The sentence that contains the problem
“God heard my prayer and answered it.”
Nobody blinks at that sentence. It gets said in churches, in hospital corridors, in the comments under posts like this one. But look at the verbs. Heard means something reached him — a moment when the prayer had not yet arrived, and then a moment when it had—answered means afterwards. Between those two words sits a God who was one way, and then another.
That should be impossible. The same tradition that produces the sentence also insists that God does not change, ever, in any respect.
I want to be clear about what I am doing here, because these posts attract a particular kind of reply. I am not arguing that God does not exist. I am asking a narrower question: what is God’s relationship to time? There are two available answers. He is inside it, or he is outside it. Both cost something, and my actual complaint is not that either one fails — it is that the popular presentation of God quietly refuses to choose, and helps itself to whichever answer the current objection requires.
What is actually being claimed
Three commitments generate the tension, and it is worth stating them at full strength before poking at them.
Immutability. God does not change. Scripture asserts it directly — Malachi has God saying he does not change, and James describes him as having no variation or shifting shadow. Aquinas gives it a philosophical spine in the Summa Theologiae (I, q.9): God is pure actuality, with no unrealised potential, and change just is the actualising of a potential—nothing left to become. There is a second Argument from perfection: any change is a change for the better or for the worse, and a perfect being can do neither. And a third from aseity, the doctrine that God depends on nothing outside himself — if nothing external can act on him, nothing external can alter him.
Note that this is strong immutability. Not “his character is reliable.” No intrinsic change at all: no new thoughts, no shift in intention, no coming to know something he did not already know.
Omniscience. God knows everything that can be known.
Providence. God acts in history. He answers prayers, delivers nations, becomes incarnate, forgives on Tuesday what he had not yet forgiven on Monday.
Each of these has excellent internal motivation. The trouble only starts when you ask where the being holding all three is standing.
Option one: God inside time
The simplest picture. God has always existed, moment after moment, present at every point along the same timeline we occupy. He was there before the universe; he is here now; he will be there after.
The difficulty is not that he cannot act. Acting is easy from inside time. The difficulty is that acting — and even just existing — turns out to be a form of change.
Start with knowledge, because it needs no action at all. To be located in time is to occupy a present. If God is in time and it is Tuesday, then God knows that it is now Tuesday. Come Wednesday, that belief is false, and he must replace it with a different one. His knowledge has been revised. The contents of a mind are about as intrinsic as a property gets, so this is not a change in his surroundings — it is a change in him. Arthur Prior pressed exactly this point in a 1962 paper on omniscience, and it has proven remarkably hard to shake.
There is an escape, and it is unattractive: God does not know what time it is now. But knowing which moment is present certainly looks like knowledge. Every conscious human has it. A God who lacks it has a strange hole in his omniscience, precisely where the action is.
The second version needs no epistemology. Any agent who acts has a before and an after. Deciding requires being undecided and then decided. Even if you say the decision was made eternally and merely executed at a particular moment, the executing is something he does then and did not do before. That is a state change, and strong immutability forbids state changes.
The standard reply is Cambridge change, a term borrowed from Peter Geach. God does not change; the world changes with respect to him. A pillar becomes “to the left of Peter” without anything happening to the pillar. Fair enough for relational properties — but indexical knowledge is not merely relational. Knowing the entire timeline tenselessly, every event tagged with its date, still does not tell you which moment you are currently at. That is the residue the reply cannot absorb.
Option two: God outside time
The classical alternative, and the older one. Boethius defined eternity in the Consolation of Philosophy as the complete possession of unending life all at once. Not a very long time. No duration at all — the whole of history present to God in a single act of awareness, the way an entire page is present to you rather than read letter by letter.
I want to concede something here, because my first instinct was wrong. I assumed that a timeless being cannot cause anything, because other timeless things — numbers, say — do not influence reality. That analogy does not work. Numbers are causally inert because they are abstract objects with no causal powers at all, not because they lack a position in time. Aquinas’s picture is that God timelessly wills the entire temporal series in one act; the effects are strung out in time, the cause is not. You can find that strange, but it is not obviously incoherent, and the numbers comparison does no work against it.
The problem is relations, not causes. If God acts on Tuesday, there must be some relation holding between him and Tuesday. That relation is either a timeless one or a temporal one.
If it is temporal, then God stands in a temporal relation, which puts him back inside time and returns us to option one.
If it is timeless, then nothing explains why it lands on Tuesday in particular. A relation with no temporal character has no more grip on Tuesday than on Wednesday or on the heat death. You get everything at once or nothing in particular, and “God parted the sea at that moment” is exactly a claim about something in particular.
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann saw this clearly and, in a 1981 paper, introduced a special relation called ET-simultaneity to bridge eternity and time. It is an ingenious piece of work, and it has been criticised ever since as ad hoc: a relation invented to do this one job, with no independent reason to think it exists.
A quiet metaphysical bill is also attached. For the whole timeline to be present to God at once, all moments have to be equally real — the block universe. If instead only the present exists, there is no laid-out sequence for a timeless God to survey.
And then the deeper cost, which survives even if all of the above is patched. Grant that a timeless God can cause. He still cannot respond. Responding means reacting to something that has happened, and that requires being after it. A timeless God can ground the entire history of the world, but he cannot hear a prayer and then answer it. Whatever happens after the prayer was folded into the plan from the beginning, prayer included.
The move that is not allowed
Here is the part I actually care about.
In apologetics, God is outside time. It is the standard answer to “who created God” — the question is confused, because he has no beginning to require a cause. It is the standard answer to the foreknowledge problem — he does not foresee your choice; he sees it, timelessly, so your freedom is intact. It is how he can attend to everyone at once.
In devotion, God is inside time. He listens now. He is moved by what he hears. He changes his mind — Moses talks him out of destroying Israel in Exodus 32, and Nineveh’s repentance reverses the judgment in Jonah. He entered history at a specific date under a specific governor.
Both pictures are in constant use, often by the same person within the same conversation, and they are not compatible. That is the incoherence, and it is worth being precise about where it lives: not in the serious literature. The philosophers picked sides. Aquinas, Anselm, Boethius and, more recently, Paul Helm defend timelessness. Richard Swinburne, Nicholas Wolterstorff and the open theists put God in time and accept the consequences. They disagree sharply, but each has a choice.
The most interesting attempt to have both is William Lane Craig’s, developed in Time and Eternity (2001): God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation. It is a serious proposal rather than a dodge. But it carries its own bill. God’s mode of existence now depends on a free act he performed — which makes something about his nature contingent on a choice, and that sits awkwardly beside aseity and necessity.
What each option costs
Stated plainly, so nobody can accuse me of hiding the ledger:
Inside time. You keep a personal, responsive God. Prayer does something. The narrative of scripture reads naturally. You lose strong immutability, and most who go this way also give up exhaustive foreknowledge of free future acts, which is how open theism ends up where it does.
Outside time. You keep immutability, simplicity and complete foreknowledge. You lose responsiveness. You get a God who acts but never reacts, and you owe an account of how a timeless being relates to a particular Tuesday.
The hybrid. You keep most of both. You lose necessity — a God whose fundamental mode of being was altered by something he decided to do.
Choose before you defend
One concession, and I think it is an important one. Immutability of character survives every Argument above. A God who is unchangingly good, unchangingly faithful, unchanging in what he wills for us, but who thinks new thoughts on Tuesday, has no problem here at all. Most philosophers who put God in time take precisely that deal, and it is not a desperate one. Nothing in this post touches it.
What does not survive is the package. These doctrines were assembled over centuries, by different people, for different reasons, and they were never checked for fit. Perfection pulls towards timelessness. Scripture pulls towards a God who acts on dates. The tradition kept both and left the seam unsewn.
So: “God heard my prayer and answered it.” Depending on which God you are defending, that sentence is either literally true or a figure of speech. It cannot be both, and which one it is should be settled before the Argument starts, not after the objection arrives.
Written with AI assistance.
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