The concept and nature of God

• God being timeless (eternal)


  P1: Everything in time changes.

  P2: But God is immutable and does not change.

  P3: Therefore God cannot be in time.

  C: Therefore God exists outside time.
• God being within time (everlasting)


  P1: God is without beginning and without end.

  P2: God interacts with and has a personal relationship with the world.

  P3: The world is temporal.

  P4: Any being that interacts with the temporal world is itself temporal.

  C: Therefore God is an everlasting being existing in time.
• The paradox of the stone

  • God is omnipotent so, can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot move it?
  • Both answers to the question place a limit on God's omnipotence proving that the attribute cannot be coherently ascribed to God.
• The Euthyphro dilemma

  • Either God's commands are good simply because they come from God or because they conform to an external moral source.
  • If commands are good because they come from God then God could command horrific things such as genocide and this would be morally good.
  • However if God's commands conform to an external moral source then God's omnibenevolence depends on something else and God is not supremely good.
  • Both horns of the dilemma prove that omnibenevolence cannot be coherently ascribed to God.
• The compatibility of God's omniscience and free human beings


  P1: Humans have free will and some of our actions are genuinely free.

  P2: God is omniscient so knows beforehand everything that will happen.

  P3: Therefore God knows beforehand in all cases what humans will do.

  P4: If God knows what humans will do then their actions are not free.

  C: Therefore human free will and God's omniscience are incompatible.