Attributes of God

Overview/recap

Christians traditionally believe that God is omnipotent, and eternal (transcendent) or everlasting.

Omniscient

• All-knowing

• Omniscience, or all-knowingness, is a classical attribute of God. It includes ideas such as being unfailingly wise as well as knowing everything

• Ideas about the omniscience of God raises issues about God’s relationship with time and with human free will

• If God knows with absolute certainty and is never mistaken, then God’s knowledge of people’s future actions could be seen to fix those actions and remove freedom of choice

Criticisms of this

• People can’t do anything except the action God already knows they will do, so perhaps their free will is compromised

• Fredrich Schleiermacher argued that God can know us as close friends know us, so he can know what we will do without forcing our choices. But his critics argue that God’s knowledge is not like the knowledge friends have because God never guesses or makes mistakes

Omnibenevolent

All-good and all-loving

Omnibenevolence

• The bible is clear that the nature of God is love. This is a consistent theme throughout the old and new testaments. God is described as “good” and “perfect” in the bible

• When God creates the universe in Genesis, everything is “very good”, suggesting God only does good

• When God chooses Israel as his people, he sets them a standard to follow, for example the ten commandments

• When God is angry with people, it is not because of their failure to perform religious rituals, but because of the way the treat each other, especially the poor and the weak

• For Christians, God’s goodness is exemplified in the person of Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross

• Love is seen as an attribute of God and also as the creation of God. God is found wherever love is found

Possible criticisms of the idea of God as omnibenevolent

• Some argue that the God of the Bible, especially in the old testament, is not particularly good, e.g. he asks Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test, he can be jealous and angry, and in the story of Noah he regretted the flood, suggesting that God can make mistakes

• The problem of evil raises questions of whether a God of omnipotence can also be all-loving when there is evidence of evil in the world (Mackie’s inconsistent triad)

• Omnibenevolence might be considered incompatible with the other attributes of God, for example, if God is omnibenevolent then he cannot do evil but if he is omnipotent then he can do anything

Omnipotent

• All-powerful

• Omnipotence, or all-powerfulness, is a classical attribute of God

• The bible attributes omnipotence to God, for example, in the creation stories in Genesis, at the end of the book of Job and in miracle stories

Examples of omnipotence

• The Stone Paradox - can God create a rock that is too heavy to lift

• 1. This paradox questions whether an omnipotent being can create a stone it cannot lift

• 2. If such a being can create the stone, then it cannot lift it, which means it’s not omnipotent

• 3. If it cannot create such a stone, then it is also not omnipotent because there is something it cannot create

• Could be countered by saying God made the laws of nature in order to not be able to do so

Descartes’ view of omnipotence

• Also disagrees because a God who could do anything at all would be able to do things that go against his loving nature, such as acts of cruelty

• Descartes’ view of a totally powerful God who can do the logically impossible makes it difficult to find an acceptable theodicy (is God the Abrahamic idea)

Aquinas’ view of omnipotence

• Aquinas argued that God’s omnipotence means God can do everything that is within his nature and does not imply a contradiction

• So God cannot be cruel or be unwise

Criticism → inconsistent triad

• Some people might argue that if there are things God cannot do and he is limited by his own nature, then he cannot be omnipotent - the problem of evil is an example of this - Mackie’s argument - tripartite problem - inconsistent triad

Swinburne’s view of omnipotence

• Swinburne argued that God can do everything, but logical impossibilities are not things

• Square circles are not things, and neither are stones too heavy for God to lift or knots that God cannot untie

• They could never exist God can do everything possible

Vardy’s view of omnipotence

• Peter Vardy argues that God deliberately limits his own power

• God created the world in such a way that his own power would have to be limited as a result

• This does not reduce or undermine God because God chose to do this in order to create a world suitable for free and rational human beings

• The letter to the Philippians in the bible suggests the same idea

• When God came to the world as Jesus Christ, he deliberately limited his own power in order to be accessible to humanity

• The Christian doctrine that God deliberately empties himself of his own power is called kenosis

Other ideas about omnipotence

• There are discussions about whether omnipotence is compatible with other attributes traditionally ascribed to God

• There are also discussions about whether omnipotence makes sense as a concept. Perhaps an all-powerful being could not possibly exist

• Perhaps omnipotence is a problem of religious language where we do not have the words to frame an adequate concept of the power of God

• Whitehead and Hartshorne argue that a totally omnipotent God would not be as impressive as a God who could meet resistance

Eternal (transcendent)

Timeless, atemporal, being outside the constraints of time

Everlasting

Sempiternal, lasting forever on the same timeline as humanity

The relationship between God and time

• Many classical Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, argue that God is eternal in a timeless way - God created time and is not bound by it but exists in the past, present, and future

• Others, such as Swinburne, argue that God is everlasting in a way that moves along the same timeline as we do. This gives us genuine free will and allows us to have a relationship with God who responds to our behaviour and prayers. The past is past for God as well as for us, and the future has not yet happened for God as well as for us

Boethius

• Boethius questioned whether an omniscient God could justifiably reward and punish. He concluded that God can see time ‘as from a lofty peak’ and can observe us making free choices in our lives whilst being outside time himself. We live inside time, on a timeline with a past, a present and a future, but God is timeless and sees all things in a simultaneity (all at once)

Anselm

• Anselm took a four-dimensional approach to God’s relationship with time. The past, present and future all ‘exist’. God can be in all times at once, and all times are ‘in God’, because God created them. We are restricted to being in one place at one time, and we have genuine free will, but God has no restrictions and can be in all places and at all times

Possible criticisms of the view that God is eternal

• If God is timeless then he does not change so he does not respond to people’s behaviour, for example with anger or love → but we do see this in the bible e.g. an act of anger in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because of how people were behaving or an act of love by sending Jesus to earth

• God knows everything for all time so our freedom is restricted, for example God knows whether we will go to heaven before we are even born - predestination argument (Calvin would support)

• God cannot interact with the universe in a meaningful way at a particular time → what about religious experiences?

• God is not omniscient because, as he is eternal and outside time, he does not know what day it is

Possible criticisms of the view that God is everlasting

• It makes God seem less impressive because God is restricted by time and has to wait for things to happen

• It puts limits on God’s omniscience as he cannot know the future with certainty

• It raises questions of what God was doing before he created the universe

‘God should be able to do absolutely anything, even the logically impossible’ Discuss

Critically discuss issues arising from the belief that God is omniscient