The nature or attributes of God - Swinburne and divine action in time

Everlasting life and succession

Swinburne's temporal account understands God as everlasting: divine life has no beginning or end, but includes succession. God can act, know that an event is occurring, and later know that it has occurred. Endlessness differs from Boethius' possession of the whole of life together without temporal passage.

This proposal treats personal agency and relationships as involving before and after. God can intend an action and perform it, receive a prayer and respond, rather than eternally willing all effects without a new response. A change in what God knows about a changing world need not be a moral defect. Knowing that a person is now praying when they are praying is accurate rather than less perfect than an unchanging belief that they are not.

A defender therefore distinguishes constant excellence of character from an unchanging state in every respect. Perfect love can remain constant while its appropriate action changes with a person's needs. A critic can prefer classical immutability, arguing that dependence on temporal events compromises transcendence or exposes divine life to change. The temporal account preserves perfection through reliable goodness, not through Boethius' timeless mode of existence.

Knowable futures and free acts

Swinburne argues that unrestricted infallible foreknowledge conflicts with genuinely undetermined future choices, including divine freedom. His account qualifies omniscience by what can coherently be known. God knows the past and present and can know necessary or causally determined future events, while not infallibly knowing every undetermined free choice in advance.

This is not simply ordinary ignorance or a poor prediction. God can know possibilities, agents' characters and what is determined without a future free act being fixed as an infallibly known outcome. There are different philosophical conventions about whether statements of undetermined future acts are already true or false. Swinburne's discussions allow that issue to be treated in different ways; the central proposal is that certainty about all such choices is not a coherent requirement compatible with freedom.

The distinction from self-limitation is delicate. A believer might say God voluntarily withholds use of available information. Swinburne's argument instead questions whether unrestricted foreknowledge of undetermined choices is a logically available capacity at all. Choosing to create free agents may voluntarily accept a world containing such unknowable outcomes, but choosing the world and declining an available fact are not identical acts.

A critic argues that this changes what believers mean by knowing every truth and weakens providential guarantees. A defender replies that omnipotence also excludes contradictory tasks without becoming a finite power, so omniscience can exclude incoherent knowledge demands. The comparison works only if the incompatibility is established; calling a difficult demand logically impossible is not an argument by itself.

Response, providence and just judgement

An everlasting God can respond in succession to a free choice or petition. This fits ordinary language about relationships and avoids describing every response as eternally fixed. If God does not determine the agent's wrongdoing, just judgement can address what the person responsibly did rather than punish a divinely imposed act.

Knowing less than every undetermined future outcome does not entail inability to help. A knowledgeable, powerful God could anticipate possibilities, establish dependable processes and respond wisely as choices occur. A defender sees flexible providence as compatible with perfect goodness. A critic asks whether benevolent governance should include prevention of foreseeable severe harms, and whether uncertain outcomes could frustrate divine purposes.

The temporal model therefore does not dissolve the problem of evil. Greater responsiveness can intensify the question why a good God fails to intervene in particular cases. Respect for agency can explain some restraint, but the victim's freedom and the proportionality of harm still matter. Nor does knowing an action after it occurs make every punishment just; judgement must be appropriate to responsibility and consistent with benevolence.

By comparison, Boethius' God knows every prayer and choice eternally and can include their effects within providence. That preserves complete knowledge but makes response less like human reaction. Swinburne preserves a more familiar relation of request and answer, while qualifying foreknowledge. Neither account receives every advantage without a philosophical cost.

Comparing the three accounts

The most useful account depends on what it must explain. A clear comparison follows each proposal through its consequences rather than merely saying two thinkers are timeless and one is temporal.

Boethius contributes the distinction between simple and conditional necessity; Anselm clarifies how different times can be present to God without being simultaneous for creatures. They are related accounts with distinct explanatory contributions, not interchangeable names. Swinburne accepts a different account of divine life and knowledge to protect temporal agency.

It is possible to resolve some apparent conflicts by separating causation from knowledge and coherent tasks from contradictions. A genuine contradiction still requires revision of a premise. It is necessary to address such a contradiction for rational coherence, but a useful account need not eliminate every mystery of divine life.

A justified judgement could prefer Boethius and Anselm because unrestricted knowledge and transcendence are central to the belief under discussion, while admitting the freedom objection remains. Alternatively, it could prefer Swinburne because open agency and successive personal response are essential, while defending his logical qualification of omniscience. A third judgement could find none fully successful because each sacrifices or reinterprets a central requirement. The decisive step is explaining why the chosen criterion outweighs the account's acknowledged cost.