Attributes of God

• Omnipotence - Aquinas

  • God can do the logically possible.
• Omnipotence - Descartes

  God can do everything including the logically impossible.
• Omnipotence - Augustine

  God can do anything he chooses to do.

  (Self - limiting)
• Omnipotence - Anthony Kenny


  God can do what is logically compatible with his other attributes like goodness.
• Problems caused by Aquinas' definition of omnipotence

  Paradox of omnipotence - limited by logic
• Problems caused by Descartes view of omnipotence


  Turns God into a tyrant who does anything.

  Means God can create evil or be unforgiving.

  Presents God as a being that humans can't rely on.
• Problems caused by Kennedy's definition of omnipotence


  Does everyone go to heaven - only thing God can do in accordance with his omnibenevolent nature.
• What is meant by the idea that God is wholly simple?


  Developed by Aquinas.

  God is immutable, timeless, space less and therefore body less.

  God's attributes are held together in equal measure.
• Philosophical problem of omnipotence


  When we refer to God as 'omnipotent', do we mean that God is the ruler over all things, or that God can do all things?

  Most philosophers argue God as the infinite creator who rules over all things that he has created but don't agree that He can do all things.
• Sense experience


  Knowing what something is because you have experienced it.

  Eg: knowing what chocolate tastes like because you have had it.
• Middle knowledge


  Knowing what would happen if you make a certain choice or thinking about a choice you could have made and its consequences.
• Future Knowledge


  Beyond human knowledge

  'Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to me.' Psalm 139:16
• Paradox of omnipotence


  Some things may be impossible to do for an omnipotent being.

  God's omnipotent nature means he could create a stone so heavy that no one including him could lift it but if he couldn't make that stone then that also goes against his omnipotence.
• General religious expression of omnipotence

  Acknowledging and accepting their own finitude and dependence on God.

  Expressing God's greatness.
• Flew & Mackie - Omniscience & Omnipotence


  Given that God could have created foreseen the consequences of creation, it ought to have been able to create free creatures who always do the right thing.
• Calvinist view

  The idea that free will is apparent, but free will is not possible in the light of God's omniscience.
• Timeless God


  He is outside time, knows but doesn't cause our actions.
• Everlasting God


  Moves through time with us and knows all that is logically possible to know but doesn't cause them.
• Michael Dummett - Omniscience


  God's knowledge is beyond human perspective.

  God knows everything in a sense of timelessness.

  He knows future events and true facts.
• Problems - Dummet


  If God's knowledge consists in knowing for every true proposition that is true, does that exhaust the concept of knowledge?
• Freidrich Schleirmacher

  Argued that there's a possible solution to it if God's omniscience restricts our freedom.

  Used the analogy of the knowledge that close friends have over each other's future behaviour without us dictating it.

  'Even the divine foreknowledge cannot endanger freedom.'
• 'What is it like to be a bat?.'


  Thomas Nigel - 1974

  We have no idea what it is like to be a bat - we don't have bat sense/minds or vocabulary.

  Apply this to God - difficult to see how God's knowledge can include knowing what a non-God experience is like.
• Psalm 139 : 1-2

  You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

  You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
• Indexical statements - Dummett


  Truth of some sentences (Titanic sinking) will only be true for the speaker at that moment.

  Dummett's arg of God's omniscience is limited.
• Aquinas - Omnibenevolence


  God knows Himself, He must know all things, as nothing can exist that did not pre-exist in His mind.
• 'He is good; his love endures forever' 2 Chronicles 7:3
• Euthyphro Dilemma


  Socrates asks Euthyphro

  "Is what is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?."
• Swinburne - God in time


  Love is incompatible with being eternal and immutable.

  God must exist in time to be able to respond with love.
• 'so loving that he created over 4000 different genetic diseases.' Richard Dawkins
• God is like a loving parent


  A child who is suffering from illness may not understand why their parents are confining them to their beds and making them have medicines.

  In the same way humans fail to understand the goods for the sake of which God may permit evil that afflict human/animal life.
• Problem of divine hiddenness


  When children are ill & in hospital, the parents are near to them, comforting them. However, so many humans go through suffering without any awareness of God's conscience presence.

  It doesn't make sense to think that God would put someone in suffering and won't respond to them.
• Beneficence - Doing good & performing good actions.
• Aristotle - A just person can only be just if he performed just acts, simply having a nice feeling isn't enough.

  Apply it to God - Simply being benevolent (wishing well) isn't enough, God has to also be beneficent.
• Some argue that God's goodness lies in being good in himself.

  He is not subject to decay or threatened by an equal or overwhelming power.

  However, there is a difference between being morally good and materially good.
• To describe someone as morally good, they have to will to do good as well. Therefore, God not only is good, he consciously wills good.
• Wilkinson - God's goodness should be understood as part of his creative action.

  He is not a 'person amongst persons' as a moral agent would be.

  'When God commands us to do what is good, it is a injunction to be human in the fullest sense.'
• Aquinas - God's justice & omnibenevolence


  God's justice isn't/ cannot be like ours on earth.

  God's justice is about giving everyone what they need, it isn't humanly like trading one thing for another.

  God's justice works with goodness.
• Aquinas & God's Justice


  God is the standard of justice.

  He is perfectly wise so by giving all creation what they need to flourish is what justice looks like.
• William Frankena - moral justice doesn't mean treating everyone in the same way but rather making the same relative contribution to the good of people's lives.
• Calvin - human nature is corrupt and so is damnable.

  Denies the existence of free will as God shows goodness through the election of certain people.