“The impossibility of atemporal personhood. Could God exist timelessly? Is there no logically conceivable world in which God exists and time does not? According to the Christian doctrine of creation, God’s decision to create a universe was a freely willed decision from which God could have refrained. We can conceive, then, of a possible world in which God does refrain from creation, a world that is empty except for God. Would time exist in such a world? Certainly it would if God were changing, experiencing a stream of consciousness. But suppose God were altogether changeless. Suppose that he did not experience a succession of thoughts but grasped all truth in a single, changeless intuition. Would time exist?

An adherent of a relational view of time would say no, for there are no events to generate a relation of earlier than or later than. There is just a single, timeless state. Substantivalists of a Newtonian stripe would disagree, of course. For Newton timeless existence was a logical impossibility. But there is no reason why we should side with Newton on this score. In the utter absence of change it seems plausible to think that time would not exist. Why, then, should we think that God could not exist timelessly in such an empty world?

“Because God is personal!” is the answer given by certain advocates of divine temporality. They contend that the idea of a timeless person is incoherent and therefore God must be temporal. They argue that in order to be a person, one must possess certain properties that inherently involve time. Since God is essentially personal, he cannot be timeless.”