But...I just can't figure it out. How does just 'saying' something is timeless avoid the problem of an infinite regress?
That's like asking why a computer programmer isn't subject to be bound by the rules of a virtual game world they create.
They have the power to create rules to bind the participants of the game to. Rules which they themselves don't experience as part of their reality and are not bound by.
If you imagine our universe as an enclosed bubble, with all it's matter, and it's rules of operation programmed in, and imagine God as sitting outside that bubble observing in, then you could imagine why time could exist for us but not for God. And why there is no logical reason why time would have to exist for God if he is outside of the universe which has time as a part of it's ruleset and experience.
Most theists who believe in a creator God also believe God thinks. So even if one is comfortable seeing that this God doesn't change...there is an implication that God thinks and thinks multiple thoughts. Now...does God think all these thoughts at once, in that one eternal, timeless moment, or does he actually have sequential thoughts where, for example, he 1) decides to create, 2) weighs the pros and cons of creating, 3) plans how to create, 4) actually creates and then 5) thinks about whether and how to involve himself with his creation, whether to bless, judge, penalize, or whatever. And did God have OTHER thoughts than just those relating to creating? You know...'what was God thinking before he decided to create?' or 'what was God's first thought?'
So...even if we are to somehow SAY God is timeless, if he has sequential thoughts, those would seem to indicate a kind of time passing because for all intents and purposes, isn't time the thing which keeps everything from happening all at once? And if his thoughts didn't happen all at once, they happened sequentially. So at a minimum we would think of sequential thoughts instead of ticks of a clock as being the measure of time, for God.
Your idea is based on the assumption that thoughts need to be sequential.
But there is no reason to assume it has to be that way. That could just be a limitation of the universe we are in.
In fact, I'd argue that our experience doesn't even work that way based on what we can observe in our universe.
There's a difference between intuition, prophetic knowledge, internal dialogue, and perception processing.
Internal dialogue is as far as I know always sequential by definition. It's you talking and reasoning with yourself.
Perception processing might be a sequential activity to a degree, with regards to the limitations of the brain and nervous system to process your five senses and present them to you in a sequential form that you then must understand sequentially.
However, internal dialogue and perception processing are not the only way we experience realizations and information coming into our awareness.
My experience with the spiritual gifts such as discernment and prophecy (both with myself and seeing others operate in it), is that the capability exists for people to instantly have a download of information or awareness about something in a way that was not sequential. It's a simultaneous download of complex information that wasn't sequentially reasoned to arrive at but simply appeared in their understanding fully formed.
I believe that even without spiritual gifts people still experience non-sequential thought formation via the process of intuition. They just have a sense or knowing that something is true, or that to do a certain action will be good or bad, without engaging in any kind of sequential thought process to evaluate information and come to a conclusion. And in genuine cases of gut level or some other kind of spirit level intuition, it's not merely their subconscious memory processing past experiences to bring them a conclusion they did not actively think about.
It would seem that if God did all that thinking in one eternal moment, then the natural world that he is supposed to have created must have also existed eternally since no time...no sequence of events, nothing could separate the moment when God thought to create and when the natural world popped into existence. And this gets us back to the problem of infinite regress...if the universe has always existed, how did we ever transcend an infinite amount of time and arrive at this point.
But beyond that, if there is some hypothetical explanation for how God can be timeless/eternal AND still have sequential thoughts, then I guess as a naturalist I can borrow that hypothetical explanation and apply it to some arrangement of the natural world and say it too is eternal and timeless, never had a beginning and still managed to do something that resulted in the time/space matter/energy universe emerging from the timeless background existence.
I think your idea is based on an erroneous understanding of what time really is.
If we start from the assumption that the Bible is true, then there are things we can learn about the difference between how God works and how man works that would give us clues about what time is and isn't.
From a Biblical perspective, time would not be defined simply as the act of events happening in sequence, one after another. In fact, I don't think sequential action would even be a part of the Biblical definition of time.
Time, what makes us different from where God is, would be better defined by two things:
1. Decay, entropy. There's a beginning and an end. It's mortality. It's not immortal. It's a process of constant change.
2. Awareness (And I'd say this is the more important one). God is all knowing, capable of knowing what the end is from the beginning. We, in our world, are bound by only knowing what we can directly perceive. Our awareness is restricted. His is not.
It is entirely possible that you could live in a realm where there was no entropy and no limited awareness, but in which you also were capable of acting sequentially.
I would conclude that the main difference between time and non-time would have to be how one in time is limited in their ability to know and experience only the immediate sequence of events they are involved in.
The contrast is that God would know the entire end outcome of his thought before he acted upon it. Whereas we can only speculate and guess what the outcome of our thoughts and actions will be.
Philosophical ideas about time aren't necessarily reflective of reality.
Their idea of "time" may be a complete fantasy.
So if we try to read certain philosophical ideas about time into the Bible we can't expect the two ideas to mesh together if the Bible is true but the philosophical ideas are not true.
When talking about how God is or is not defined by time, we'd first have to be able to state some empirical truths about time. What is it?
But I don't know of anything you can empirically say is true about the idea of time as a concept that isn't already found in the Bible.
And for those ideas about time which are not found in the Bible, which would contradict the Bible, we must ask what evidence you have for believing those aspects of time are shown to be real rather than just being idle speculation.
But if it's not, why should time matter?
