By Matt Ganza

Arceus, also referred to as the Alpha Pokémon, is thought to be the creator of the Pokémon world. Its Pokédex entry throughout numerous games states that Arceus was the first Pokémon that was born in nothingness and then proceeded to shape the world. In one of the more recent Pokémon games, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, its Pokédex entry reads as follows: Hisuian mythology states that Arceus is the creator of all things. In short, Arceus is God. The Pokémon world is a theistic world.

So our world and the Pokémon world have that in common. There is some sort of transcendent, extremely powerful, conscious, personal, creator of the world. However, I will attempt to present to you all why I believe that Arceus, as it exists in the Pokémon world, is an incoherent mess and, for the same exact reasons I will give for Arceus, so is the traditional God of Christian theism (or at least a particular popular version of the Christian God that has been held onto throughout church history).

In order for me to display the incoherency of Arceus all I need are two pieces of information: 1) Arceus started off as an egg that eventually hatched and 2) Dialga is responsible for the existence of time. Okay. And there is actually one more piece of information: 3) Dialga is not eternal like Arceus and has a beginning.

Dialga’s various Pokédex entries sometimes read as follows: It is said that time began moving when Dialga was born. Without Dialga, there is no time. It is widely agreed upon in the philosophy of time that time and change are linked together, so much so that if there is no time, then there is no change, and that poses a problem for Arceus. Changes occur at times. Without time and Dialga, Arceus is for all intents and purposes a timeless being, and as a timeless being, he is also immutable (unchanging). We know that Arceus created Dialga, and from Dialga’s birth, time started flowing. But remember the first piece of information I mentioned? Arceus started off as an egg according to multiple Pokédex entries. If he started off as an egg and thus is no longer an egg, then that means that there was a change that occurred within Arceus’ life. Hold on though! Change requires time. Time didn’t exist until Dialga was created, and Dialga wasn’t created until after Arceus hatched! This is a very big problem because we now have no way of accounting for how Arceus went through a process of change. Technically, he should have stayed as an eternal, timeless, immutable egg that never created anything.

Therefore, the concept of Arceus is incoherent. We have an immutable and timeless Pokémon that somehow managed to change and have a temporal relation of before and after in its life.

I’m pretty sure by now most of you can already see where my argument is going in relation to the God of Christian theism. It has been tradition throughout most of church history, despite the lack of Biblical data to support it, that God is both timeless and immutable. We see this in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and Boethius to name a few Christian philosophers/theologians throughout history. As a timeless being, God exists without temporal extension, temporal location, and succession of moments in his life. This means that God doesn’t have a past or future and that he cannot go from doing one thing to doing another in a sequential order. As immutable, he cannot undergo any kind of intrinsic or extrinsic change. These two views are logically linked. To abandon one of these views is to abandon both. He is timeless because he is changeless, and he is changeless because he is timeless.

Now, you might be thinking that there can’t possibly be any similar argument to make between God and Arceus because part of my argument is Arceus changing from being in an egg to hatching, and obviously that doesn’t apply to God! You are correct that God wasn’t born from an egg, but that isn’t the point. The spirit of my argument has to do with the concept of change. Arceus has a change in his life, a before and after. The question is…does God? I think that it is very clear that Christianity teaches something that introduces a similar issue. This comes from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

The one tradition that is older, and has more Biblical support, than God being timeless is that the universe, all of reality that is not God, is not eternal and has an absolute beginning point. Think about that for a second. There was, using philosophical language, a state of affairs where God existed alone with God-self. No creation. This means that God had to go from a state of not creating to creating in order to bring all other non-God things into existence. This is an explicit change in God. But God is supposed to be essentially timeless and immutable. If God is essentially timeless and immutable, then either all the other non-God things are eternal because God is eternally creating, leading to an eternal effect, or he never actually creates because he cannot change from a state of not creating to creating. Because of the strong data for creatio ex nihilo, it seems that we are at a sort of impasse. We have an unchanging and timeless God that has somehow changed from a state of not creating to creating. It is this conflict with changing and being changeless that brings both Arceus and this particular version of the Christian God to the point of incoherence.

But don’t fret! There is a solution for the Christian God at least! Simply abandon the idea of a timeless creator in place for a creator that is everlastingly temporal and voila! Crisis averted. God being temporal simply means the opposite of the qualities I listed above concerning timelessness. God has temporal location, extension, and has a succession of moments in his life (can do/think one thing and then another). Note, however, what this does not mean. It does not mean that God is confined to exist inside our universe. This is a common misconception as ‘time’ is usually understood as a physical aspect of the universe. God would exist within his own time that would most likely be in sync with the universe’s physical time. This is a common misunderstanding when it comes to God’s relationship to time.

I think it’s about time for a change in our view about God and his relationship to time, don’t you?

If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic here are a few books to read: God and Time: Four Views edited by Greg Ganssle, The End of the Timeless God by R.T. Mullins, Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time by Paul Helm, and Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time by William Lane Craig.

Matt Ganza is a recent graduate from Azusa Pacific University in California with a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy. He is currently a bartender with the prospects of becoming a teacher. He has plans to continue his education by getting a Master’s and PhD in Philosophy as well. He used to host a YT channel called The Nerdy Theist where he attempted to bridge the gap between philosophy, theology, and pop culture but has been on hiatus. He has plans to return to the channel in the future.