Title

Eternal present and Stump-Kretzmann eternity

School/Department

Talbot School of Theology

Publication Date

Fall 1999

Abstract

A classic difficulty of the conception of divine eternity as timelessness is that it seems impossible for an atemporal deity to be causally active in the world. Stump and Kretzmann, in their seminal article "Eternity," claimed to be able to resolve this problem by formulating a new species of simultaneity, viz., eternal-temporal simultaneity. Although their proposal has received extensive criticism, little has been said concerning the notion of the "eternal present" which underlies their analysis. It is argued that apart from construing divine eternity as a sort of embedding hyper-time, it does not seem possible to make sense of Stump and Kretzmann's description of the eternal present.

Keywords

Stump-Kretzmann; Eternity

Publication Title

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,

Volume

73

Issue

4

First Page

521

Last Page

536

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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