Existence of God
Part 1: What is God Like?
1 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.)
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).
2 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
Perfect-Being Theology (Anselmian theology)
- Part of natural theology
- God as the Greatest Possible Being
3 Standard Theism
The Attributes of God
- Self-Existence
- Personal
- Everlasting/Eternal
- Omnipotent
- Omniscient
- Wholly/Perfectly Morally Good
3.1 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 | Creation |
|---|---|
| necessary | contingent |
| uncreated | created |
| independent | dependent |
God \(-\) the world \(=\) God
the world \(-\) God \(=\) nothing
3.2 Personal
- has knowledge and awareness
- able to perform actions
- able to enter into relationships
3.3 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).
3.4 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).
3.5 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).
3.6 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.
References
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.