Are Wolterstorff's Arguments For God Everlasting Rather Than Eternal?
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WORKSHEET 3 RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT 7. What are Wolterstorff’s arguments for God being everlasting rather than eternal? How do the positions of Stump and Kretzmann, as well as Helm’s compare to Wolterstorff’s? Which of the three do you personally find the most convincing? Why? The argument that Wolterstorff presented is that God cannot be the Redeemer and eternal at the same time. Wolterstorff, by holding this idea that since God does change, He must exist within time, making God everlasting, not eternal (exiting outside of time). Wolterstorff argues that the biblical account reveals the fact that God really does change, based on the succession of events that occur in relation to each other. Events in Scripture seem to be…show more content… “Boethius defined eternity as the complete possession all at once of illimitable life.” Stump and Kretzmann developed four ingredients for an eternal being: (1) any being that is eternal must have life, (2) the life of an eternal being cannot be limited, (3) an eternal being must have duration, and (4) life must be possessed all at once. To explain how God is eternal but at the same time relates with humanity concerning temporal events, Stump and Kretzmann developed the idea of ET-simultaneity (eternal temporal simultaneity). They concluded that God cannot foreknow contingent events and that He cannot change the past. “It is impossible that any event occur later than an eternal entity’s present state of awareness, since every temporal event is ET-simultaneous with that state, and so an eternal entity cannot fore know anything.” As well, “the impossibility of God’s changing the past is a consequence not of the fact that what is past is over and done with but rather of the fact that the past is solely a feature of the experience of temporal entities.” Stump and Kretzmann hold his position to the belief that God, who is an omnipotent, and omniscient eternally, can only affect events as they are actually