Constant and unchanging being is in agreement with scripture, no?If God exists outside of time then He is a constant, unchanging Being
This is where it gets tricky and dependent on how exactly we conceptualize timeless states. Timeless states don't prevent us having things arranged in logical sequences, for example there could be a stack of books arranged in alphabetical order. This order makes as much sense temporally as it does atemporally. I previously gave the analogy of a ball resting on a cushion, causing an indent in the cushion. This casual relationship also makes sense atemporally. We would still logically say the ball is the cause of the indent, not the other way around.Who has no thoughts i.e. mental changes over time. Choices require changes in mental states over time. If God created time He cannot have changes in mental states and therefore cannot have free will. If He doesn't have free-will what is He? He's more like the Star Wars "force", a non-thinking emotionless unchanging photo.
You give the example of timelessness being like an 'unchanging photo', but what if you viewed it as an unrolled reel of film on the table before us, so that we can view all frames at once? Instead of watching the film on a screen frame by frame, giving us a sense of temporal succession, we have now essentially 'collapsed' the time dimension into just another spacial dimension, meaning we can observe multiple points on the timeline simultaneously in much the same way as I can simultaneously see the left side and the right side of the wall in front of me. Instead of having temporal relationships between events we now just view them as a logical sequence, all at once. We can still observe the actors thoughts, choices, actions etc, and can identify causal relationships between things.
As such I believe it is possible in some sense for thought, emotion and will to exist atemporally.
Although I will agree with you that it seems incredibly difficult to preserve free will outside of time. I'm struggling to see any way in which timeless states can be anything other that fully deterministic. Even if we allow for will, that will isn't free and is determined by factors outside of itself. In the example of the film strip there is no possibility of the sequence being anything other than what it is. We wouldn't expect our film to possibly have a different ending every time we watched it. So in that sense I agree that God is somewhat reduced to a force acting according to the laws of his nature.
A logical contradiction of being outside of time found at Divine Immutability | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy :
Here is a truth that I know: that it is now 2:23pm. That is something I couldn’t know a minute ago, and it is something that I won’t know in a minute. At that time, I’ll know a different truth: that it is now 2:24pm. Either God knows such temporally indexed truths—truths that include reference to particular times at which they are true—or not. If God does not know such truths, then he is not omniscient, since there is something to be known—something a lowly creature like me does, in fact, know—of which God is ignorant. Since very few theists, especially of a traditional stripe, are willing to give up divine omniscience, very few will be willing to claim that God is ignorant of temporally changing truths like truths about what time it is.
If God is omniscient, then God knows such temporally changing truths. If God does know such temporally changing truths, then God changes, since God goes from knowing that it is now 2:23pm to knowing that it is now 2:24pm. And worse, God changes with much more frequency, since there are more fine-grained truths to know about time than which minute it is (for instance, what second it is, what millisecond it is, etc.) If God knows such truths at some times but not at others, God changes. And if God changes, divine immutability is false. So if God is omniscient, he is not immutable. Therefore, God is either not immutable or not omniscient. And since both views are explicitly held by traditional Christianity (and other monotheisms) there is a problem here for the traditional proponent of divine immutability.
This is only a contradiction if we view God as being in time. Scroll down to the last 2 paragraphs of the section you quote which outlines an atemporal response. I find this a reasonably satisfactory answer.
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