God Eternal and Paul Helm

Richard M. Gale

I am honored to have been afforded this opportunity to pay tribute to Paul Helm upon his retirement. We rarely feel good about ourself in philosophy, but Helm has earned that right through his many valuable contributions to the philosophy of religion and religious studies. Especially noteworthy is his probing, sensitive and vigorous defense in his Eternal God: a Study of God Without Time of the view of God as timelessly eternal -- not subject to any temporal distinctions or determinations -- rather than omnitemporally eternal -- enduring in time without beginning or end.[1] Whether you are a friend or foe of divine timelessness, you cannot fail to find this book a valuable springboard for developing your own position. I am still a foe , but my position has changed and, I hope, become more defensible as a result of my encounter with Helm.[2] Through a critical analysis of his views I will develop this new view.

The long-standing and seemingly endless dispute between the friends and foes of divine timelessness is typical of perennial philosophical disputes. Equally intelligent and knowledgeable people are lined up on both sides, neither being able to convince the other; for there is no agreed upon decision procedure for resolving their disagreement. In philosophy we do not know how to keep score and thus cannot determine who wins and who loses. If it matters to you to be able to find out who wins, take up pingpong instead of philosophy.

These disputes often are intractable because the disputants have different sentiments of rationality or paradigms of explanation, in other cases because their rival accounts have different purposes or goals. I believe, as a result of my confrontation with Helm’s book, that the dispute over divine timelessness is of the latter sort. Put in a nutshell, the foes of divine timelessness want a God who is religiously available to agents whereas the friends of divine timelessness want a God with whom they can mystically commune. The latter will have the features of the content of a unitive mystical experience – timelessness, immutability, ineffability and simplicity – while the former will be of a kind with the worldly agents with whom he interacts. We want both of these Gods and the challenge to the theologian is to find some way to unify them, as, for example, by some mystical doctrine like that of the Trinity. The mistake made by Helm and other friends of divine timelessness is to argue that the God of agency is amenable to the same analysis as is appropriate for the mystic’s God and thus will be timelessly eternal like the latter.

God is that than which none greater can be conceived (a GCB for short). Attempts to deduce that God is timeless from this conception of God as a GCB are unconvincing. Typical of them is Anselm’s claim that a GCB must be timeless for if it were in time it would have at least the possibility of beginning or ending and thereby fail to qualify as a GCB. A foe of timelessness will reject this argument because it makes use of a hasty generalization from ordinary temporal beings. The deep source of the failure of all such deductions is that they fail to relativize the concept of a GCB. For when great and good are used to characterize something it must be specified in which respect it is great or good. This holds also for comparative evaluations employing these words. Helm correctly points out that we cannot ask whether an individual “is better than another if we are not allowed to ask better for what, or better than what….The difficulty of operating with ‘better than’ at [Anselm’s] level of abstraction casts doubt” on his whole procedure. (13) Thus when we say a being is the greatest conceivable one we must specify the respect in which it is the greatest.

The next step in establishing my thesis, which also is located in Helm’s text, is that the friends and foes of timelessness relativize the greatness of the GCB in different ways. The book’s opening quotation from John Duncan’s Colloquia Peripatetica hints that their dispute results from their different attitudes toward mysticism. “When at the Grammar School in Aberdeen, I got hold of a volume of George Campbell, in which he ridicules, as lamentable folly, the notion that to God there is no past, present or future – to Him all are one. I remember how well I abhorred George Campbell for that. I thought it the most magnificent thought I had ever met with.” (x) This hint at a mystical basis for the differences between the manner in which the friends and foes of timelessness relativize the concept of greatness is developed further when Helm writes that “The idea of God as timeless, as the changeless ground of all that changes, has profound implications for the character of human spirituality, for the focusing of faith, hope, and love in what is unseen and eternal rather than what is visible and transient. John Milton gave expression to such spirituality when he wrote of the prospect of triumphing over death and chance and time.” (xiv-xv)

The timeless God, although appealing to those of a mystical bent, is ill-fitted to perform the roles that is required of him by those who want a God of action who will effectively engage with them in their endeavors. For them, God should be, as William James put it, our ideal social self – that being to whom we look to for inspiration and guidance and by whom we want ultimately to be judged. Since it is required that agents temporally interact with this God, it must be a God in time. Helm takes note of this when he writes that “If God were timelessly eternal… the character of God, particularly the God of Christian theism who judges and redeems, is radically compromised.” (43) “One of the main reasons that certain philosophers have for maintaining that God is in time is that only so is it possible to think of God reacting to human choices. The idea of a responsive divine life, and of divine and human freedom, are closely intertwined in their thinking.” (109)

Whether or not there even was available to the authors of the Bible a conception of timeless eternality, they give numerous reports of God interceding in human history. Periodically he is back in town, even more pissed off than he was on previous occasions because of our sinful ways. Whereas it is plausible to give a metaphorical interpretation of depictions of God as having bodily parts, it is not reasonable to do so for the numerous accounts of Gold as temporally interacting with creatures. The Bible abounds in descriptions of Alstonian-type apparent direct nonsensory perceptions of God in which God warns, comforts, counsels and chastises his creatures. The phenomenology of these experiences is of a God who acts and endures in time.

Helm briefly sketches a way in which a devotee of divine timelessness can accommodate these phenomenological appearances of God as temporal. “Just as a tree can be thought of as made up of a collection of objects which we cannot observe without thereby making reference to the tree as a palpable physical object impossible, so the God to whom we refer as acting in time and space in fulfillment of his own purposes and in reaction to human needs can be thought of, albeit with difficulty, as transcending space and time. The difficulty is real enough, but it need be no more intellectually embarrassing than is talk of unobservable electrons.” (107. See also p. 23) This analogy between God and the theoretical entities of science needs to be filled out further with respect to the ontological status of their phenomenal appearances. Either they are mere appearances, having no objective reality, or they are not. This disjunction can serve as the basis of a dilemma argument against Helm’s timeless God.

The first horn, which denies objective reality to God’s temporal phenomenal aspects, is the divine analogue to the scientifically-based bifurcationism in which it is claimed, to use Sellarsian terminology, that the manifest image of physical objects based on sensory experience depicts the world in a way in which it isn’t. The scientific image, which employs concepts of unobservable entities, alone depicts things as they really are. (Bruce Aune, whom Helm gives as the source of his analogy, defends this Sellarsian error theory of the manifest image.)

This horn of the dilemma has the unwanted consequence that the Biblical apparent direct nonsensory perceptions of the temporal presence of God are erroneous, unveridical, because they depict God in a way in which he isn’t. This troublesome consequence gives rise to an even more troubling one. That God would produce this plethora of unveridical experiences of himself as temporal makes him a deceiver and seems incompatible with his essential benevolence. Descartes tried to ward off this objection to his scientific bifurcationism by using a free will defense of God for allowing us to freely form erroneous beliefs about the world based on our senses. A similar defense of God for permitting erroneous beliefs about his nature based upon apparent direct perceptions of him is far more difficult to sustain. Unlike our sensory-based beliefs about physical objects, it is God himself who is the immediate cause of our apparent direct nonsensory perceptions of him. And, furthermore, whereas we have some power to resist believing that physical objects are as they perceptually appear to be, we do not seem to have the freedom to resist forming beliefs about God’s nature upon having an apparent direct perception of him because of the overpowering nature of such an experience.

Things fare even worse for Helm’s exclusively timeless God on the second horn. Now we are to take the manifest image based on phenomenal appearances as objective features of reality. This can be combined with a compatibilist account that accords objective status also to the scientific image, or one that denies it any objective status, such as would an instrumentalist account. Either way God turns out to have temporal features, which is inconsistent with Helm’s view of God as devoid of any temporal features. It would best fit “the two Aspects of God” (or maybe “the two Gods”) thesis of this paper to opt for the compatibilist alternative and thereby ascribe to God both temporal and timelessly eternal features. While it is difficult enough to combine the manifest and scientific images of the physical world, it is even more difficult to do so with respect to the temporal and timelessly eternal God. How can a single God manifest himself under such different, and apparently incompatible, guises? As suggested earlier, something like a doctrine of the Trinity is needed. Traditional mysticism faced this problem, because it held that the Eternal One becomes, via some sort of emanations, a temporal many, only to be unified back into the Eternal One.

Helm, holding that God is exclusively timeless, must opt for the first horn of the dilemma and thus take his chances with showing that God really is no deceiver. Helm never recognizes this problem, but, being the extremely honest philosopher that he is, recognizes problems aplenty with his doctrine of divine timelessness and, no doubt, would include this one among them. However, Helm argues throughout his book that these problems are far less severe than those that arise for a temporalistic God, thereby resembling the baritone, who after being thoroughly booed by the notoriously tough Parma audience for his opera-opening aria, responded ,“If you think I stink, wait till you hear the tenor.” Two of the most prominent objections to a timeless God that Helm attempts to lessen hold that a timeless God can be neither a person nor omniscient. Each will be considered in turn.

Personhood Objection. All parties to the dispute agree that God must be a person; and, even though they disagree about the niceties of the analysis of the concept of personhood, which is not surprising given that the concept is largely a forensic one, they agree that at a minimum a person have reason, which involves being conscious, having memories, knowledge and beliefs, as well as the capacity to act intentionally. In other words, a person must be a rational agent. The friends and foes of divine timelessness have opposed intuitions about whether it is conceptually possible for a timeless being to have these rationality and agency properties. The foes appeal to “ordinary language” to support their modal intuitions, for the beings of which we ordinarily predicate these properties are temporal. For example, the foes would reject on conceptual grounds the imputation of purposeful action to a timeless God, since ordinary, familiar cases of purposeful action have the fulfillment of the purpose come later than the action but for a timeless God there is no temporal relation between his timeless act and its worldly fulfillment.

But we must be on guard against the fallacy of “the legislativeness of ordinary language,” according to which the ordinary use of a word is legislative for all uses of it.[3] For the fact that we have never had the occasion to so speak does not show that it would be conceptually wrong, violate a “rule” of language, so to speak. For example, it is dubious to infer from the fact that all the causal relations we know of involve a temporal relation between cause and effect that it is conceptually impossible for God to timelessly bring about effects in time. This needed jump from what we actually say to what it is conceptually correct to say is the bane of ordinary language philosophy or conceptual analysis. And, since God is such an extraordinary being -- the extraordinary Being -- it is not surprising that the dispute over whether it is conceptually possible for a timeless being to be a person is a seemingly intractable one. The best that the disputants can do is to snipe at each other’s arguments, bearing in mind that no one is going to win a decisive victory; for we do not know how to keep score in philosophy.

To begin with, consciousness, at least of the more developed sort that is required of a person, is a process, something that goes on, and therefore is temporal. Helm never considers this basic objection, but this is not a serious omission, since he does attempt to show that his timeless God can have specific forms of consciousness, such as memory and belief and purpose, which would entail being conscious. Having memory certainly is essential for any more developed sort of consciousness, and Helm attempts to show how a timeless God can have memory. Ordinarily, we say that someone remembers only if what is remembered is earlier than the remembering. Helm’s timeless God cannot have such ordinary memories and thus cannot be conscious. To meet this difficulty Helm concocts a timeless analogue to ordinary temporal memory which God can have. Whereas ordinary remembering is “knowing that p and having not forgotten that p…a timeless being remembers p when he knows p and it is impossible for him to forget p.” (59)

This contrived timeless analogue to ordinary memory is suspect. The only part of Helm’s definition that specifically concerns memory is the clause that “it is impossible for God to forget p.” But it is true also of the number seven that it is impossible for it to forget p. Are we then to say that there is a number analogue to memory? Seven “remembers” being odd just in case seven is odd and it is impossible for it to forget being odd.

Another thing required of a person is that it have a life, though not necessarily in the honorific sense (“Go and get a life!”) or the biological one. It was for this reason that Augustine and Boethius spoke respectively of all of God’s years standing together and his life being an illimitable one had all at once. Unfortunately, it is contradiction in terms to speak of a timeless duration and all of one’s years standing together. Helm analyzes Humpty Dumpty style God’s having an illimitable life in terms of each of his essential attributes being illimitable. (39) That there are no limitations on God’s attributes, however, is totally irrelevant to his life being illimitable. These objections to the possibility of there being a timeless person are put forth tentatively, since I fear they may rest on the fallacy of the legislativeness of ordinary language. But the friends of divine timelessness should be at least as cautious in advocating their blatant departures from ordinary usage.

For the purpose of establishing my thesis, what matters is not whether the timeless God is a person but whether he is the right sort of person for playing the role of our ideal social self, the one with whom agents have intimate action-guiding interactions. It was baldly claimed that Helm’s timeless God cannot play this role, and, surprisingly, it is the issue of the divine omniscience that best reveals why it cannot.

Omniscience Objection. An omniscient being must know every true proposition. But among the true propositions are temporal indexical ones, to be called call A-propositions. An A-proposition makes a temporal determination and is expressed by the use of a sentence that is not freely repeatable in time in that successive tokenings of it could express propositions that differ in truth-value.[4] A B-proposition reports a temporal relation and is expressed by the use of a sentence that is freely repeatable in time in that successive tokenings of it could not express propositions that differ in truth-value. Sentences that are freely repeatable in time are B-sentences and those that are not are A-sentences. These definitions leave it an open question whether for every A-proposition there is a B-proposition that is identical or at least logically equivalent equivalent with it. The omniscience of a timeless God is challenged by his apparent inability to know true A-propositions, since it would seem that only a being in time could have such knowledge. Helm exerts considerable ingenuity in his attempt to neutralize this problem for his timeless God. Toward this end he employs these three strategies: (1) appeal to degrees and importance of omniscience; (2) reduction of A- to B-propositions; and, (3) refutation by parody based on an analogy with spatial and personal indexical propositions.

(1) Initially, Helm seems to accept the claim of the enemies of divine timelessness that God cannot know an A-proposition.[5] “If the omniscient being were timeless, he would necessarily not know that it was raining now, since being timeless, he could not be temporally present on the occasion on which it is raining.” (40. See also p. 80) “The significant fact about…[A-propositions] is that they can only be known to be true when they are true.” (42) Thus the reason why a timeless God could know an A-proposition, such as that event E is happening now, or that it is now time T, is that only a being who exists at the time referred to – now or this time – could know the proposition. But why is this the case? Two answers might be given. The first is that a being who does not exist now cannot understand this proposition, the second, that he cannot express it. The second answer might appear more helpful; for, when it is asked just why this being cannot know the proposition, it would seem that the only answer is the he cannot express it. But a lot depends on what is meant by express. A timeless being can timelessly bring it about that an A-sentence is tokened at a certain time. Think of a parallel case involving a spatial indexical sentence containing “here.” A being who is not here, or maybe not even in space at all, could cause it to be the case that a tokening of “The treasure is here” occurs at a certain place, that is, the sound of the tokening appears to come from a certain place. Think of a ventriloquist. Why couldn’t there be a temporal ventriloquist? It might be countered that although he causes a tokening of an A-sentence at a certain time, he does not express the A-proposition because he cannot understand it, since he doesn’t exist at the time in question. But this is the first explanation and thus brings us full circle. Maybe the second answer can be bolstered by analogy with the personal indexical proposition that I am Richard Gale. Even if some ventriloquist were to cause it to be the case that the sounds made by a tokening of the sentence “I am Richard Gale” were to emanate from my mouth, he would fail to express the very same proposition that would be expressed by my uttering the sentence.. Whatever the right answer is, I think we can agree with Helm that an improperly positioned person cannot know these different temporal, spatial and personal indexical propositions.

Granted, at least for the sake of argument, that a timeless God cannot know an A-proposition, what are theists to make of it? What importance should it have for them? Should it bother them? These are the right questions to ask, given that the concept of a GCB cannot be understood without connecting it up with a context of human concern and endeavor. Where I differ from Helm is over how he answers these questions, for I think it should greatly bother the theist, as will emerge from my discussion in (3) of the parody refutation, whereas he does not.

Helm’s response has two prongs. First, it is claimed that the timeless God’s failure to know A-propositions is of little importance, because for every event truly reported by an A-proposition God knows of this event under a different description, namely via a B-proposition that reports the very same event. For example, while God cannot know that it is raining now, he can timelessly know that rain occurs (tenselessly) at T, provided that now=T. The second prong, which has Helm’s timeless God play baritone to the omnitemporal God’s tenor, argues that the timeless God’s omnitemporal rival also fails to be omniscient. For in order to know any A-proposition, it must exist at the appropriate time; but in virtue of having this unique temporal perspective, it will be denied knowledge at that time of those A-propositions that are truly expressible at earlier and later times. (81) He also will be unable to know those A-propositions that are true at that very time that predict future contingents, such as creaturely free actions, thereby further lessening its omniscience. (82) Another disadvantage of placing God in time is that he loses his required immutability; for, not only does he grow older, he must continually change his mind about what time it is and the like. (85ff.)

So far Helm’s a plague-on-all-your-houses strategy has argued for a tie between a temporal and a timeless God’s omniscience: Both are restricted. He now argues that there is a respect in which the latter’s omniscience is superior to the formers. “If it is granted that there are expressions of propositions which a timeless omniscient being could not use [namely, A-sentences], this must be balanced against the fact that a timeless omniscient being knows the future, our future, something which other accounts of divine omniscience find difficulty in accommodating.” (85) So the baritone isn’t as bad as the tenor! The reason for a temporal God having to be ignorant of future contingent propositions is due to Boethius’ and Pike’s arguments for fatalism.[6] Another respect in which a temporal being’s knowledge is inferior to that of a timeless being is that the latter but not the former can know B-propositions. “But even if [a temporal being] knew the truth of all temporal indexicals at the times when they were true he would know nothing timelessly. So while an omniscient being in time would know more than a timeless omniscient being he would also know less.”(78) Helm gives no support to this implausible claim, implausible because we seem to know many B-propositions, such as that The Civil War begins (tenselessly) in 1861.

(2) A-propositions have been a breeding ground for conceptual puzzlements and perplexities. They seem to ontologically commit us to a queer entity –now or the present – that mysteriously shifts to ever later times or events and the rate of one time unit per time unit, which is the basic problem with the river of time depiction of temporal passage. A-propositions, as we have seen, also muck things up for God’s omniscience. The “propositional B-reduction” helps us flies to escape from the bottle by showing that every A-proposition either is identical with or entailed by a B-proposition. There also is the more radical “ontological B-reduction” which attempts to show that there are no A-propositions in the traditional, abstract Fregean de dicto sense – a unity comprised of both the sense of the subject and the predicate expressions. Rather, an A-proposition, such as that now is when event E occurs, is an ontological mixed bag, being an ordered pair comprised of the real life referent of the tokening of “now” and the concept of being the time when event E occurs. Helm inconsistently defends both the propositional and ontological forms of the B-reduction; for an A-proposition cannot be identical with or entailed by a de dicto B-proposition unless it too is a de dicto proposition.

The propositional B-reduction. The identity version of this reduction runs up against the problem that a person can have a propositional attitude toward an A-proposition (B-proposition) without having that attitude toward the B-proposition (A-proposition) that is co-reporting with it, even when she understands both propositions. (Propositions are co-reporting just in case their participial nominalizations are co-referring; assuming that now=T, that now is when E occurs is co-reporting with that T is when E occurs because now being when E occurs is identical with T being when E occurs. In various publications I had defended a criterion of propositional identity that required of identical propositions that it is impossible for someone who understands both propositions to have a propositional attitude toward one of the propositions that she does not have to the other. By this criterion, no A-proposition is identical with any B-proposition because it always is possible for someone who understands both propositions to believe one of them, for example, without believing the other – to believe that it is raining now without believing that rain occurs (tenselessly) at time T. Prior’s well traveled “thank goodness that’s over” example rests on this criterion.

Helm is well aware of this consequence of my criterion and accordingly attempts to undermine it. “a and b both express the same proposition if it is impossible to believe a and not to believe b, or vice-versa. The basic problem with such a criterion is that for it to operate in the case of a timeless God such a God must be able to adopt a propositional attitude, to believe, temporal indexical expressions [A-propositions], when manifestly this is impossible.” (77) This objection to my criterion misses the mark because Helm’s formulation fails to specify that the person who performs the thought experiment of seeing if she could believe a but not believe b understands both a and b. The viability of my criterion does not require that every subject who is capable of having a propositional attitude is a suitable subject for the thought experiment. The results which are obtained from the thought experiments of those who have sufficient understanding of both a and b hold true for everyone, even those who cannot perform the thought experiment because of limitations in their understanding. Helm’s God will just have to take our word for it. Helm has unwittingly unearthed yet another limitation on the omniscience of this being.

There is another way in which Helm can challenge my criterion: produce a counter-example to it, which could be done via a good argument for an A-proposition being identical with a B-proposition.[7] And this is just what Helm attempts to do on the basis of D. H. Mellor’s Real Time, in which it is argued that for every A-proposition there is a B-proposition that has the same truth-conditions as and therefore is identical with it. “A sentence such as ‘It is raining now’ uttered by A on 30 July 1987 has the same truth-conditions as the sentence ‘It is raining on 20 July 1987’, and so expresses the same proposition. So a timeless God knows that it is raining now if he knows its dated equivalent.” (78) By the same appeal to truth-conditions it can be shown that the appropriate use of differently tensed counterpart sentences express one and the same proposition. “If one says that what counts as sameness of fact is sameness of truth-conditions, then “It is raining now’ uttered on the 24 September and ‘It was raining then [yesterday]’ (uttered on the 25^th) have the same truth-conditions, namely that it is raining on 24 September.”(82) The only difference between a timeless God and time-bound creatures with regard to A-propositions concerns not the fact or true proposition that is known, it being the same in both cases, but only their ways of knowing or expressing them. “For though there are ways in which an eternal being cannot represent certain facts to himself he can still know those facts, or at least he knows facts that entail the facts that he cannot represent to himself, and he knows that this entailment holds.” (85) This is the entailment version of the B-reduction and relies on the principle, not that knowledge is closed under entailement, which it isn’t, but rather that if a person knows p and that p entails q, then she knows that q.

The Mellor-Helm criterion for propositional identity fails because it confounds the truth-conditions for propositions with those for sentences. This is patent when it says that “A sentence such as ‘It is raining now’ uttered by A on 30 July 1987 has the same truth-conditions as the sentence ‘It is raining on 30 July 1987’, and so expresses the same proposition.” (78. My italics.) The truth-conditions for a proposition are the worldly verifiers or truth-makers for the proposition. The truth-conditions for the proposition that S is F is S’s F-ing (or being F). Thus, when I say that E occurs now, the proposition that I express has as its truth-conditions the worldly event of E’s occurring now. What I say, the proposition that I express, does not entail that E occurs at the date on which I say or token the sentence in question. The truth-conditions for the sentence “E occurs now” are the rules for correctly tokening it so as to express a true proposition, namely that a tokening of “E occurs now” expresses a true proposition if and only if it is tokened simultaneously with an occurrence of E.

Whereas the truth-conditions for an A-sentence make reference to a temporal relation between a tokening of it and the event it reports (the one referred to by its particiipial nominalization), this is not the case for the truth-conditions for an A-proposition. The A-proposition that it is raining now does entail that any token occurs, and thus it is not contradictory, only pragmatically self-falsifying, to say that it is raining now although no tokens occur. Helm’s token-reflexive analysis of A-propositions runs afoul of this point. “The question ‘What does God (timelessly) know now?’, is equivalent to ‘What does God (timelessly) know at the time this utterance is being made?’” (103) “If truth is applied strictly to tensed sentence, it is being applied to something which has some of the logical characteristics of an event…event in question is necessarily either an uttering or inscribing, something datable.” (135. See also 52 and 136) But it is only the truth-conditions for an A-sentence, not an A-proposition, that refer to a tokening event.

The ontological B-reduction. Helm’s says some things that speak for this elimination form of the B-reduction. He does not reduce A-propoitions to the ontological mixed bag de re propositions of Russell and Perry but instead to an event. B-propositions are abstract entities that are timelessly true or false, but A-propositions are events, tokenings of A-sentences, as was the case with Helm’s above token reflexive analysis of them. Furthermore, when we predicate truth and falsity of an A-proposition it is the tokening of a sentence, not an abstract proposition, that is the subject of our predication; and the same A-sentence can vary in its truth-value over time. Propositions are said, by Helm, to be immutable in that “if it is true that I am at my desk on 1 March 1987 then it always was true that I am at my desk on 1 March 1987, for though sentences can change their truth value, propositions cannot. “(133) The verb in this B-proposition is tenseless, being “no more about the future than it is about the past….To be about the future the expression would itself have to be regarded as an event occurring at a particular time.” (136)

Helm’s reduction of an A-proposition to a sentence-tokening flies in the face of ordinary usage. For when we translate the sentence, “The man in the corner believes that it is raining now,” into a foreign language, the entire sentence, including “it is raining now,” gets translated. But if the intentional accusative of this man’s belief were a sentence tokening, as in “The man in the corner believes the tokening of the sentence “It is raining now,” the mentioned sentence “it is raining now” would remain untranslated. Furthermore, pace Helm, when we predicate truth of an A-proposition we do so of an abstract proposition and in a tenseless manner. We say that it is (tenselessly) true that it is raining now. We do not say that the tokening of the sentence “It is raining now” is now true. For it is only a contingent fact that the mentioned sentence is used to express the proposition that it is now raining; and thus it is possible that it is true that it is true that it is now raining and false that the tokening of the sentence ‘It is raining now” is now true. Truth is tenselessly predicated of the abstract A-proposition that it is raining now. For if the predication were tensed, it would make sense to say that it was true that it is raining now. What does make sense is to say that it was true that it is then raining,” in which “then” functions as a Castaneda quasi-indicator.[8]

(3) Refutation by parody. It is this response to the challenge posed bv A-propositions to the omniscience of his timeless God that Helm primarily relies on. Thus, he would not be crushed if his attempted B-reduction did not succeed, for he is willing to bet the family farm on his refutation of this challenge by a reductio ad absurdum parody. It goes as follows. (41-55)

(i) There are exactly parallel or analogous arguments based on spatial and personal indexcial propositions against a timeless God’s omniscience to the one based on A-propositions.

(ii) These parallel arguments have absurd consequences by the standards of traditional theism, and thus should be rejected by the theist.

(iii) The argument against a timeless God’s omniscience based on A-propositions also should be rejected by the theist. From (i) and (ii) by the princiiples of analogical reasoning

Premise (i), at first glance, looks right; for, just as A-propositions are expressed through the use of sentences that are not freely repeatable across times, spatial and personal indexical propositions are expressible by sentences that are not freely repeatable respectively across places and persons. Furthermore, just as one must exist now in order to know the A-proposition that it is raining now, one must exist here and be identical with me to know respectively the propositions that the treasure is here and that I am Richard Gale. But it would be absurd, according to traditional theism, to say that God is numerically identical with his creatures or that he occupies some place. Thus, theists must excuse God from having to know spatial and personal indexical propositions; and, given the strong analogy between these propositions and A-propositions, they should do likewise for A-propositions. Helm challenges those who think it is important for God to know A-propositions but not these other indexical propositions to produce relevant disanalogies between them. I accept this challenge.

It must be granted to Helm at the outset that it is impossible for God to know every true indexical proposition of any one of the three types – temporal, spatial, and personal. But this leaves open whether this God must know at least some true indexical propositions, and, if so, of which of the three types must he have this knowledge. And if he must have this knowledge for any given type, he must have the indexical perspective that is required for having this knowledge. It would be a howler to infer from the fact that God cannot know every true indexical proposition of a certain type that he cannot know any one of them, or even, that it is not required that he know some of them. It will be argued that God must know some temporal and personal indexical propositions but need not and cannot have knowledge of any spatial one. And thus there is a very significant disanalogy between temporal and personal indexicals, on the one hand, and spatial indexicals, on the other.

It is obvious that God, being a person, must be capable of making a first person indexical reference to himself, as for example by tokening “I am God” or whatever sentence in Deitiese has the same meaning. And thus God will know at least some true personal indexical propositions. If he is a purely spiritual being, then he is barred from having any spatial indexical perspective and therefore from knowing any spatial indexical proposition. This does not hold if God bcomes incarnate.

There is another reason why it is crucial to the role played by the personal God of the Bible, the one that interacts with men, that he have a personal indexical perspective. This is a requirement for his being able to have relations of intimacy with them. He must be able to you our I’s and we, turn, you his I. While God cannot know the very proposition I express when I say “I am Richard Gale,” he can know a different indexed counterpart proposition that entails the former, namely “He is Richard Gale,” said as he ostends me. This mutually I-you-ing, or, as some would say, I-thou-ing, is necessary for personal dialogue.

Must God also have a unique spatial perspective for him to have intimate dialogue with men? No, for we can imagine having an intimate relation with a purely spiritual being. This is just what a séance is attempting to achieve. Here and I, therefore, are disanalogous with respect to our concept of intimacy, thereby undermining the analogical premise, (i), in Helm’s parody reductio. A individual’s not being in space does preclude some forms of intimate interaction, with their attendant thrills and tingles, such as was achieved when Jack and Jill’s index fingers touched as they each said “this water pump.” And zing went the strings of their hearts. But, if we are to trust the reports of the medieval nuns who, on the basis of their mystical experiences, claimed to be the “bride of Christ,” maybe not having a body did not cramp God’s style.

Here also is disanalogous with now with respect to intimacy, which further undermines (i). For you can have an intimnate dialogue or interaction with someone only if you assume that your temporal perspectives coincide – that she is speaking to you when you hear her (assuming for the sake of brevity that there is no time lapse between the speaking and hearing) and that she, in turn, hears your response and subsequently reacts to it, and so on back and forth. Each “moves” the other. This sort of intimate interaction cannot be achieved if you know that your correspondent timelessly knows everything you say in the course of the “conversation” and timelessly causes you to hear his “responses” at certain times, as would Helm’s timeless God. Think in this connection of conversing over the phone with a tape recording that was made in advance by some prescient individual who knew just what you would say. Once you learn of this fact there no longer is any sense of intimacy between you and this being. The Biblical apparent direct perceptions of the presence of God are good examples of the sort of intimate dialogue that is so central to the working theist. Job would be very upset if he learned that he was “talking” with a tape recorded message.

Just as a personal God could you our I’s and thereby know differently personally indexed counterpart propositions to the ones we express by using “I,” a temporal God can, at any given time, know different temporally indexed counterpart propositions to those that are truly expressible at earlier and later times. And since the former entail the latter, his failure to know every true A-proposition and personal indexical proposition is significantly lessened. For example, that S was F yesterday entails that yesterday S is then (quasi-indicator) F. Through the entailment relations between the A-propositions expressed by persons at different times a sort of temporal “intimacy” is achieved across these times, but it is quite limited because a conversation could take place between differently temporally positioned persons only if causation, per impossible, could go backwards.

There is yet another reason why a conversation requires that the communicants share the same temporal but not the same spatial perspective that rests on a very deep disanalogy between here and now with respect to the concept of objectivity, further undermining premise (i), the analogical premise, in Helm’s reductio by parody.[9] After this disanalogy is unearthed, it will be employed in showing why there cannot be a conversation between a person existing now and one existing earlier than now whereas there can be a conversation between a person existing here and one existing in front of (to the rear of, etc.) here. The link between the concept of a conversation and that of objectivity is that a conversation requires that the communicants agree in their judgments of objectivity, that there is an objective reality that they share in common.

A determination is objective only if it is not be subject to choice and is common to or agreed upon by other observers. Now satisfies these two requirements for objectivity but here neither. They are conceptually disanalogous in these respects in that the spatial (temporal) analogue to a given proposition containing a spatial (temporal) indexical term differs from it in its modal status. A spatial (temporal) analogue to a given proposition is formed by replacing every spatial and temporal term in it respectively with a suitable temporal and spatial term. “Here” is to be replaced with “now” and “earlier than” by “in front of,” though “to the rear , or right, or left of,” would work equally well. Thus, the spatial analogue to the proposition that an object cannot now wholly occupy two different places is that an object cannot here wholly occupy two different times. This brings out a conceptual disanalogy between here and now, since the former is necessary and the latter impossible, which is due to the fact that an object is spatial but not temporal parts.

Whereas the use of now is not subject to selection or choice, the use of here is. This can be brought out clearly by the following pair of analogues.

(T1) A tokening of “now” now denotes a time but this very tokening could have denoted a time other than that time.

(S1) A tokening of “here” here denotes a place but this very tokening could have denoted a place other than that place.

At first glance, there appears to be no disanalogy, since both (T1) and (S1) seem to be impossible.

But, far from being impossible, (S1) is necessary. The reason is that a tokening of “here” can be accompanied by an act of pointing and thus denote a different place than the one occupied by the speaker: I say to the movers, “Put the table here (as I point to a place in front of myself).” Since I could have pointed in a different direction than I in fact did, that very tokening of “here” could have denoted a different place than it in fact did. Obviously, there cannnot be an analogous type of selectivity with the use of “now.” Our only choice is when to token it, but once we have made that decision there is no further choice as to what time is denoted. But, with “here,” even after I decide where to token it, I have a choice as to what place will be denoted by my tokening.

The response to this alleged selectivity-based disanalogy will be that a naked use of “here,” one unaccompanied by any act of ostension, cannot refer to any place other than the one occupied by the speaker, thereby making (S1) impossible when restricted to naked uses of “here.” The reply is that even with a naked use of “here” there is choice, for the speaker has chosen whether or not to use it nakedly. But, disanalogously, a use of “now” must be naked, and thus the speaker has no choice in the matter.

There is another respect in which “here” is selective and “now” is not. Even if a tokening of “here” were in no way selective, it still would be the case that

(S2) A tokening of “here” later than now both could refer to a place in front of here and could refer to a place to the rear of here.

whereas

(T2) A tokening of “now” in front of here both could refer to a time earlier than now and could refer to a time later than now.

It is clear that (S2) is necessary, since it is possible for the speaker to be spatially free and rangy, and thus be able to change her spatial perspective at will in any direction in space. But (T2) is not necessary, because a speaker is not analogously able to change her temporal perspective at will in any direction in time. The reason is that it is impossible for a speaker who exists now to bring it about that a tokening of “now” denotes a time earlier than now, for causation cannot go backwards in time although it can go in any direction in space.

The other, and more important, objectivity-involving disanalogy concerns the agreement-in-judgment-among-normal-observers test for the objectivity or veridicality of a perceptual experience. Whereas these relevant observers must co-present with the perceptual experience, they need not occupy the same place as does the perceiver. This gives rise to the following conceptual disanalogy.

(T3) To test a perceptual claim made now appeal is made to the noninferential perceptual claims only of observers who exist now.[10]

(S3) To test a perceptual claim made here appeal is made to the noninferential perceptual claims only of observers who exist here.

These propositions differ in their modal status since (T3) is necessary and (S3) is not. In testing the objective truth of a percetual claim made here we do not confine ourselves to the testimony of observers who are here, for someone who is not here can have just as good a view, often better, of what is happening here. But we do not elicit the noninferential perceptual judgments of past or future observers with regard to what exists or is happening now. Their testimony as to what they then noninferentially perceive is irrelevat. If we were able, per impossible, to converse with Plato we would not ask him what time it is now; for what he says after consulting his sun dial would be totally irrelevant.

We want those with whom we enter into intimate dialogue to share our view of objective reality and thus they must be co-present with us and share or temporal indexical perspectives of past, present and future. A timeless God could not have these perspectives and thus could not share our sense of objective reality. These perspectives are essential to our lives as agents in which we deliberate and intentionally carry out our decisions. If we want a God who is available to us as agents, a God who will warn, direct, and comfort us in our worldly endeavors, it cannot be the timeless God of Helm. But if, on the other hand, we want a God with whom to mystically commune, he would be the one that we want. Most theists want both Gods and the challenge is to find a way to synthesize them.