Abstract

Anselm claims that God exists both at every place and every time and at no place and no time. In this essay, I provide accounts of omnipresence and eternality intended to make sense of this claim. In so doing, I argue that God's relations to space and to time can be understood entirely in terms of divine knowledge and power. To flesh this claim out, I introduce the notions of effective and epistemic access. Put roughly, having effective access to a place or time amounts to being able to bring about some event at that place or time and having epistemic access to a place or time amounts to being able to know about some event that it occurs at that place or time. Since being omnipresent amounts to being related to space in the most excellent way possible, I argue that an omnipresent being's effective and epistemic access to space must be both complete and spatially immediate. And, moreover, a being who enjoys such access to space ipso facto lacks spatial location. But, since it doesn't follow that a being who enjoys such access to time ipso facto lacks temporal location, I conclude by arguing that other considerations--considerations which arise from a proper understanding of divine knowledge--ought to lead theists to think that God in fact does lack temporal location. In short, I argue that the mode of divine knowledge is best construed as involving immediate awareness of every fact. But, since beings which are temporally located cannot have such awareness of every fact, it follows from this that God lacks temporal location. Now, since the claim that God lacks temporal location has met significant resistance in the contemporary philosophical literature, I preface my argument for the claim that God lacks temporal location with both a careful articulation of what that claim amounts to and a detailed discussion of objections to which have been offered in the recent philosophical literature. Ultimately, I conclude that none of these objections succeeds