Although Iâ??m saddened by your loss of Christian faith--which I hope will prove to be merely temporary, as it has been for many others--, Iâ??m grateful for your provocative question, Dan. Believe it or not, your question was addressed by al-Ghazali in his brilliant, classic work The Incoherence of the Philosophers. I have discussed Ghazaliâ??s response in an unpublished article â??The Coherence of the Incoherence: Al-Ghazali on God, Time, and Creation,â? which I wrote several years ago for a projected volume of essays to be edited by Paul Helm that unfortunately never came to fruition. Iâ??ll share here some of the contents of that article.
Ghazali holds that time begins at the moment of creation, so that God sans the universe exists timelessly. He then imagines what it would be like if God annihilated the universe so that reality consists of a timeless state of God existing sans creation.1 The question arises as to how these timeless states are differentiated from each other. Intuitively, we want to say that the one state is before the world exists and the other one afterwards; but that cannot be literally true. As you note, â??The question of when God existed in a timeless state is meaningless. But then, how can God have a timeless â??phaseâ?? in his life? How are these phases related to each other if not temporally?â?
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