1. This is the failing of Pike’s argument, inspired by Schleiermacher, that timelessness is incompatible with omnipotence (Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness, Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion [New York: Schocken Books, 1970], p. 110; cf. p. 173). A timeless God has the ability to create a temporal world, even if, were He to do so, He would be temporal. Pike gratuitously assumes that God’s (a)temporal status is an essential rather than contingent attribute.
2. Pike, God and Timelessness, p. 110; Pike’s influence is evident on Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), p. 13; Grace M. Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body, with a Foreword by John MacQuarrie (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1984), p. 50.
3. Alan Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), pp. 21–22.
4. This claim will need qualification if quantum indeterminacy is ontic. For then the causal conditions of some quantum event, say, the decay of an elementary particle, might be present at t and be sufficient for the occurrence of the event in the sense that no other conditions are necessary and yet the event not occur at t because the conditions do not deterministically produce the effect. But given sufficient time and some finite probability of the event’s occurrence, the event will eventually happen. In such a case, we must either say that the cause is not zero time related to the effect or else that the passage of time is part of the causal conditions of the effect in each particular case, so that the passage of time is causally efficacious or else that the event in question is simply uncaused. This qualification does not affect Padgett’s point about divine intentions being zero time related to their effects, however, since there cannot be any duration between God’s timeless volitions and their temporal effects. Even in the case of a temporal deity, divine causation is significantly disanalogous to indeterministic quantum causal conditions. God’s volitions are deterministic of their effects, not indeterministic, since He is omnipotent. Even if they were not, the indeterministic quantum causal conditions have to be continuously present in order for the effect to eventually occur, so that God could not cease to will an effect before it appears. In that case, we would either include the passage of time as part of the causal conditions, so that the cause is zero time related to the effect after all, or, if we want God’s volitions to be the total cause, include the duration as part of the effect willed by God, so that God’s causation is simultaneous with the effect. In any case, deterministic interpretations of quantum theory are viable (e.g., Brody’s interpretation of quantum theory as applying to ensembles of particles (Thomas Brody, The Philosophy behind Physics, ed. L. de la Pena and P. E. Hodgson [Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993]).
5. Padgett does not spell out the situation this clearly, but this is what he means, on the pain of positing locations of B and C in absolute space and time. The past lightcone is a spacetime structure at a spacetime point comprised of all events which can causally influence the event at that point. For a discussion see my Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), chap. 5.