Well, NOW we're outside of my league, for sure!
But on the other hand, human beings are extraordinary, because we CAN think about concepts like "eternity" and "immortality" and "infinity" and even "pi" and "the perfect circle": things which actually do not exist in the physical universe. That intriguingly suggests that we have some "aptitude" for things outside of time and space, although it does leave your head buzzing like a little too much beer.
What I've heard, is this: it's not that God doesn't experience time at all, it's that He experiences it all at once. We're like people driving a car down a road. We can only experience the spot where we are. God is like a person on a high hillside looking down on the road and seeing the whole thing at a glance.
What that does to "before" and "after," "cause and "effect," I do not know.
I don't think it's true that there's no "concept" of time to God. He made Time and Space; they are His creatures. So He understands them thoroughly; He shaped them with precision calibration to be exactly what they are.
You mentioned before --- rather touchingly, I thought --- that you could sympathize with a lonely, bored god who would create a Universe capable of surprising him. A tender picture, to be sure, but surely you're missing something about the nature of God.
God is not a singleton. God is a Trinity: that is, three persons with one undivided essence. You may wonder how this can be, and why it makes a difference, but it makes a big difference indeed.
For one thing, God is love. An isolate cannot love; unadulterated self-love is a monstrosity which does not deserve the name of love at all. Love needs at least a subject, verb, and object. This is one way to understand the Trinity: God is, from all eternity, a community of Persons. What are they doing for all eternity? Loving.
So God didn't have to create the Universe because of loneliness or boredom, or any need at all. It was sheer overwhelming wild superfluous generosity. He wanted to show forth His glory: beauty, light, splendor. He wanted more beings capable to appreciating this. More Beloveds. Neutrinos. Quasars. DNA. Me. You.
Yes, that's a scenario that seems to remove some contradictions or absurdities.What I've heard, is this: it's not that God doesn't experience time at all, it's that He experiences it all at once. We're like people driving a car down a road. We can only experience the spot where we are. God is like a person on a high hillside looking down on the road and seeing the whole thing at a glance.
What that does to "before" and "after," "cause and "effect," I do not know.
Now, here's a weird result of that: If God sees the march of time in our universe as a whole like a timeline laid out in front of him, then if he interacts with us at all, he must make a change at a spot on the timeline, thus changing it hopefully to something with a better result. But the previous timeline is presumably just as real as the new timeline. So the old timeline, without any divine, intervention, has played out in its entirety. But then God steps in and changes time - and just like the time-traveller scenario where you change a timeline - the whole "storyline" gets eliminated in favor of the new one. The old storyline, including every good & bad thing that happened in it, disappears like it never happened.
So, what if God decides to intervene in our timeline's past? Say, he decides to thwart 9/11. Well, that's great, but then we, and everything we thought, felt, & did since 9/11 will disappear. It's the same as in the traditional time-traveller scenario: The chrononaut goes back in time to save the world/big city from the disaster/atrocity, but everything his colleagues & everyone else did in the intervening time gets erased. Very weird, if nothing else.
Interestingly, if this model is true (of God seeing time as a timeline laid out in front of him), we should be able to pray retroactively, as in "Dear God, please make it as if 9/11 never happened." I guess if such a prayer was answered, we'd never know because "we" would now refer to the versions of ourselves who are playing out the new timeline.
God is not a singleton. God is a Trinity: that is, three persons with one undivided essence. You may wonder how this can be, and why it makes a difference, but it makes a big difference indeed.For one thing, God is love. An isolate cannot love; unadulterated self-love is a monstrosity which does not deserve the name of love at all. Love needs at least a subject, verb, and object. This is one way to understand the Trinity: God is, from all eternity, a community of Persons. What are they doing for all eternity? Loving.
That's something I've never thought of. Maybe because it sounds downright creepy! But even if you discount the creepy factor, it still sounds rather ad-hoc. I mean, I talk to myself all the time. And I sometimes do things for myself, which is subject-verb-object right there. This may point to something about how the parts of our minds are organized under the hood, but I'm still one person and if there was just myself in this world, I'd still eventually get bored talking only to myself. And of course it still begs the question of where this God person came from and why he's not part of a family, etc.
But hey, all the standard nontheistic models have aspects which are just as unsatisfying for me too, so I'm not really sold on any models here. :-)