I've hear God refered to as existing outside of space, before the beginning of time and so on. I'm not sure I know entiery what this means. What does "space", "time", "outside" and "before" in this context? Isn't outside and inside inherently spatial relations, and before and after temporal ones? The whole idea seems syntactically wrong to me. Like "north of the northpole". Could someone clarify exactly what they mean when they say that God exists "outside of space and time"?

Answers:

It is entirely possible that the correct technical syntax does not exist to describe the theist idea of a transcendent being.

To further your analogy, they are saying north of the north pole but actually mean that the thing they describe is not on the surface of the planet.

The thing is, if you're going to say that we don't have the words to describe the idea of a transcendental being, you'd better be consistent about it. For instance, don't tell me that God relates to time and space is mysterious and inexpressible ways, and then turn around and tell me he "loves" me, as if that much was clear as day.

It is like God's mystery extends to all things we'd like to forget about, but never to those few aspects that need to be a certain way. It is maddening.

As God is often conceived as boundless, if one were to say God exists within spatio-temporal boundaries then the contradiction is apparent. However if one was to assert that space-time is real in a fundamental way, that it's just a brute condition of existence that is, then the theist has the problem of explaining how something non spatio-temporal (God) can interact with something spatio-temporal. However that's not the whole story. There are models within physics that don't treat time as fundamental, see Julian Barbour on timeless physics for example. The motivation for this is that the main equation of quantum gravity, the wheeler de-witt equation lacks any time dependence. This is obviously controversial but it is an option. Similarly the late philosopher J.M.E Mctaggart made a very famous argument in a paper entitled "The unreality of time" with a pretty much identical conclusion at the beginning of the twentieth century. If you're interested in these ideas I think a good accessible introduction to them would be two science shows Through the wormhole (I think the ep is called Is time real?) and The fabric of the cosmos on PBS in an episode entitled Illusion of time.

You'll probably have noticed that I haven't actually made any points on the idea of time as being something that isn't fundamental, rather I've just thrown some names at you. The reason for this is I need to get clearer on the issue myself before I can really contribute to the conversation as it's an extremely difficult one but I think it's worth getting some kind of a grasp on despite its challenging nature.