Nature and attributes of God

• Omnitemporal


  Existing in all places
• Omnipotence


  All-powerful
• omniscience


  all- knowing
• benevolence


  God wants good for all
• free will


  Human beings can choose their own actions
• predestination

  God knows our future actions and we don’t have freewill
• eternal

  Timelessness
• everlasting

  within time but his existence is without end
• Suitcase analogy

  Describing God’s nature in comparison to a suitcase. Only so many attributes you can fit in before some need to be altered/removed
• Matthew 19:26


  “With God, all things are possible”
• Luke 1:37


  “Nothing is impossible with God”
• Aquinas - ‘Summa Contra Gentiles’ + ‘Summa Theologica’


  -God exists within Logic

  -Uses the impossibility of a square circle as an example

  • “it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them”
  • “Whatever involves contradiction cannot be held by omnipotence”
  • ”God is law unto himself” - God is standard of justice
  • everlasting- understands our suffering and empathises
  • ”He is not responsible to other things but everything else is responsible to him”
  • God can still be omnipotent as he can do the logically possible - "It is impossible for God to will anything but what his own wisdom understands as good"
• Descartes - ‘Principles of Philosophy’


  -God is unrestricted and beyond the principles of logic

  -“It would be rash to think our imagination reaches as far as his power”
• Aquinas’ Omnipotence: EVALUATION

  CONS:

  -produces a reductionistic view and questions whether God is worth worshipping

  -Anything can be excused by claiming that it’s God’s will and could counteract omnibenevolence

  -God can do everything, according to Swinburne, but what is everything?
• Aquinas’ Omnipotence: EVALUATION

  PROS:

  -Logical as God is limited to the understanding of human knowledge- more personal

  -Fits with the suitcase analogy so is a coherent theory

  -Incorporeal- can’t sin, contradicts his good nature
• Descartes’ omnipotence: EVALUATION

  PROS:

  • Proves the omnipotence of God as he exists outside of logic, thus his power is unlimited
  • fits with omniscience and predestination
  • John Macquarie - God not constrained by logic, God acts out of love for humanity. His power is different from our own "all nature seems to bespeak the works of God"
• Descartes’ omnipotence: EVALUATION

  CONS:

  -logical impossibilities don’t exist - J.L Mackie believes that impossible actions are “only a form of words which fails to describe any state of affairs”

  -Against suitcase analogy- not within laws of logic

  -Arbitrary God- God was personal to Aquinas, but not for Descartes. We can’t have a relationship with him
• Peter Vardy


  -God has put self-imposed limitation in place to create a universe that inhabits free, rational creatures
• Boethius - ‘The Consolation Of Philosophy’ OMNISCIENCE


  -Timeless and eternal God - “simultaneous present”

  -God cannot answer prayer and is impersonal because he’s outside of our time

  -“God’s foreknowledge does not impose necessity in things”

  -Human freewill causes future events, not God’s foreknowledge (conditional necessity- freely chosen) but simple necessities are natural laws
• Euthyphro Dilemma - Plato


  Only God defines morality, nothing more or less

  -Lacks clarity- does God only define morality or conform to it too?
• Anselm - ‘De Concordia’ OMNISCIENCE


  • timeless, but disagreed with Boethius
  • four-dimensionalism= all times and places are equally as real and present to God
  • God chose to create free humans so has self-imposed limitation- “God is whatever it is better to be than not to be”
  • Following necessity - moment of free choice known in God’s eternal present, that moment is in God (e.g God knows that there will be a revolution tomorrow)
  • Preceding necessity - no free agent/choice (e.g God’s knowledge of the laws of nature)
  • Nothing is intrinsically good other than God - "when you punish the wicked it is just ... when you spare the wicked it is also just; since it shows your goodness"
• C.S Lewis


  -If God is omniscient, our freewill is compromised

  -“A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating” -God should be personal out of love

  -Humans are morally responsible for their actions
• EVALUATION: Boethius- Omniscience PROS

  • God interacting with individuals is contradictory - God is arbitrary and partisan if he’s randomly interacting -Can’t make sense of something doesn’t equal impossibility -The incarnation would have to be interpreted. Jesus would be a perfect, human response to God instead of God being incarnate.
• EVALUATION Boethius CONS omniscience

  -timeless God seems to be transcendence, unchanging and uninterested. Biblical God seems immanent and interacts with believers

  -A timeless God would mean that God couldn’t be incarnate as he’d exist outside of time

  -Kenny (‘The God of the Philosophers’ 1979)- thinks that God viewing separate events in a simultaneous moment is incoherent - “While I type these words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on”
• EVALUATION Anselm PROS

  -God has 2 types of knowledge- knows about the laws of nature, but knows human choices because of following necessity- proves omniscient

  -Protects freewill- God alongside us in the moment, only knows our actions due to following necessity

  -Descriptions of time depend on perspective. God is more immanent than for Boethius, not simply an observer alone
• EVALUATION Anselm CONS

  -Difficult to apply time to God- following+preceding necessity implies the passage of time

  -There cannot be a more significant moment that’s equally present in God. - all moments are equally present, not coherent

  -Eternal God has seen our future choices- challenges free will
• Friedrich Schleiermacher


  • Used analogy of close friends and the other’s future behaviour- God can be omnipotent whilst allowing people to act freely
  • CON- risks God being too personal so isn’t worth worshipping…COUNTER- Makes him personal but not too personal as he isn’t interfering with freewill
• Augustine- omnipotence ‘The City of God’


  • “God is omnipotent on his account of doing what he wills”
  • Similar to Descartes - loosely believes that God can do anything, can justify nonsense and claim it as God’s will
  • Different to Aquinas - he presents the paradox of the stone and restricts God to logic, but Augustine states that God can do whatever he wishes.
  • “All logically possible powers which it is logically possible for God to have” - A.Kenny
• Calvin - ‘Institutes of Christian Religion’


  • Uses Boethius’ definition for predestination
  • no free will, God shows mercy through his election of godly people - - small number that are members of the Church. Can’t be good without God -“they are a small and despised number concealed in an immense crowd”
  • damned can’t complain, no reason to b saved. God acts with mercy
  • view of hell is traditional- “torn by an angry God”
• Swinburne ‘The Coherence of Classical Theism’ 


  • “He always does the morally best action…and no morally bad action”
  • analogy of God as a parent. Punishment of damnation comes from love
  • Human freedom must include the freedom to damn ourselves
• Davies - Swinburne opponent - ‘Is God a Moral Agent?’


  -Swinburne is too simplistic. God isn’t consciously good

  -God must be a moral agent in order to be good. God is morally good because he can’t contradict his own nature

  -“God is good because he manages…to be well behaved”
• Aquinas’ two types of justice

  1.Commutative justice - mutual giving + receiving

  2. Distributive justice - ruler gives people what they deserve - God does this

  We might not understand, but this doesn’t mean that he isn’t benevolent

  
  

  • "God's justice is about what is appropriate to him"
• Peter Vardy *The Puzzle* - self-imposed limitation

  • Universe is suited to inhabit free, rational creatures as God created it to limit his own ability
  • "God is limited by the universe he has chosen to create".
• Fredrich Schleiermacher - *On Religion*

  • analogy of close friends knowing each other's future behaviour - God chooses to maintain a self-imposed epistemic distance
  • believed in "removing an untenable knowledge of God in order to make room for faith."
• C.S Lewis *Merely Christianity* - opponent

  "A world of automatons- of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating"

  • Humans are morally responsible for their actions, so if God is omniscient freewill is compromised
• Roman Catholic Church

  • Second Vatican Council - "all that holds true not only for Christians, but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way"
  • all deserving people can receive God's mercy
  • Pope Francis: "we are all sinners but we are all forgiven"
• Dalferth *Becoming Present* - Descartes Proponent

  "God's love doesn't operate uniformly as it does in a timeless creation. It adapts to circumstances"
• Church

  • The Catholic Church thinks that God has not left us with just the Bible, but a Church. - The Church is the ‘Body of Christ’, which passes on truths and teachings from one generation to the next.
  • In 325 AD the Bishops of the Church met at Nicaea to discuss what the official teachings of the Church should be.
  • They eventually came up with the Nicene Creed.
  • This sets out numerous Catholic beliefs, including those about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
• The Holy Spirit

  • The Church believes that the Nicene Creed is revealed truth from God.
  • This is because the Holy Spirit is believed to guide and inspire the leaders of the Church in their decisions.
  • The Catholic Church believes that there is a combination of sources of Christian truth.
  • In addition to the Bible, there is the continuing inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
  • The Holy Spirit works within the Church to deliver fresh inspiration and teachings.
  • The Holy Spirit does this through the Magisterium and the Pope to pass on to Catholics today.