Why does St. Augustine say that God is outside time?

St. Augustine posits that God exists outside the realm of time because God is a perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient being whose nature is immutable and eternal. Unlike human beings, who are contingent, mutable, and bound by temporal progression, God transcends the causal order of the created world.12

Because God exists outside of time, temporal directionality—such as the distinction between past, present, and future—does not apply to the divine. Consequently, Augustine argues that it is a category error to attribute "foreknowledge" to God in the human sense, as God does not "know" things beforehand; rather, God’s eternity encompasses all of time simultaneously. By situating God outside the temporal flow, Augustine seeks to reconcile the existence of divine omniscience with the concept of human free will, as God’s knowledge does not function as a predictive force within a linear timeline.134