Nature of God

Genesis - omnipotence

• “And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light’”

• story of Abraham and wife

  • ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’

Matthew - omnipotence

Jesus told story of rich young ruler

• ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’

• ‘With man this is impossible but with God all things are possible’

omnipotent - can even do the logically impossible

Descartes (+Anslem)

omnipotent - can do everything that is logically possible for perfect being to do

Aquinas

• wouldn’t do anything that would contradict his nature

• ‘everything that does not imply a contradiction is among those possibilities in respect of which a God is called omnipotent’ Summa Theologica

Swinburne - omnipotence

self-contradicting definitions =/= things

can’t do logically impossible

Hebrews ‘It is impossible for God to lie’

William of Ockham - omnipotence

creation → limited → ordained power

• cannot ‘uncreate’ world or change past

omnipotence - self-limiations

for free will

Vardy (+Hick epistemic distance)

The Puzzle of Evil - Story of King and peasant girl

‘God is limited by the universe he has chosen to create’

omnipotence - self-limitations, incarnation

John Macquarrie

Christology, kenosis = self-emptying → emptied of some divine attributes to make JC’s encounters with humanity possible

• NT Philippians ‘he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!’

Alvin Platinga

free will defence

omniscience - psalm

‘all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be’

Friedrich Schleiermacher

e.g. Indian restaurant

analogy of knowledge that close friends have of each other’s future behaviour

‘divine foreknowledge cannot endanger freedom’ (The Christian Faith)

Timeless

“who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy” Isaiah

Paul Helm - timeless

‘God considered as timeless, cannot have temporal relations with any of his creation’

Maurice Wiles - theologian

e.g. miracles would present partisan God

so doesn’t literally act in world

God loves us thru gift of creation

Aquinas - timeless

prayers shouldn’t be for requests

everlasting

Swinburne and Charles Hartshorne

Boethius - justice

• The Consolation of Philosophy

• humans exist within time

• God’s knowledge ‘transcends all temporal change’

• 'God looking down at us from ‘lofty peak’

Anselm 4D approach

• humans live in presentist way

• time = 4th dimension alongside height, width, depth

• every time and space ‘in’ God, created and sustained by God

Support of Anselm 4D

• Aquinas: ‘God sees all things together and not successively

• Augustine: Bible, no before God, time works in diff way for God

• Wolterstorff: God is ‘freed from the bondage of temporality’

Swinburne - justice and omniscience

• God of OT ‘is a God in continual interaction with men’ (The Coherence of Theism)

• ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…’ John

• God outside time not biblical

  • false platonic idea, promoted by Aquinas

  • change not opposed to perfection

God doesn’t have fixed purposes for eternity

• story in Isaiah of King Hezekiah’s illness

  • ‘I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life’

• ‘eye for an eye’ → ‘turn the other cheek’

  • CA/ God not changing mind, changing covenant enabled by Jesus’ sacrifice which became open to all

God has fixed intentions

Numbers ‘Does he promise and not fulfil?’

Vardy - justice and omiscience

uses Geach’s analogy of Grand chess master

Medieval theologians (Aug, Aqui, Ans) on Euthyphro dilemma

false dilemma

• 3rd option = what God commands is good bc accords with God’s omnibenevolent nature

Euthyphro dilemma - K Rogers

x “conform” “invent”

His very nature is the standard for value’

Robert Adams

• should modify divine command theory

• good bc commands of loving God'

  • so commands not arbitrary

  • God = standard

Benevolence - Hume and Mill

POE

• Hume: ‘infinite suffering for finite sins’

Benevolence - Aquinas

speak of God’s lov eusing aanlogy

Jurgen Moltmann

The Crucified God

• Process theology → God becomes empathetic fellow sufferer, self-limitation

Benevolence - epistemic distance and soul-making

Bible

‘Now I know in part; then I shall know fully’ Corinthians (Paul)

Not possible and not necessary to resolve conflicts

• Aquinas: God essentially unknowable

  • epistemological and linguistic p of humanity

• Analogy of God like diamond

Necessary to resolve

• Anselm “faith seeking understanding”

• Dawkins: “faith is the great cop-out”

  • ‘it is a mystery’ = lazy and damaging

• JL Mackie: ‘miracle of theism’

  • ironically it is ‘miracle’ that reasonable ppl should continue to support C beliefs given their incoherence

Not necessary to resolve

• Story of Job OT

  • life starts off good then goes wrong

  • devil challenges God, bets can turn Job against him

  • asks Job who you are to q me, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth

  • faith = explanation

• humans unable to grasp reasoning

  • Aquinas: ‘the world is like a tapestry. From above it all makes sense to God, but below there is a mess’

• Hick epistemic distance

• Barth RT

• P of RL - Aquinas

  • minds limited so don’t conceive omnipotence and omniscience in right way

boethius simple and conditional necessity

• E.g. man out walking on sunny day

• ‘Necessary’ can be applied to both sun shining and man walking but in diff ways

  • Sun necessarily shining bc is what sun must do (simple)

  • Necessary that man is walking or else wouldn’t see him walking (conditional)

    • But freely chosen 

  • God sees things we consider to be in future bc result of human free will

  • Knows man is walking only bc man has chosen to walk

    • Not bc he is forced