Existence of God

Part 1: What is God?

Christopher L. Holland
christopher.holland@slu.edu

Saint Louis University

March 27, 2025

What is God Like?

What Do We Mean by “God”?

Standard/Restricted Theism
“The theistic deity is conceived as a transcendent spiritual being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good” (Peterson et al. 2012, 10).
Expanded Theism
“Restricted theism conjoined with other distinctive beliefs that arise from the creeds, doctrines, and scared texts of a particular living religion” (11).
Pantheism
God is Everything, the Whole.
Panentheism
Everything (the world) is in God. (But God is more than the world.)

What Do We Mean by “God”?

We will focus on Standard Theism.

Standard/Restricted Theism
“The theistic deity is conceived as a transcendent spiritual being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good” (Peterson et al. 2012, 10).

Approaches to Theology:
The Study of God

Natural Theology: Humanity’s search for God

  • Pertains to what can be known about God through creation and reason alone.
  • Associated with the idea of General Revelation

Revealed Theology: God’s self-disclosure to humanity

  • Presumes the existence of God and God’s self-disclosure/revelation in scripture and history
  • Associated with the idea of Special Revelation

Approaches to Theology:
The Study of God

Perfect-Being Theology (Anselmian theology)

  • Part of natural theology
  • God as the Greatest Possible Being

Standard Theism

The Attributes of God

  • Self-Existence
  • Personal
  • Everlasting/Eternal
  • Omnipotent
  • Omniscient
  • Wholly/Perfectly Morally Good

Self-Existence

  • God’s self-existence may also be called his independence, self-sufficiency or aseity (aseity comes from the Latin a se meaning “by itself.”)
  • God is an uncreated and necessary being.
  • Everything else depends on God for its existence, but God’s existence is simply a fact.

God and Creation on Standard Theism

 

God Creation
necessary contingent
uncreated created
independent dependent

   

 

God \(-\) the world \(=\) God

the world \(-\) God \(=\) nothing

Personal

  • has knowledge and awareness
  • able to perform actions
  • able to enter into relationships

Everlasting/Eternal

Theists disagree on whether God is everlasting or eternal.

Everlasting
“God always has existed and always will exist. God, then, exists through time like other persons and things, but unlike others, his existence has neither beginning nor end” (Peterson et al. 2012, 149).
Eternal
“God is timeless, outside of time altogether. God . . . does not experience the world moment by moment as we finite persons do; rather, he experiences the world’s history all at once, in a total simultaneous present” (149).

Omnipotent

“At a given time God can perform any action the performance of which is logically consistent with the past up to that time, and consistent with God’s own nature” (Peterson et al. 2012, 146).

Omniscient

  • God knows and believes all and only true propositions.
  • Or: “At any time, God knows all propositions which are true at that time and are such that God’s knowing them at that time is logically possible, and God never believes anything that is false” (Peterson et al. 2012, 149).

Wholly/Perfectly Morally Good

God has “whatever character traits, principles of action, and so on it may take to qualify a being as morally perfect” (Peterson et al. 2012, 147).

For instance:

  • Love
  • Benevolence
  • Honesty
  • Justice

Moral perfection also seem to imply Omnibenevolence: God desires and works toward the good of all creatures.

Sources

Craig, William Lane. 2008. Reasonable Faith. 3rd ed. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.
Moreland, J. P., and William Lane Craig. 2017. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. 2nd Edition. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic.
Oden, Thomas C. 1992. Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology. New York: HarperOne.
Peterson, Michael L., William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger. 2012. Reason & Religious Belief: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pojman, Louis P. 2006. Philosophy: The Pursuit of Wisdom. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Pojman, Louis P., and Lewis Vaughn, eds. 2017. Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. 10th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.