Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Brittney Lowe Hartley on the LDS Understanding of "Time" and God's Relationship to "Time"


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: