Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

160 J.J.C. Smart
5 Eternity and Sempiternity
In my discussion of the cosmological argument I suggested that the theist is
on stronger ground (though in the end I thought still not on strong enough
ground) if he or she thought of the Deity as an eternal or atemporal being
who causes the existence of the whole space–time universe in some tenseless
sense of ‘cause’. So God would not be a first cause in any temporal sense of
‘first’. This would be a plausible modification of Aquinas’s view in his ‘third
way’. (As he puts it himself Aquinas seems to me to refer unnecessarily to
temporal matters.) So if I can be an ‘angel’s advocate’ (i.e. the contrary of
a devil’s advocate) Haldane’s argument for a first cause in the temporal sense
is unnecessary. The universe might have no first cause because it might be
like this: . . . big bang, big crunch, big bang, big crunch ..., with an infinite
sequence of big bangs and big crunches in both temporal directions. Or it
might be a space–time whose topology is such that it makes no sense to talk
of a beginning in time. Stephen Hawking proposed the latter possibility in a
conference at the Vatican. Hawking seemed to think that his proposal could
have been seen as shocking, 23 but I do not think that it ought to have worried
an admirer of Aquinas. Aquinas can be supposed to have thought of God as
imperishable in the sense of necessarily being unable to be destroyed, and being
such that its being destroyed makes no sense, not being sempiternal, not even
necessarily sempiternal, but outside time like the number 9. Or perhaps like
the whole space–time universe which cannot be said to change or stay the same.
I hold that to say that a signal lamp changes (tenseless present) is to say that
a later temporal stage of the lamp differs (tenseless present) from an earlier
temporal stage. The whole space–time universe obviously cannot change in
this way. Presumably God would be something very different from the number
9 and different from the space–time universe. (At least if we can rule out
pantheism.) Of course God is thought of as everywhere and everywhen, but
this could be interpreted in terms of an atemporal being having various relations
to every point of space–time. I hold that God as the creator of the universe
and hence of space–time itself could not be a spatio-temporal being (or a
spatial or temporal one). Later in his essay Haldane seems to be in agreement
that an adequate conception of God should be that of an atemporal being.
After this brief excursion into being an ‘angel’s advocate’ I still have my
bothers about the notion of a necessary being and of whether the complexity
of God’s nature (his desires and power to create ex nihilo) does not mirror the
complexity of the laws of nature themselves. In the latter case Ockham’s razor
would be a problem for the theist.
Aquinas seems to elucidate necessity by contrast with the contingency of
perishable things. His discussion needs a bit of modification if we are to look