Monday, August 4, 2008

Farrer on "the anti-scholastic revolt"

"if we attribute to God a life of creative volition we shall see his acts under the temporal form, not only in their effect, but in God's living of them. But it is absurd to say that we in this world have got all the time there is, and if God wants any of it, he will have to come in and have a bit of ours. There is no such thing as time; there is activity, which viewed objectively, may be called process; and there are relations of before and after within it, which for various purposes may be abstracted, described and diagrammatised in various ways. The time-relations to be found within process are determined by the structure of the process, not vice versa; if we knew what it was like to be God, or to live the life of God, we should know what there is in his existence analogous to the temporal forms which characterise ours. But perhaps we shall not be so rash as to claim that knowledge. . . .
"Nothing can be in our time-order without being a natural constituent of our world."

Austin Farrer, Faith and speculation: an essay in philosophical theology (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 164.

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