أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Book "From Divine Time Maker to Divine Watchmaker" By R. T. Mullins

Ryan T Mullins is a researcher and lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Lucerne, a researcher at the Polin Institute, and a docent of dogmatics at the University of Helsinki. He has published over 60 essays on various topics in philosophical theology related to models of God, philosophy of time, personal identity, the problem of evil, disability theology, the Trinity, and the incarnation. He has published multiple books including, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford University Press, 2016), God and Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Eternal in Love: A Little Book About a Big God (Cascade 2024), and From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker: Explorations in God's Temporality (Routledge 2025).

This book "From Divine Time Maker to Divine Watchmaker" By R. T. Mullins offers the most extensive exploration of divine temporality to date. It focuses on five main questions. First, what is time? Second, how is God responsible for the existence of time? Third, what does it mean to say that God is temporal? Fourth, what kind of structure might God give to a time series? Fifth, what are the implications for theological doctrines such as the Trinity, creation, providence, and life after death? The author offers a deep, critical engagement with the Christian tradition but also goes beyond to build analytic bridges to Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Jainist philosophical theology. The book provides an up-to-date discussion of issues within analytic metaphysics, philosophy of time, and philosophy of religion and draws on the resources of contemporary systematic, historical, and biblical theology.

The main theme of From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker by R. T. Mullins is an extensive defense of divine temporality. Mullins argues against the classical theistic view of a "timeless" God, claiming instead that God exists in time, acts sequentially, and experiences successive moments. The book systematically addresses five core questions:-

The nature of time: Examining what time is and how it functions.

God’s responsibility for time: How God creates, sustains, or is intertwined with the existence of time.

The meaning of divine temporality: Defining what it means for God to exist and act within time.

The structure of time: Investigating the metaphysical structure of temporal reality.

Theological implications: How a temporal God reshapes the understanding of doctrines like the Trinity, creation, providence, and life after death.

"Much appreciation for the late Katherine Hawley is due. During my PhD, I had several meetings with her to discuss the philosophy of time. I recall a meeting in 2011 where I wanted to discuss the absolute theory of time. I wanted to leave God out of the conversation, but Professor Hawley was quite interested to understand how God fit into the discussion. I remember her asking if I was saying that God is absolute time. I said, “No. That sounds crazy.” She thought that identifying absolute time with God would pave the way for an interesting argument for the existence of God. I ignored her advice for many years and resisted any notion of

identifying time with God. This present book corrects my mistake of not heeding her advice."

Chapter1.

The concept of God involves two conditions. First, God must be the single ultimate ground of reality. Second, God must be perfect.

Most models of God affirm that God is a necessarily existent, eternal being with essential properties like maximal power, maximal knowledge, maximal goodness, and freedom. Most models of God also affirm that God has contingent properties like creator and

sustainer of the universe. Different models of God wish to affirm other, contested, essential divine properties like love, impassibility, passibility, simplicity, and so on. The main focus of this book is the attribute of eternality.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, “All Christian theologians agree that God is without beginning and without end.”

Each model of God agrees that God has the following attributes: personal, necessarily existent, aseity, selfsufficiency, maximal knowledge, maximal power, maximal goodness, maximal rationality, and freedom.

To say that God is timeless is to say that God necessarily exists without beginning, without end, without succession, and without temporal location. To say that God is temporal is to say that God necessarily exists without beginning and without end.

Chapter2.

Different models of God ( classical theism, neoclassical theism, open theism, and panentheism) agree that God is a necessarily existent, eternal, and personal being with attributes like aseity, self-sufficiency, maximal power, maximal knowledge, maximal goodness, perfect freedom, and perfect rationality. Further, each model affirms the thesis of divine foundationalism which says that God is the ultimate source of reality.

Chapter 3.

Louis Berkhof says that it is only natural that one would discuss the works or actions of God after one has offered an account of the essence of God. With an account of what God is, one must next ask what God does.

Chapter 4.

There are two important questions that are driving the discussion of this book. First, what is time? Second, how is God responsible for the existence of time?

The major strand of thought that dominates discussions of these questions within philosophical theology. I call this view creationism because it affirms that God creates time. This view has representatives from across the world’s religions. For example, Philo of Alexandria says that “God is the maker of time.” Maimonides says, “In the beginning God alone existed, and nothing else…Even time itself is among the things created.” According to Augustine, God “made time itself.” Al-Ghazali concurs that God “created time and space.” Creationism is one possible view about how God is responsible for the existence of time.

God creates time in the sense that God creates change and events.

RT) Time is (i) an ordered series of events, and (ii) each individual moment is identified with a collection of simultaneous events.

Chapter 5.

"Identification View" denies that God creates time, and says that time can be identified with God in some way. There is some sense in which God is the substance discussed by the absolute theory of time which is why one can attribute or predicate time of God.

This distinction between God’s time and creation’s time is a popular one in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Time is (i) a natured entity that makes change possible, (ii) the ontological source of moments, and (iii) that which orders the moments.

Time intrinsically has a direction— forward.

Time is necessarily disposed to move in one direction, but that time does not necessarily actualize this direction.

The creationist claims that God is the timemaker.

Thanks to Jake Brancatella for pointing me towards Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 4549, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2246. This text says that one should not curse time for Allah is time.

Chapter 6.

consider two sets of potential problems for divine temporality related to the doctrine of the Trinity. The first set of problems focuses on an important, though controversial, distinction made within Trinitarian theology called the immanent and economic Trinity. It is sometimes said that divine temporality entails a collapse of this distinction, or somehow makes the Trinity dependent upon creation.

Chapter 7.

Divine timelessness and divine temporality provide coherent models of God, and that both present God as the greatest etaphysically

possible being. Mawson also grants that both wish to affirm that God has maximal power, maximal knowledge, and maximal goodness.

According to Keith Ward, divine timelessness gives the illusion of power over the future. Ward maintains that omnipotence is the only thing needed for God to have power over the future. In his estimation, timelessness is not doing any work in this regard. "Timelessness does not give God any advantage in terms of power, goodness, or knowledge".

Chapter 8.

Examining rival ontologies of time and the implications for religious doctrine. Presentism is the most attractive temporal ontology of time because it has a good fit with various theological claims.

Standard Christian Story: There eternally exists a triune God. From all eternity, this God has existed alone. This God freely decided to create a universe for a particular purpose. Part of this purpose includes satisfying the desire to enter into everlasting friendship with human persons, who are immaterial souls with physical bodies. In order for the friendship to be genuine, God ensured that human persons have rationality and freedom. These human persons rebelled against God, but God had anticipated this, and already had a plan to ensure that His purposes for creation would come to fruition. Part of this plan involved establishing covenants with particular groups of humans, as well as sending prophets to teach the people the ways of the Lord. The most dramatic part of this plan involved one of the divine persons becoming incarnate in human flesh in order to establish solidarity with humanity, as well as redemption. The reality of death might seem to go against God’s desire for everlasting friendship, but God has accounted for this by offering an afterlife that comes in two stages. The first stage is called the intermediate state. This is where a soul goes after it undergoes bodily death. The soul resides in the intermediate state until the second stage of the afterlife occurs. The second stage is the general resurrection of the dead in which all human persons are given new bodies, judged by God, and given everlasting life. At that point, sin and death shall be no more for God has completely defeated evil.

Philosophical anthropology focuses on the metaphysical question “what is a human person?”. For the purposes of this book, I assume that a person is a centre of consciousness that is capable of being self-aware—i.e. a thing with a first-person perspective.

A human person is a person that is appropriately related to a human organism or body. What is that appropriate relationship to a human body? There are several different kinds of answers that one can give to this question, but I shall limit my focus to two popular views: substance dualism and physicalism. On substance dualism, a human person is a soul with a body. A person is identical to an

immaterial substance (a mind) that has the capacity to think, feel, and act. The appropriate relationship that a person has to a human body that makes her a human person is to be understood in terms of satisfying various conditions for being embodied.

Chapter 9.

Truthmaking (TM): A proposition is true because there exists something that makes it true. In light of (TM), many philosophers have engaged in something called the truthmaking project which is the task of finding those things in the world that make various propositions true. The truthmaking project is said to be a method for confronting metaphysical questions, and not itself a metaphysical doctrine. Truthmaking is supposed to be a tool to help us rule out different positions in metaphysics that fail to satisfy (TM).

Chapter 10.

Contemporary Christian philosophers and theologians have adopted four-dimensionalism and eternalism for various reasons. Again, eternalism is an ontology of time that says all moments of the timeline are concrete or actual. Four-dimensionalism is the doctrine of temporal parts which says that things like human persons persist by having continuity relations with other temporal counterparts.

Four-dimensionalism and eternalism are often said to be derived from certain interpretations of the special theory of relativity. Why? One reason for thinking this is because there is nothing within the special theory of relativity that allows us to pick out a preferred reference frame for the cosmic present. In other words, nothing within the standard interpretations of the special theory of relativity helps us identify the present moment of time.

Some philosophers and theologians are philosophically motived to hold to eternalism and four-dimensionalism because these theories are said to comport well with truthmaker theory.

Chapter 11-14 & Conclusion

When I first became interested in God’s relationship to time, I was captivated by the idea that God is timeless. I could not understand what it meant for God to be timeless, but I was certain that this entailed that God is holy and perfect. Something about the fact that I could not understand divine timelessness justified my certainty that it makes God worthy of worship. Yet, as I went in search of the timeless God, I found that my inability to make sense of divine timelessness was no longer a source of awe and wonder. I came to realize that I do not worship God because I cannot understand Him. Instead, I worship God because of the things that I do understand about God, namely, His love, power, and knowledge displayed throughout creation, and the revelation that He has made known to us through Jesus Christ.

"The End of the Timeless God", I came to realize that divine timelessness faced many problems. The doctrine was no longer a mystery to me, but was quickly becoming unintelligible. The major focus of this book is an exploration of divine temporality. I want readers to understand that a commitment to divine temporality does not lock you into a particular model of God or theological position. If you are flirting with divine temporality, you have a lot of options to consider in your overall systematic theology and worldview. Divine temporality by itself does not tell you what happens when God creates a universe. Is God creating time, or is God merely creating the conditions for the measurement of time? Is God a time maker or is God a watchmaker?

The Identification temporalist can deny that time has an intrinsic metric. The Identification temporalist can give three reasons to support her position.

First, this precreation moment never began to exist. Without an initial boundary, it is impossible to say how long this moment has lasted. There is no initial boundary by which one can start a measurement. Again, a moment is the way things are but could be otherwise. In the precreation moment, God simply exists without any change, and without any universe. God has not yet exercised His freedom and power to create a universe and subsequent moments.

Second, due to a lack of change in this precreation moment, there is no way to develop a clock in order to measure the length of time. The inability to develop a clock rests on the claim that there is nothing to measure—i.e. the lack of change. Without any change, there simply is no measurement to make. Thus, there simply is no fact of the matter as to how long this precreation

moment lasts.

Third, in order to develop a clock, there needs to be more than mere change. There must also be consistent change. Without consistent change, one cannot develop a clock in order to create a measurement of a series of moments. An Identification temporalist might say that a series of moments cannot be measured unless there are laws of nature that provide a uniform periodic process by which one can develop a metric. In the absence of laws of nature, a series of moments can have a topology. This means that moments can be earlier and later than each other.

However, the series of moments will lack an intrinsic metric because there is nothing in the world to create consistent change. As such, there is no truth to statements about the length of temporal intervals in the absence of uniform laws of nature. In light of this, the Identification temporalist can say that God exists in unmetricated time prior to His free act of creating the universe. Prior to creation, God exists at a moment where there is no change of any sort. Thus, there is no way to measure the initial precreation moment. There is no fact of the matter as to how long God existed before He freely created the universe.

The Creationist claims that God is the time maker, whereas the Identification view believes that God is merely a watchmaker. When God creates a universe with uniform laws of nature and consistent change, God does not create time. Instead, God creates a succession of moments with a metric.

In "From Divine Time maker to Divine Watchmaker"; R. T. Mullins argues that the classical doctrine of divine timelessness faces serious philosophical and theological difficulties. The book defends a robust form of divine temporality instead. Against timelessness, Mullins proposes that God is everlasting: without beginning or end, yet possessing a real duration of life. Temporal existence is not an imperfection but a condition for personal agency. On this model, God remains the creator and sustainer of time. Divine temporality does not diminish transcendence, rather, it allows God to be genuinely related to the world He governs. Methodologically, author criticizes approaches that prioritize abstract metaphysical principles over the full range of theological data. Theories of God should explain, not explain away, divine action and relation. The book concludes that divine temporality offers a more coherent account of omniscience, providence, and personal agency than timelessness. God's perfection is found not in the absence of life, but in its fullness.