God

I

Introduction

God, a being in a religion. Especially in monotheisms, a single God is considered the creator or source of everything that exists and is spoken of in terms of perfect attributes—for instance, infinitude, immutability, eternity, goodness, knowledge (omniscience), and power (omnipotence). Most religions traditionally ascribe to God certain character traits that can be understood either literally or metaphorically, such as will, love, anger, and forgiveness.

II

Conceptions of God

Many religious thinkers have held that God is so different from finite beings that he must be considered essentially a mystery beyond the powers of human conception. Nevertheless, most philosophers and theologians have assumed that a limited knowledge of God is possible and have formulated different conceptions of him in terms of divine attributes and paths of knowledge.

A

Philosophical and Religious Approaches

The philosophical and religious conceptions of God have at times been sharply distinguished. In the 17th century, for instance, the French mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal unfavourably contrasted the “God of the philosophers”, an abstract idea, with the “God of faith”, an experienced, living reality. In general, mystics, who claim direct experience of the divine being, have asserted the superiority of their knowledge of God to the rational demonstrations of God's existence and attributes propounded by philosophers and theologians. Some theologians have tried to combine philosophical and experiential approaches to God, as in the twofold way of speaking of God as the “ground of being” and “ultimate concern” devised by 20th-century German theologian Paul Tillich. A certain tension is probably inevitable, however, between the way that theologians speak of God and the way most believers think of and experience him.

B

Primary Attributes

God may be conceived as transcendent (“above” the world), emphasizing his otherness, his independence from and power over the world order; or as immanent (“indwelling” in the world), emphasizing his presence and participation within the world's process. He has been thought of as personal, by analogy with human individuals; some theologians, on the other hand, have maintained that the concept of personality is inadequate to God and that he must be conceived as impersonal or suprapersonal. In the great monotheistic religions, God is worshipped as the One, the supreme unity that embraces or has created all things; but polytheism, the belief in many gods, has also flourished throughout history.

These contrasts are sometimes dialectically combined. Thus, while theism emphasizes divine transcendence and pantheism identifies God with the world order, in panentheism God is understood as both transcendent and immanent. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity and similar doctrines in other religions acknowledge both the unity and the inner diversity of God. Christianity is a form of monotheism in which the stark unity of God has been modified. It has also been argued that God has both personal and impersonal aspects, or even that he alone is truly personal and that at the finite level there is only an imperfect approximation of personal being. These attempts to unite dialectically in God seemingly opposite characteristics are common in religious and mystical writers and are intended to do justice to the variety and complexity of religious experience. The 15th-century German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, for instance, believing that God can be apprehended only through mystical intuition, stressed the “coincidence of opposites” in God; the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted on the parodoxical nature of religious faith. These formulations suggest that the logic of discourse about God is necessarily different from the logic that applies to finite entities.