The classical theist proposes the most important exception to the claim that change pervades reality: a changeless ground (atemporal, aspatial, immaterial) exempt from all of it. Not frozen in time but outside time altogether. The doctrine has two tightly linked expressions. The first is static-being: God as timeless in the sense of possessing being without temporal instantiation. The second is eternal-present: God as timelessly simultaneous with every temporal moment, possessing life *tota simul*, whole and all at once.

(Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947) develops both: God is *actus purus*, pure act without potency, entirely without temporal or spatial extension; God is also eternal in the Boethian sense, possessing illimitable life in complete simultaneity. (Boethius, (524) 1969) introduces the eternal-present doctrine to resolve the foreknowledge problem: God knows all temporal events not by foreseeing them but by perceiving them as simultaneously present. Plantinga -(Plantinga, A., 1974); -(Plantinga, A., 2000) defends a modern version: the Maximally Great Being is a necessary, immaterial mind whose changelessness grounds rather than instantiates the changing world. (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) refine eternity through their doctrine of ET-simultaneity (eternity–time simultaneity), a non-temporal simultaneity relation between God and temporal events. (Leftow, Brian, 1991) develops a quasi-temporal eternity (QTE) variant. (Barbour, Julian, 1999) proposes a physical analogue: Platonia, a timeless configuration space from which the experience of time arises as an illusion. The intuition is ancient, the defenders are serious. If any such being is coherent, it grounds structure without being subject to it.

The counter-construction bears on the argument's most ambitious reach. The argument claims that wherever change is possible, Time, Space, and Substance obtain. The classical theist counter-proposes a being for which change is not possible (for which T, S, and Φ are strictly inapplicable) and which grounds structure rather than participating in it. If such a being can exist, then □(T∧S∧Φ) as a claim about all of reality fails. Structure obtains wherever there is change, but something else obtains changelessly, and that something else is the ground.

A clarification before the moves. The argument's intermediate conclusion is □◇C: Reality necessarily permits change, not that change must always be occurring. The static-being objection treats these as different claims. They are not. Permission is not a fact about whether change happens in a being. It is a fact about what Reality structurally allows. A static being that exists within Reality exists in a Reality that already permits change, and that permission is structure. The objector is proposing something stronger: a being that exists outside Reality-as-structured. The shared structural failure has a name in advance. *Changeless* is a parasitic negation of Change, a quantifier internal to the domain of transitions, not a state outside it ([§2.1.5](<2.1.5 The S5 Bottleneck.md>), Parasitic Negation). A ground specified as changeless either reduces to that quantifier and grounds nothing, since a quantifier is not a substrate, or smuggles in determinate features that instantiate the very domain the construction was meant to escape. Five forms of the move test that dilemma.

*First.* The Maximally Great Being move proposes a being atemporal, aspatial, and immaterial that possesses being without instantiating any of the three roles, grounding the structure without being part of it. A changeless being cannot be identified with ∅ merely from atemporality, aspatiality, or immateriality. At most, its being determinate rather than nothing supplies a thin difference-role. The further step from qualitative or logical distinctness to Spatiality's loaded type — relational extension within a manifold — requires the independent bridge argued elsewhere ([§2.4.7](<2.4.7 Distinction Requires Spatiality.md>)); it cannot be assumed against the classical theist at the outset.

Now consider grounding: the static being is proposed as the ground of existence, something that produces or sustains structure. Any grounding relation, whether construed as causal production or as metaphysical/explanatory dependence, requires determinate relata, asymmetric direction between them, and real obtaining. An atemporal grounding theorist will deny that it must persist through a temporal interval; the simultaneous-causation move is taken up in detail at [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>). The local conclusion is therefore role-level: a wholly indeterminate ground cannot ground, while a determinate grounding relation instantiates difference, direction, and bearing. Whether those roles require the fully temporal and physical types is the separate role-to-type question. The proposal seeks a ground with none of the Conditions that grounding requires, and so leaves itself with no determinate way to specify that ground at all.

*Second.* The Aristotelian non-temporal priority move refines the claim: the static being is prior to the structure in the order of explanation, not in the order of time. Formal causes (what a thing essentially is) and final causes (what a thing is for) involve non-temporal ordering; a changeless being can stand in formal or final priority to the structure without standing in temporal priority. Non-temporal priority is still structural priority. Formal priority requires the ground to be structurally distinct from what it grounds, requiring the difference-role to hold ground and grounded apart. Final priority is not temporal succession, and the Aristotelian point should be granted in full. But it is still an asymmetric ordering relation: source and end, potency and actuality, orientation and fulfillment. The structural argument does not need to redescribe final causality as clock-time. It needs only the weaker claim that final priority is not structureless priority. To ground structure, the static being must stand to what it grounds in some determinate ordering relation (formal, final, logical, or temporal) and a determinate ordering relation already requires distinguishable relata, asymmetric priority, and a stable relation between them. The defining feature of the static being, its non-instantiation of the roles, is exactly what disqualifies it from standing in any grounding relation at all.

*Third.* The Boethian eternal present presses a different line: God exists not in time but in an eternal present, a timeless simultaneity from which the whole of temporal history is present at once, as a landscape is present to an observer on a hill. From eternity, all temporal moments are equally present, not as a series God remembers or anticipates but as a totality God possesses, *tota simul*. This is not static immobility but complete, simultaneous, perfect possession of illimitable life.

The eternal-present view should not be caricatured as requiring God to track a moving present from inside an A-series (McTaggart's term for the tensed past/present/future ordering, distinct from the tenseless B-series of earlier/later relations; [§4.2.5](<4.2.5 The Unreality of Time.md>) develops the distinction). Its point is exactly the opposite: God knows each temporal event in its temporal location without occupying one moment rather than another. The pressure arises when the doctrine is asked to preserve more than tenseless total knowledge. Classical theism also wants divine responsiveness, providence, answer to prayer, and knowledge of creaturely events as events to which God stands in determinate relation. Those commitments require more than the passive possession of a static array. They require asymmetric dependence between prayer and answer, between creaturely event and divine knowledge, between what is asked and what is given.

If the Boethian account gives only B-series access to the whole temporal order, it has not yet supplied response in the operative sense; prayer and answer stand as correlated elements of the array rather than in a response relation. If it supplies genuine response, it has introduced ordered asymmetry, distinguishable relata, and a stable relation between them, the structural roles in the very place the doctrine was meant to exempt from them. The objection is not that God must know “currently” in the creaturely mode. It is that the theological predicates the doctrine wants to preserve require a structured relation that mere eternal co-presence does not by itself provide.

*Fourth.* Stump and Kretzmann's ET-simultaneity offers a technically refined version: a non-temporal simultaneity relation between God and temporal events. God is simultaneous with every temporal moment, not in the sense of being at the same time as each, but in the sense of standing in a “simultaneity in the mode of eternity” relation to each. This relation is neither temporal nor non-existent; it is a third kind, definable precisely.

ET-simultaneity replaces ordinary temporal simultaneity with a sui generis relation between eternity and temporal events. That relation supplies determinate relatedness, but relatedness alone does not entail spatial extension. The live objection is instead whether ET-simultaneity can support asymmetric response and agency without importing temporal succession; the doctrine should not be rejected simply by redescribing every relation as Space. (McTaggart, J. M. E., 1908) argues that genuine change requires the A-series; agency, which involves change, inherits the requirement, and ET-simultaneity forgoes that agency in the trade.

*Fifth.* Barbour's Platonia offers the most radical version, physical rather than theistic: a timeless configuration space with the experience of time an illusion arising from “time capsules”, configurations that happen to encode apparent memories. No being, just the static configuration space.

Platonia is a world whose description requires time in the describing. Configurations must be individuated (each is this configuration rather than that) requiring relational non-identity (Space). The configuration space must subsist as one structural whole that bears its configurations (Substance). Distinguishing one configuration from another requires cognitive succession from one to the next (Time). The act of describing Platonia occurs in time, but that establishes only an act-side fact about the describer. It does not by itself show that Platonia's represented content is temporal. The object-side question is whether the configuration space contains an intrinsic ordering or dynamical structure adequate to recover time; that must be argued from the model rather than inferred from the description event.

A kindred softening worth naming is Leftow's -(Leftow, Brian, 1991) QTE (quasi-temporal eternity) which allows God to stand in quasi-temporal relations to creatures while remaining intrinsically timeless. QTE is the weakest version of the doctrine, and it concedes most explicitly that relations to temporal creatures require some structural analog of Time. The position is honest about the cost: intrinsic atemporality is preserved only by distinguishing intrinsic from relational structural features, and the relational features do the work that the structural roles require. Open-theist softenings (Hasker, Sanders) concede still more (temporal duration, genuine response, real relation to creatures) and concede the structural commitments most explicitly.

*What converges.* The five forms exhaust the outside-proposal, and each fails the same way: reaching outside structure only to find structure already there. The Maximally Great Being has no foothold for specification (a wholly indeterminate ground cannot ground, and a determinate grounding relation instantiates difference, direction, and bearing); non-temporal priority is still structural priority, since formal and final precedence require the very conditions they were meant to escape; the Boethian eternal present either supplies only B-series co-presence, which is not yet response, or supplies genuine response and with it the ordered asymmetry it was meant to exempt; ET-simultaneity supplies determinate relatedness but forgoes asymmetric response and agency in the trade; and Platonia's configurations are individuated in a space that bears them, while the succession its description deploys poses a question the model has yet to answer.

The static being is proposed from within the structure it is supposed to precede: a present is a position in a sequence, and with the sequence removed, “present” names nothing.

Sibling theistic counter-constructions: the simultaneous-causation mechanism classical theism uses to connect the eternal God to the temporal world is answered in [§5.1.3](<5.1.3 Simultaneous Causation.md>), and the divine-simplicity construction of the eternal God's internal metaphysics in [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>).


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← [4.2 Time, Change, and the Changeless](<4.2 Time, Change, and the Changeless.md>) | [4.2.2 Shoemaker's Time Without Change](<4.2.2 Shoemaker's Time Without Change.md>) →
