Since Kneale wrote his article, many writers have argued against divine timelessness by claiming that it is inconsistent with divine omniscience. If God knows everything, they reason, he knows what time it is now. But the token of "now" in (say) "it is noon now" refers to the time at which the speaker speaks. So if one knows that it is noon now, and one knows this only if one is able to assert it truly, one exists now (see Stump and Kretzmann 1981). A variant has it that if God is always omniscient, at noon he believes that it is noon and not 1 PM, and at 1 PM that it is 1 PM and not noon. Plausibly, what a person believes is an intrinsic fact about that person. But a timeless being cannot change intrinsically: What changes intrinsically has an intrinsic property at one time that it lacks at another. Some would reply here that one can only know what is true, and if God is timeless, for him it is not noon, or any other time: it is noon for God only if some part of his life which is located at noon is temporally present, and if God is timeless, no part of his life is located at noon or is temporally present.
This raises, of course, the question of how it can be noon for us but not God. And this question leads to an argument others (e.g. Craig 2002) press, that divine timelessness is inconsistent with our ordinary view of time. We ordinarily think that the present exists and the future does not. But a timeless being's life has no future part: lives with future parts are ipso facto lives in time. If your death is still to come for a timeless being, your death lies in a future part of its life. So for a timeless being, your death is not still to come. But for you, it is still to come. Events yet to come for us must not be yet to come for a timeless being: they must already be there, in some way. And so it seems to follow that the future as well as the present exists: If all of time later than noon exists for God, it exists, period, even for us. Either divine timelessness entails the reality of the future, counter to our usual way of thinking about time, or else if God is timeless, some parts of time are real relative to some persons but not others: For us, it is (say) noon, as all of time that is later than noon does not exist, but for God, all of time later than noon exists, and so it is not noon.
Stump and Kretzmann (1981) argued (contra Kneale) that talk of timeless action makes sense and that the move to make here has been known since Aquinas. God's acts consist of atemporal intendings plus effects of these that occur at particular times. God's contribution to the acts is not located in time, but nonetheless his life can "involve some incidents in time" (Kneale). Purposeful action involves "thought of what will come about after its beginning" (Kneale), but "after" can have a sense involving causal as well as temporal precedence and can also refer to temporal effects of an atemporal intention that occur after other such effects. Stump and Kretzmann also claim that an eternal being's life endures in its own way: "timeless duration" is no contradiction, and neither is "timelessly present." Further, they argue, events in an eternal life are in a sense simultaneous with events in time: "simultaneous" does not always mean "at the same time"; in the eternal-temporal case it has a complex sense involving the coexistence of eternal and temporal presents.
Some might see Stump and Kretzmann as working out a hybrid doctrine of divine eternity, one involving neither sheer timelessness nor ordinary temporality but presentness and duration without the full range of temporal features. Such "intermediate" theories have multiplied. Craig (2002) suggests that God is timeless "before" creating and became temporal by creating. It is hard not to think this view contradictory: being over seems a paradigmatic temporal property, one only temporal events have, yet according to Craig the timeless phase of God's life is over. Padgett (1992) argues that God is "relatively timeless"—that is, in some but not all ways in time. As he sees it, points in our time are points in the time God exists in, but length relations between these points do not exist for God. For us, noon is an hour before 1 p.m. but for God there is no definite length of time between the time we call noon and the time we call 1 p.m. Swinburne (1993) suggests that, whereas God exists in a time without definite length before he creates, once he creates, the lengths of time that exist for us exist for God.
