While the
book was more miss than hit, Brittney Lowe Hartley, in her volume on LDS philosophy, provided a useful discussion
of the Latter-day Saint understandings of time and God’s relation thereto:
In early Mormonism, time was considered a
party of eternal reality and uncreated. God experiences time differently but
still has a concept of progressive time. Joseph Smith addresses this concept: “In
answer to this question—Is not the reckoning of God’s time, angel’s time,
prophet’s time, and man’s time, according to the planet on which they reside? I
answer yes.” (D&C 130:4-5). We can’t be entirely sure about what God’s
manner of reckoning is when it comes to time, but it does seem that God exists
within a past, present, and future as a being that occupies space. However much
God can “see” or “experience” the future, it is still the future for Him. How
much God can correctly anticipate or see the future is hard to say. BYU Dean of
Religious Education Robert Millet writes, “The future is as real for God as for
his children; it is open, free, and undetermined. Anything can happen. They and
God are in this thing together, and they must work through it together” (Sterling
M. McMurrin, “Some Distinguishing Characteristics of Mormon Philosophy,” 42).
He is not so different that He exists out of time entirely.
Just like with matter and spirit, time is not
something created by God, but is experienced by God as part of the true nature of reality. There is a classic
philosophical thought experiment where the question is posed: can a man
(theoretically) travel back in time and kill his own grandfather? Physicists
and early Mormon thinkers alike tend to believe the answer is no, that
theoretically that the past is past . . . Sometimes time is spoken of as a
subset of eternity. Some of the early LDS leaders speculated on how long our
current epoch of time is. W.W. Phelps, the famous LDS hymn writer, came up with
the number 2 billion 500 million for our current eternity through some creative
mathematics . . . In recent years, however, there has been a shift to talk
about God in more absolutist terms, taking on language from traditional
Christianity, in contrast to our history.
God is also spoken of as being omniscient and omnipresent in a way more common to
our traditional Christian neighbors today . . . (Brittney Lowe
Hartley, Mormon Philosophy Simplified: An
Easy Latter-day Saint Approach to Classical Philosophical Questions [2019],
63-65, italics in original, emphasis in bold added; Note: I have omitted Hartley
giving a “nod” to the plausibility of the blasphemous doctrine of incarnation
on p. 64 [an example of how the book is more “miss” than “hit” as noted above)
On W.W.
Phelps and the 2.5 billion year figure, see:
See also: