Final answer:
Aquinas responds to the problems of God's timelessness by affirming God as the unmoved mover, necessary being,
and cause of contingent existence, who is changeless and outside of time, thus reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom and addressing the issue of evil.
Step-by-step explanation:
St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the problems of God's timelessness and relationship to the universe through his philosophical works, particularly in the context of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology.
Aquinas argues that God is the unmoved mover, the first cause, and the necessary being who brings contingent beings into existence.
Since God is the ultimate cause, he exists beyond time and change, which are features of the contingent world. According to Aquinas, while God is changeless in his essence, his creations, which operate within time, do not impair his perfection.
To deal with the issue of God's knowledge of the future and human free will, Aquinas suggests that God's knowledge is not sequential or temporal like human knowledge.
Instead, God's understanding is timeless, viewing all moments with equal immediacy, which means that divine foreknowledge does not conflict with human freedom.
The problem of evil is another point of contention; Aquinas and his theological predecessors like Augustine engaged with this issue, defending the coexistence of an all-perfect God with the presence of evil in the world.
These philosophers use reason to explain faith, suggesting that evil is not an entity of its own but rather a privation of good or a failure to meet good's standard.
In response to scientific discoveries, like the Theory of Evolution, and metaphysical quandaries, such as the creation ex nihilo and the notion of a beginning of time, Aquinas would likely refer back to the role of God as the necessary being not subject to the limits of contingent existence.
By engaging with Aristotle's principles of being and potentiality versus actuality, Aquinas attempts to reconcile the timeless nature of God with the temporal world and the complexities that arise from this paradigm.