Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is (...) not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God. (shrink)

Two major objections to divine atemporality center on supposed tensions between the claim that God is omniscient and the claim that he is timeless. Since most defenders of divine timelessness are even more firmly committed to omniscience, driving a wedge between the two is intended to convert such persons to a temporal view of God. However, I believe that both arguments fail to demonstrate an incompatibility between omniscience and timelessness, and that the objections themselves rest in large part on misunderstandings (...) regarding both the motivation for and substance of the doctrine of divine timelessness. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Traditional Analogical Arguments Arguments to the Best Explanation Arguments from the Sciences Probability and World Hypotheses Is the Designer God? Works cited.

Paul Helm offers a welcome and stimulating treatment of the problem of God's timelessness from a standpoint which affirms the traditional theistic view that God is without time. Works devoted wholly to divine eternity are rare in any case, and the most well-known recent book on the subject, Nelson Pike's God and Timelessness, attempts to discredit the notion of God's atemporality. Although Pike has been joined in his view by many philosophers of religion in recent years, there seem to be (...) an increasing number of those sympathetic to divine timelessness. Helm demonstrates an excellent grasp of the issues in this debate and the literature on the topic, especially that of analytic philosophers of religion. One of the greatest strengths of Helm's own discussion is that it is very thorough and carefully argued while remaining largely free of technical jargon and formal notation. This is a very clear and accessible book; it would make a good text for a graduate seminar and will certainly be required reading for anyone working in this field. (shrink)