Nature of God

• Omnipotence


  Divine power and self-imposed limitation
• Omniscience


  Divine knowledge and its interaction with temporal existence and free will
• Omnibenevolence


  Divine benevolence and just judgement of human actions, including Boethius's argument relating this to divine foreknowledge, eternity and free will
• Eternity


  Divine eternity and divine action in time, including Anselm's four-dimensionalist approach as an extension of Boethius's view
• Free will


  The extent to which human free will reasonably coexists with these attributes
• The above should be studied with reference to alternative possibilities presented by Boethius, Anselm and Swinburne
• Eternity


  To understand what it means to say that God is eternal, we need to be clear what we mean by the term 'God'
• Is the term God describing a simple, in the platonic sense, divine entity?
• It is implicit in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle that God must be outside and separate from both space and time and therefore unaffected by either
• This doctrine, also found (perhaps now unsurprisingly) in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, and earlier in the Fourth Lateran Council, states that God is not composed or divisible by any physical or metaphysical means
• Simplicity of God


  God is not made up of separate parts. This teaching is applied to our understanding of God's entire nature. His being, nature and substance is that of complete simplicity
• The properties attributed to God, which are the main topic of this section, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are not seen as contradicting this teaching of simplicity because each property is a different way of looking at the infinite active being of God from our human and limited perspective
• Eternal


  Infinite duration, without succession (that is, without one thing following another) and without end. It is therefore impossible to measure eternity: it is an everlasting present
• Human beings experience time as a succession of moments and therefore find it nearly impossible to conceive of eternity in any other way apart from a duration indefinitely extended from the present moment in two directions
• When we are discussing God, we are faced with a serious problem. Our grammar is tensed – that is, all our sentences are framed with verbs (a sentence must have a verb), but all our verbs presuppose the kind of succession we have been talking about here
• What we mean by describing God as eternal in this sense is taking us beyond the limits of the language we are using to express the idea
• We, however, perceive God to be acting in a finite fashion; first purposing and then acting, first promising or threatening and then acting on his promise, and so forth
• In the Bible we find God intimately concerned with history, with his people Israel and interacting with the nascent Christian community. But other parts of scripture are at odds with this; for He who inhabits eternity infinitely transcends our understanding (Isaiah 57: 15)
• His eternity, therefore, leads us to believe that His immensity and infinity gives Him an altogether different nature from ours
• Any language we then use to try to talk about God will always be limited and fall short of describing a Being who is ultimately a mystery
• Omnipotence


  The belief held by most monist faiths that God is 'all-powerful'
• Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, neatly highlights the problem with this attribute: 'Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.'
• This kind of criticism appears to be of the 'God can't make a square circle' or 'God can't make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it' kind
• It is clear that we will not get very far with this kind of discussion if we try to create illusory limitations 'in God' which are really limitations of our language and our ability to describe Him accurately
• Omnipotence (Descartes)


  The ability to do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible
• Omnipotence (Aquinas)


  The ability to do anything possible, but not anything impossible
• If you accept the Cartesian definition of omnipotence, then Dawkins', or any other attempt for that matter, to disprove God's existence using logic is doomed to failure
• If you believe in a God who can do the logically impossible, then you have to believe that he can both create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it, and yet still lift it
• The more popular understanding of omnipotence, proposed by Aquinas, survives the paradox of the stone in a different way
• If we can assume that God as defined by Aquinas exists, then he is a being who is capable of lifting any stone. A stone that is so heavy that God cannot lift it then becomes an impossible object
• One other, final approach to this problem would be to say that within the universe God has created he does not have the power to do just anything
• Almighty


  To recognise the ultimate dependence of the universe and all things within it on God. It is to recognise God's creative and sustaining power. However, it specifically does not mean that God has total power to do anything He wishes. God is limited by the universe he has chosen to create
• When we talk of God being 'omniscient', we tend to mean much more than just having a great deal of information and a particular skill at processing it
• One of the problems which arise from this 'more' that God knows may limit our freedom, as how can we be free and God know in advance what we are going to do
• Richard Swinburne attempts to get round this problem by describing a God who knows everything which can possible be known but maintains that this does not include knowledge of the future
• If we start from a position of human freedom, then we cannot believe in a God who knows our future without sacrificing our freedom
• The Christian understanding of our relationship with God is crucially a loving one, which, without freedom, would be meaningless
• The Bible tells us that God has never learned nor needed to learn anything from anyone
• It may at this point be worth thinking of an earlier thread that we explored in language, namely the idea that the apophatic way is the only way to a solution here
• Omnibenevolence

  The concept of omnibenevolence has its roots in two different but related ideas about God: one being that God is perfect and the other that God is believed to be morally good