I blogged previously about theories of time, and how most philosophers of time believe that if the dynamic theory of time is true, God must be in time. Alternatively, if the static theory of time is true, then God must be outside of time.

William Lane Craig details two main arguments in favour of a dynamic theory of time in his book Time and Eternity:

• The ineliminability of tense
• The presentness of experience

The presentness of experience argument, which I have described previously, argues that everyone experiences the reality of tense, and so it should be taken as real unless a strong reason can be found to defeat it. In philosophical terms, it is a properly basic belief.

In this article, I will give a summary of the argument for a dynamic theory of time, based on the ineliminability of tense. This is a fairly complex argument, so I do not intend to finish it all in one go.

This argument says that it is undisputed that we use tense everyday as part of normal language. It then argues that it is impossible to restate tensed sentences as tenseless sentences, and that tenseless facts are insufficient to make tensed sentences true or false. Consequently, there are tensed facts, so the dynamic theory of time must be true.

The reason for this is that tensed facts can only exist if there is an objective 'now' (as stated by the dynamic theory of time). In the static theory of time, there is no objective 'now', and so tensed facts cannot exist.

Craig states this argument formally as follows:

1. Tensed sentences apparently express tensed facts.


2. The apparent expression of tensed facts by tensed sentences should be accepted as correct unless:
   
   (i) Tensed sentences are shown to be translatable into tenseless sentences without any loss of meaning.
   
   Or
   
   (ii) Tensed facts are shown to be unnecessary for the truth of tensed sentences.


3. Tensed sentences have not been shown to be translatable into tenseless sentences without any loss of meaning.


4. Tensed facts have not been shown to be unnecessary for the truth of tensed sentences.


5. Therefore, the apparent expression of tensed facts by tensed sentences should be accepted as correct.

Premise (1) is fairly obvious. The tensed sentence “Australia won the 2003 Cricket World Cup” is obviously claiming to represent a tensed fact about the world.

Premise (2) says that unless there is a good reason to doubt this expression of tensed facts, we should accept it as true. The only two known ways of escaping this conclusion are detailed in sub-clauses (i) and (ii).

Therefore, premises (3) and (4) are the critical premises of this argument. Craig calls the route referred to in premise (3) as “The Old Tenseless Theory of Language” and the route in premise (4) “The New Tenseless Theory of Language”.

I will examine both of these separately at a later date, but to summarise the arguments briefly.

The old tenseless theory of language claims that it is possible to restate any tensed sentence as a tenseless sentence. For example, it claims that the tensed sentence "John was not at work" could be translated without any loss of meaning to the tenseless sentence "John is not at work on February 8, 2006". The main objections to this theory are that the tensed and tenseless versions of the sentence contain different information.

The new tenseless theory of language claims that tensed sentences cannot be translated into tenseless sentences, but nevertheless, it claims that only tenseless facts are required to make tensed sentences true. For example, take the tensed sentence "It is now 2006", and call some utterance of this sentence S. S is true if and only if S occurs in 2006. The problems against this argument are rather complicated, so we will leave them for another time.cd key for blackhawk down

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