Notes

  1. . Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 267.
  2. . See, e.g., Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), esp. chap. 1.
  3. . Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), A805–B833, p. 635.
  4. . William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), p. 254.
  5. . Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), p. 73.
  6. 6. Plotinus The Enneads 3.7.4.
  7. . This sketch is largely based on the analyses of temporal experience by Martin Heidegger in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) and in his Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). For a more detailed elucidation, see my Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), esp. chaps. 7 and 8.
  8. . See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
  9. . From the standpoint of a phenomenological examination of human temporality it is difficult to see how the notion of an eternally timeless present–with neither pastness nor futurity entering into it–can be rendered meaningful in any human sense. Its postulation seems to be an instance of negative theology: Heidegger, e.g., in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, argues that the Greek postulation of this idea can only be explained as an inverse projection of a protest against temporality; see p. 249.
  10. . Saint Anselm,“Proslogium,” in Basic Writings, trans. J. S. Deane (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 7–8.
  11. . The classic statement of this view is that of Saint Thomas Aquinas:“Now because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not” The Summa Theologica, trans. A. C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 25 (part 1, 3). The philosophic question of course is how we may be able to have knowledge of negative attributes if we are unable first to know of any commonality. To seek to do this by means of analogic reasoning does not appear to overcome the problem, for one cannot judge the validity or legitimacy of an analogy unless one already has separate knowledge of each of the entities that the analogy compares in terms of a presumably common, or similar, quality.
  12. . Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1139b. One might consult the Metaphysics, esp. 1074b–1075a, where it is plainly suggested that were God to have knowledge of change, this “would be change for the worse” and would destroy God's self‐sufficient perfection. One could add one other temporal consideration to the attack on omniscience: If the future is constituted of genuinely open possibilities, it is thereby unresolved, and if in principle unresolved, then even divine foreknowledge cannot be complete.
  13. . The pragmatic force of Plato's famous dictum that time is but “the moving image of eternity” is to make sequential time the principle of order in the world of nature. See my The Human Experience of Time (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 15–20.
  14. . James (n. 4 above), p. 311.
  15. . See John Stuart Mill, Theism (Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill Co., 1957), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. This generally ignored essay presents an important analysis of the concept of deity. In many ways, it anticipates some of the issues developed in the writings of Charles Hartshorne, particularly in Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941), which suggested several themes I touch on here.
  16. . Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. J. Kopper, (Stuttgart: Phillipp Reclam, 1966), pp. 217–18.
  17. . Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957), p. 427, n. 1; cf. Heidegger (n. 7 above), p. 499, n. xiii.
  18. . See William Ellery Channing,“Likeness to God,” in The Works (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1888), pp. 291–301. Channing's essay presents a cogent criticism of the via negativa of traditional theology and argues for the necessity of a concept of God commensurate with human predicates, a view that is very close to that expressed by Alfred North Whitehead in his King's Chapel lectures published under the title Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan Co., 1926) and, from a quite different philosophic perspective, by the Russian religious existentialist Nicolas Berdyaev.