changes, without God Himself changing and so being temporal – so long as the tensed theory of time is true (that is so long as there are truths about what is past, present, or future, additional to truths about what happens at particular named dates – e.g. 2003). If the tenseless theory of time were true, then the four-dimensional universe would exist as a whole, and could be dependent for its existence throughout all time on God who was timelessly aware of it. At this point Craig refers us to two books of his in which in which he has argued at length that the tensed theory is true [to be reviewed in the next issue of Religious Studies – Ed.] ; and he gives here a two-page summary of his arguments in these books. He then goes on in part 2, section 1 to consider how God is related to the time measured by human clocks. He accepts Newton’s view that there is a true ‘ metaphysical time ’ – there are truths about the length of all intervals between events, whether or not they are measured correctly by human clocks. Einstein gave no good reason for denying this, only for denying that we could know about it –