Religion, Time, and Cosmology

The relation of God to time and to the cosmos ties together several threads of the philosophy of religion: the cosmological argument's beginning of the universe, the doctrine of creation, the eternity of God, and the fine-tuning of physical constants. Underlying all of these is a question in the metaphysics of time itself — whether time passes (the A-theory) or is a tenseless manifold (the B-theory) — whose answer constrains how God can be related to time, whether the universe can have a "beginning," and whether timeless eternity is coherent. This is the page where philosophy of religion meets physics and cosmology most directly.

This page treats creation and the beginning of time (Augustine), the A-theory/B-theory dispute and its bearing on divine eternity, and the metaphysical reading of fine-tuning and cosmology.

Creation and the beginning of time

A perennial puzzle, posed already by the critics Augustine answered: "What was God doing before he created the world?" The flippant answer ("preparing hell for those who ask") and the serious one both appear in Augustine's Confessions XI, and the serious one is profound:

The question is malformed, because time itself is part of creation. God did not create the world in time, at some moment with empty time stretching before it; God created the world with time — "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." There was no "before" creation, because "before" is a temporal relation and there was no time in which God waited.

This is a remarkable anticipation of modern relativistic cosmology, in which time is a feature of spacetime that itself "begins" at the initial singularity — there is no "before the Big Bang" in the standard model, for the same reason there is no "north of the North Pole." The convergence is striking and is exploited by the Kalām cosmological argument (the universe, including time, began to exist, so has a cause of its beginning) and resisted by no-boundary proposals (Hawking–Hartle) on which the early universe has no sharp temporal edge.

Augustine's move also dissolves the "delay" objection to creation: one cannot ask why God created when he did (why not sooner?), since there is no temporal "when" external to creation at which the choice was made. And it forces the question of God's own relation to time: if time began, is God in it (everlasting, with creation a genuine new act) or outside it (timeless, willing the whole temporal order in one eternal act)? — the eternity question.

The A-theory and the B-theory of time

The metaphysics of time, independent of religion, comes in two great families (after McTaggart's A-series and B-series):

• The A-theory (tensed / dynamic time). Temporal passage is objective and real: there is a privileged, moving present; the future is open and becomes, the present is, the past was and is fixed. Tensed facts ("it is now 2026," "the battle is past") are irreducible features of reality. Presentism (only the present exists) and the growing-block view (past and present are real, the future is not) are A-theories.
• The B-theory (tenseless / static time). All times — past, present, future — are equally real (eternalism / the "block universe"), and there is no objective passage or privileged present; "now" is indexical, like "here," picking out the time of utterance, not a metaphysically special moment. Temporal relations are tenseless ("earlier than," "later than"); the appearance of "flow" is a feature of consciousness, not of time itself. The B-theory is widely thought to fit special relativity, in which simultaneity is relative and there is no observer-independent global "now."

This abstract dispute has sharp theological consequences, because which theory is true determines which model of divine eternity is available.

Time and divine eternity

The connections (developed in eternity) run as follows:

• Timeless eternity requires the B-theory. A timeless God to whom all times are equally and tenselessly present makes ready sense if all times are equally real (eternalism) and there is no objective "now" being missed. But if the A-theory is true — if there is a real, moving present and an open future — then a timeless God seems unable to know what is happening now (the tensed-knowledge objection) and unable to be present to a present that genuinely passes. So classical timelessness is hostage to the B-theory.
• An open future favours an everlasting, temporal God. If the A-theory holds and the future is ontologically open, then open theism's claim that there are no truths yet about free future acts gains metaphysical backing, and an everlasting (in-time) God who experiences passage and responds to a becoming world fits naturally. The foreknowledge problem then takes its sharpest form (an open future cannot be foreknown), and the Boethian timeless solution is unavailable.
• The Kalām argument needs the A-theory. Craig defends the Kalām and the A-theory together: only if temporal becoming is real did the universe genuinely come into being (rather than tenselessly existing with a finite earlier boundary, as the B-theory would have it). On a strict B-theory, the universe does not "begin to exist" in the sense the argument needs — it simply has a first time, as a ruler has a first inch, without any coming-to-be. So the cosmological argument's force depends on contested metaphysics of time.

Thus the A/B-theory question is a hidden variable behind the eternity, omniscience, and cosmological-argument debates: a theist's commitments there are constrained by, and constrain, her metaphysics of time.

Fine-tuning and cosmology, metaphysically read

The fine-tuning data — the life-permitting values of the physical constants and the low-entropy initial condition — raise a metaphysical question beyond the design argument's epistemic one:

• The initial low-entropy state. The universe began in an extraordinarily ordered (low-entropy) state, the precondition for the thermodynamic arrow of time and for all subsequent structure (Penrose's $1$-in-$10^{10^{123}}$). Why the universe started so ordered is, on naturalism, a brute and staggering improbability; theism reads it as the intended initial condition of a creator — a metaphysical, not merely probabilistic, point about the direction and informational richness built into creation from its first moment.
• The multiverse as metaphysics. The multiverse reply to fine-tuning is not only a probabilistic move but a metaphysical posit — an enormous (perhaps infinite) ensemble of universes — that raises its own questions: does it merely relocate the need for explanation (a fine-tuned universe-generating mechanism)? Is an actual infinity of universes coherent (the Kalām worries about the actual infinite recur)? The theist argues the multiverse is no more parsimonious or testable than God; the naturalist that it follows from independently motivated physics (inflation, the string landscape).
• Beginning vs. dependence. As with creation, one must separate whether the universe began (a cosmological-empirical question, bearing on the Kalām) from whether it depends on God (a metaphysical question, the Leibnizian contingency argument's concern). A past-eternal or no-boundary universe would still be contingent and so, the theist argues, still in need of a necessary ground — creation as dependence, not temporal start.

Where time and cosmology sit

The metaphysics of time and cosmology is the substructure beneath several headline debates. Augustine's insight that time is created with the world dissolves the "before creation" puzzle, anticipates relativistic cosmology, and frames creation as either a temporal beginning (the Kalām reading) or a timeless dependence (the classical reading). The A-theory / B-theory dispute is the hidden variable: timeless divine eternity and a strict-becoming reading of the Kalām require opposite answers (B-theory for the former, A-theory for the latter), and an open future (A-theory) reshapes the foreknowledge problem and favours an everlasting, open-theist God. And the fine-tuning and low-entropy data, read metaphysically, press the choice between a created, intended cosmos and a brute or multiverse one. The lesson, as throughout the attributes, is that the theist's options form an interlocking package: positions on time, eternity, foreknowledge, creation, and the cosmological argument cannot be chosen independently. This connects the philosophy of religion outward to the physics of spacetime and back to the arguments for God.