Eternity, Omnipresence, and Immutability

How is God related to time and change? Classical theism says God is eternal, immutable (changeless), and impassible (cannot be acted upon or suffer), and omnipresent (present to all things). But each of these attributes is in tension with the picture of God as a personal agent who acts in history, responds to prayer, comes to know what we have just freely done, and loves — and the tensions interlock: a timeless God seems unable to act at a moment or know what is happening now, while an everlasting God seems swept along by change. This is the Pascalian worry — the God of the philosophers against the God of faith — in precise attribute form, and it bears directly on the foreknowledge problem and on divine simplicity.

This page sets out the two models of divine eternity (timeless vs. everlasting), the Stump–Kretzmann attempt to make timeless action intelligible, and the tensions of immutability and impassibility with a responsive, loving God. It links the physics of simultaneity where the analogy is illuminating.

Two models of eternity

"God is eternal" admits two sharply different readings:

• Timeless eternity (atemporalism). God exists wholly outside time — without temporal location, succession, or duration. There is no before or after in God's life; God's existence is, in Boethius's classic phrase, interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio — "the complete and perfect possession all at once of an endless life." All times are equally and timelessly present to God. This is the dominant classical view (Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas), and it coheres with immutability and simplicity: a being with no temporal parts cannot change.
• Everlasting eternity (temporalism / sempiternity). God exists in time but without beginning or end — God endures through all time, with a past, present, and future, but never came to be and will never cease. Defended by many contemporary theists (Swinburne, Wolterstorff, the open theists), often precisely because it makes divine action, response, and knowledge of the present unproblematic — God acts now, and knows now what time it is.

The choice is forced by other commitments. Timelessness secures classical immutability, simplicity, and a clean route through the foreknowledge problem (God does not foreknow; he timelessly knows) — but strains the notion of a God who acts and responds in time. Everlastingness secures a personal, responsive, temporally engaged God — but sacrifices strict immutability and reopens foreknowledge. The two attributes (eternity and personhood) pull in opposite directions, and most of the debate is about whether the strains of timelessness can be relieved.

Can a timeless God act and know the present?

Two objections press hardest on timelessness, and both concern the interface between an atemporal God and a temporal world:

• The action objection. Acting seems essentially temporal: to create, speak, answer a prayer, or become incarnate is to do something at a time, in response to a prior state. How can a being with no temporal location do anything at a moment, still less do different things at different moments while remaining changeless? The classical reply: God timelessly wills the whole temporal order, including which effects occur when; the effects are temporal and successive, but the willing is one timeless act. God does not first decide, then act, then see the result; the entire causal story is the single object of one eternal volition.
• The knowledge objection (Kretzmann's problem). A timeless God cannot know tensed/indexical truths — what is happening now, that it is now 2026. Such truths change with the passing present, and knowing them requires being located in time. So either God does not know what time it is now (a gap in omniscience) or God is not timeless. The temporalist takes this as decisive for everlastingness; the atemporalist replies that God timelessly knows the complete tenseless truth about which events occur at which times (the B-theory of time, on which tensed facts reduce to tenseless ones — see time and cosmology), and that there is no further "now-fact" to be ignorant of. So timelessness tends to require a B-theoretic metaphysics of time.

ET-simultaneity (Stump–Kretzmann)

The most discussed defense of timeless action is Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann's (1981) notion of eternal–temporal (ET) simultaneity. The problem: if God's single eternal "now" is simultaneous with every temporal moment, and simultaneity is transitive, then all moments are simultaneous with each other — collapsing time. Stump and Kretzmann reply by defining a new, non-transitive simultaneity relation that holds between the eternal and temporal modes of existence (neither relatum being in the other's reference frame), explicitly modelled on the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity: just as, in SR, "simultaneous" is frame-relative and there is no absolute cross-frame simultaneity, ET-simultaneity is a relation across two incommensurable modes of being (eternity and time) that does not license inferring temporal simultaneity among the temporal events. Each temporal moment is present to eternity, without the moments being present to one another.

The proposal is ingenious and influential but contested: critics (Fitzgerald, Lewis, Swinburne) argue the new relation is obscure or ad hoc, that the SR analogy breaks down (relativistic frames are still temporal, whereas eternity is supposed to be timeless), and that it does not finally explain how a genuinely atemporal being acts in time. The debate remains open and is the technical heart of the eternity literature.

Immutability

Immutability — God cannot change — comes in two strengths:

• Strong immutability: God cannot change in any respect (the classical view, entailed by simplicity and timelessness). A being with no temporal succession and no parts has nothing in which to change.
• Weak immutability: God is constant in character, purposes, and faithfulness — God does not waver or deteriorate — but can change in his relations and responses to a changing world (the view that fits an everlasting, personal God).

Strong immutability faces the Cambridge-change and responsiveness worries: scripture depicts God deliberating, relenting, responding to prayer, becoming angry, and — centrally for Christianity — becoming incarnate, all of which seem to involve real change. The classical theist replies that many such changes are mere Cambridge changes (God's "becoming" my creator when I am born is a change in me, a new relation, not a real change in God, as a pillar's "becoming" to my left is a change in me, not the pillar), and that scriptural depictions are analogical/anthropomorphic. Whether every apparent divine response can be so redescribed — especially God's knowledge tracking our free choices — is exactly where strong immutability is pressed.

Impassibility

Impassibility — God cannot be acted upon, cannot suffer or be moved by emotion caused from outside — is the most contested classical attribute today. It follows from strong immutability and from God's aseity (nothing external can affect a wholly self-sufficient being). But it sits hard against the God of faith: a God of love who is unmoved by his creatures' suffering, who cannot sympathise (literally "suffer with"), seems cold — and, for Christianity, the Cross seems to assert precisely a suffering God. The twentieth century saw a strong turn toward divine passibility (Moltmann's "crucified God," process theology's dipolar deity, open theism), holding that a perfect love entails vulnerability and responsiveness, so that impassibility is not a perfection but a defect imported from Greek philosophy. Defenders of impassibility reply that a God buffeted by passions would be less than perfect — dependent, changeable, at the mercy of the world — and that God's love is active benevolence, not passive emotion. The dispute is a direct instance of the perfect-being method's difficulty: is impassibility great-making, or is responsiveness?

Omnipresence

Omnipresence — God is present everywhere — is the spatial analogue of eternity and the least paradoxical of these attributes, but it too needs care. God is immaterial and not located (not spread out in space like a fluid, nor contained by any place); rather God is present to every place in the sense of (i) knowing all that occurs there, (ii) being able to act immediately at every point, and (iii) sustaining everything in being. Aquinas: God is in all things "by power, presence, and essence." The model parallels timeless eternity: as God transcends time yet is present to every moment, God transcends space yet is present to every place — a non-spatial presence grounding a spatial world. (Pantheism and panentheism, by contrast, locate God as or in the world; see the concept of God.)

Where eternity sits

The cluster of eternity, immutability, impassibility, and omnipresence is where the God of the philosophers and the God of faith come most visibly into tension. Timeless, strongly immutable, impassible classical theism buys a metaphysically pristine deity — simple, changeless, perfectly secure — and a clean solution to foreknowledge, but must work hard (via ET-simultaneity, Cambridge change, and analogical language) to recover a God who acts, responds, and loves. Everlasting, weakly immutable, passible theism buys the personal, responsive God of worship directly, but surrenders simplicity and exhaustive providence. The choice cannot be made attribute-by-attribute: eternity, immutability, simplicity, and omniscience stand or fall together as packages, which is why the final question — whether any consistent package deserves the name "God" — belongs to the coherence of theism. The remaining classical attributes, goodness, simplicity, and aseity, complete the set.