Response from Charles Taliaferro on September 23, 2012

Great observations and great questions! There are three views that are defended today by philosophers in the theistic tradition (the tradition that holds that there is a God who exists necessarily, is all good, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and the creator and conserver of the whole cosmos). On a traditional view (going back to Boethius and Aquinas) God is eternal in the sense that there is not before, during, or after for God. God's creating the cosmos as well as all God's acts are timelessly willed. On this model, God timelessly wills successiveness (the origin and sustaining of a changing cosmos) but God does not successively will (God wills at one time to do X and then do Y). This position is defended by many philosophical theists such as Brian Leftow at Oxford University. He is the author of the book Time and Eternity, which you might check out. Then there is the view called Open Theism which holds that God is in time God is present throughout all the created order NOW and is everlasting (that is, God has no beginning and no end). I do not think that if something is in time, it follows that it had a beginning or origin. I bet this sounds crazy to you, but some philosophers (like myself) think there are abstract objects like numbers that exist necessarily and never had an origin and will have no end. There is a third view championed by W.L. Craig which is quite interesting: he holds that God was timelessly eternal until creation, after which God is temporal. You can do a google to find Craig's home page in which he has posted various papers on this and other topics.

I want to encourage you in your questions and inquiry!!!!!!!! The intersection of the philosophy of time and philosophy of God is fascinating. You might look to the free Stanford Encyclopedia entry on philosophy of religion and entries on time.