Underlying any attempt to describe the nature of God is the recognition that such a being must be fundamentally different from ourselves. The world that we experience is imperfect, fragile and subject to change – God, on the other hand, represents perfection, power and immutability. This profound distinction has led some thinkers to claim that God is in a sense unknowable. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides developed a negative theology in which God can only be described in terms of what he is not: descriptive terms are so limited by their application to the world that they cannot adequately express the nature of the divine. Nevertheless, certain conceptions of God have tended to dominate Western theology and a number of attributes are common to those conceptions. A discussion of these attributes may help to define the nature of God and clarify the substance of religious claims.
It has been traditional to use the masculine pronoun when referring to God, and faute de mieux that convention will be followed here.
The object of religious belief is usually considered to be maximally great: that is, to possess certain key attributes to the highest degree. This has not always been the case. Pagan religions often gave their deities imperfect qualities and made them susceptible to jealousy, anger, sexual attraction and so forth. But the monotheistic religions all assume a God free from such flaws, who displays instead maximal greatness and perfection. This seems inevitable in a being that is to be worthy of worship and able to fulfil the traditional roles that religion demands: creating and sustaining the universe, the dispensation of justice, answering prayers, and so on. A consequence of this maximal greatness is also uniqueness: while many religions have worshipped a plurality of deities, only one by definition can be maximally great. Anselm, in his formulation of the ontological argument, defined God as ‘a being than which nothing greater can be conceived’ and this is traditionally taken as the starting-point for any description of the attributes of God. At the very least, maximal greatness seems logically to entail omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness – although how these attributes should be construed is not always clear.
The claim that God is omnipotent or almighty seems at first sight to lead to a paradox. Can God create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? If so, he becomes less than omnipotent; if not, then he is not omnipotent in the first place. Other versions of the paradox ask if God can make 2 + 2 = 5 or square a circle. This is a purely logical objection, however, and most philosophers agree that an inability to defy the laws of logic does not represent a limitation to God’s omnipotence. (Descartes, on the other hand, believed that the laws of logic were wholly subject to God’s power.) As Thomas Aquinas put it:
Whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Summa Theologica Part 1, Question 25, Article 3
One problem with this position is that there is nothing illogical involved in a limited being making something too heavy to lift: people do this all the time. The contradiction arises, therefore, only in the context of omnipotence. This has led some to argue that omnipotence is an inherently self-contradictory idea.
Certainly, there are difficulties involved in construing divine omnipotence. Can God change the past? It seems reasonable to expect that he can, but perhaps a changed past is no longer the past at all – in which case this also involves a logical contradiction. Another interesting question is whether God can commit an evil act. This is connected to the attribute of perfect goodness and is sometimes resolved by claiming that while it is possible for God to sin, it will never happen as he is by nature a perfectly good being. Alternatively, since sin is an imperfection, it may be seen as logically impossible for a perfect being to sin. This combination of omnipotence and goodness also gives rise to the problem of evil: how can evil exist when God has both the means and the motive to prevent it? One resolution to this problem argues that evil is the result of free will which God cannot – to be logically consistent – control.
The traditional attribute of omniscience has also been the subject of considerable discussion. Of particular concern is the fact that it appears to be incompatible with human free will. If God infallibly knows what someone will do tomorrow, it does not seem that they are free to do something different. Much depends on the proposed definition of freedom here, but by most definitions of free will foreknowledge presents a problem. The sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina proposed one solution in his doctrine of middle knowledge. In addition to necessary truths and contingent facts about the world, God also knows what a person will do in all possible circumstances: once God creates a particular set of circumstances, therefore, even though he knows the outcome in advance, the individual is nevertheless free to choose their own course of action. It is not clear how coherent such a doctrine is. Others have proposed that the problem can be resolved by recognising that God exists outside of time, and therefore the idea of ‘future’ knowledge has no meaning. Richard Swinburne, on the other hand, has argued that God cannot possess foreknowledge since it is logically incompatible with human free will: as with the paradox of omnipotence, such logical contradictions are not held to represent a meaningful limitation to God’s omniscience.
Central to monotheistic beliefs is the conception of God as wholly good and benevolent. While perfect goodness seems to be required for a being worthy of worship, this attribute does present some problems. One issue is that raised by the Euthyphro dilemma, first identified in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. The dilemma focuses upon the relationship between God and goodness and asks, what is the source of goodness? Is something good because God says it is good? – or does God say something is good because it is good? In the first case, God is identified as the source of goodness – but many philosophers have found this problematic. If goodness is determined by God’s will then it appears arbitrary and counter-intuitive: if tomorrow God wills adultery or murder to be good, then they would become so. Moreover, the question of God’s own goodness becomes redundant, as there is no prior standard which he must meet and no moral reasoning available to inform his choices. Human goodness becomes a question of obedience, and moral order a matter of mere authority. On the other hand, if God approves of actions because they are good, then goodness becomes morally independent of God and there must be another source of goodness. This notion of a higher source of moral value does not seem consistent with God’s omnipotence.
The second problem that arises from God’s benevolence is the problem of evil mentioned above in connection with omnipotence. A particular aspect of this problem is the notion of hell as eternal punishment for sinners. The type and duration of suffering allotted to the damned in medieval theology is surely incompatible with a being that is wholly good, and thankfully these sadistic notions have more or less been abandoned by modern thinkers.
Many of the metaphysical attributes of God articulate how fundamentally different he is from other beings. The most profound and perhaps the strangest of these attributes is divine simplicity. Put briefly, God is identical to each of his attributes, and each attribute is identical to every other one. God is without parts: a simple, indivisible being. For example, it is wrong to say that God possesses or displays goodness: rather, he is goodness. Despite this identity of existence and essence, Christian theology has usually maintained that these attributes are nevertheless distinguishable, which allows discussion of particular qualities to be (in a limited sense) meaningful. Some philosophers have claimed the doctrine of divine simplicity to be incoherent. Certainly, the relationship of an object to its properties has occasioned much disagreement over the last two thousand years, and such a special instance as God only confuses the matter further. Some theologians have argued in addition that divine simplicity is incompatible with the Trinity. In any case, many other traditional attributes of God seem to flow from this doctrine.
Since all material objects are complex and divisible, simplicity seems to demand that God is incorporeal, that is non-physical. The notion of an incorporeal being is closely tied to the traditional concept of a soul or spirit, and suffers from the same objections. Significantly, if God is to intervene in the world it must be possible for him to affect the physical world (matter or energy) without existing physically at the point of effect. Such a claim is at odds with current understanding in the physical sciences. Along with incorporeality, God is traditionally considered to be timeless: that is, he exists outside of both space and time and is consequently eternal. This is sometimes expressed by saying that God is self-existent in that he was not created and had no beginning. Some thinkers have preferred to view God as eternal but existing within time, as this allows for a more coherent understanding of creation, intention, memory, action and response. Certainly many acts attributed to God, notably miracles and the incarnation of God as man, apparently took place within a human time-frame. It has further been claimed that the very notion of timeless eternity is incoherent. The idea that God is both timeless and perfect also implies that he is immutable and not subject to change, since any change must take place within time and be a lessening of perfection. Those who prefer to locate God within time understand immutability in a weaker sense, requiring only that he does not change his character or purpose. This position more easily accommodates the possibility of forgiveness, for example. A God that is not limited by time and has no corporeal substance may also be omnipresent. (Omnipresence should be distinguished from pantheism which identifies God with the physical universe and denies his existence as an independent and transcendent being.) The attribute of omnipresence may be compared to timelessness: as God is not bound by time and therefore exists at all times, so an omnipresent God (being incorporeal) exists in all places. Some philosophers have worried about the implication that an omnipresent God must also exist in hell; others have construed omnipresence in a weaker sense. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued that a King is said to be everywhere in his kingdom by virtue of his authority – and so it is with God and his limitless power (Summa Theologica 1.8.3). Since God exists outside of the world (and space and time) he is generally described as transcendent, although Christian doctrine also allows that God became immanent and entered the world through Christ. Transcendence and immanence exist in tension in many religions – the otherness of God being preferred at one time, and the immediacy and accessibility of God at others.
One particularly interesting attribute of God is impassibility: that is, God cannot be affected by external causes or influences. Although God acts upon the world (creating and sustaining it), because of his perfection and immutability the world cannot act upon him. Such a claim has implications for the view of God as a moral being. Compassion, pity, sorrow at the suffering of his creation – all seem to imply that God is in some sense affected by the world. Some philosophers have further argued that knowledge itself implies modification in the knowing subject, and an omniscient God must therefore be open to such an effect. The medieval theologians had quite different takes on the issue of impassibility. Thomas Aquinas insisted that God experiences ‘pure perfections’ like love and joy, but only in a metaphorical or analogical sense. Anselm, on the other hand, argued that God does not experience compassion at all (Proslogion 8). These disagreements reveal an interesting clash between different conceptions of God: on the one hand, a humane God capable of love and compassion; and on the other, a more abstract embodiment of absolute perfection.
In addition to possessing these metaphysical attributes, God is usually conceived in certain roles and relationships to the world. He is the creator of the universe ex nihilo and is therefore essentially separate from it. But he is also the sustainer of the universe: without God, the universe would cease to exist. God is also traditionally considered to possess a degree of personhood: he is able to enter into relationships with individuals and responds to the world with recognisable emotions like love, compassion and sadness. The degree of personhood attributed to God differs from religion to religion, and it is perhaps difficult to reconcile this with other attributes such as perfection and impassibility. Nevertheless, personhood is central to most Western conceptions of the nature of God.
This list of attributes is neither exhaustive nor perhaps necessary, but it does capture something of the common thinking of Western religions. In recent times more radical notions of God have emerged from thinkers like Paul Tillich and Don Cupitt, who redefine or even deny the objective existence of God and draw attention to the inadequacy of the language we must use to describe him. The problem of religious language, of course, has a long history.
Nevertheless, traditional theology seems to depend heavily upon at least some of these descriptions, and it remains a matter of debate whether the individual attributes of God are internally coherent, and whether certain combinations of these attributes are in fact consistent.