Institute for Saint Anselm Studies
The Saint Anselm Journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (Spring 2006)

Anselm on Eternity as the Fifth Dimension

Katherin A. Rogers
University of Delaware

ABSTRACT

Among the various arguments for the contemporary rejection of the view that God is eternal is the claim that a timeless God could not be omniscient in that He could not know what time it actually is right now, and the complaint that invoking divine eternity fails to solve the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge. I argue that Anselm's doctrine of divine eternity avoids these criticisms by adopting what I call the "four-dimensionalist" theory of time; all times, what we call past, present, and future exist equally and are all immediately present to divine eternity.

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