“It is plausible to believe that time began to exist and that therefore God has not existed for infinite time. But now we are confronted with an extremely bizarre situation. God exists in time. Time had a beginning. God did not have a beginning. How can these three statements be reconciled? If time began to exist—say, for simplicity’s sake, at the big bang—then in some difficult to articulate sense God must exist beyond the big bang, alone without the universe. He must be changeless in such a state; otherwise time would exist. And yet this state, strictly speaking, cannot exist before the big bang in a temporal sense, since time had a beginning. God must be causally, but not temporally, prior to the big bang. With the creation of the universe, time began, and God entered into time at the moment of creation in virtue of his real relations with the created order. It follows that God must therefore be timeless without the universe and temporal with the universe.”