1. The nature/attributes of God Flashcards
What is the meaning of Eternal?
The belief that God exists not inside time, but outside it. God is a-temporal.
What is the meaning of Benevolent?
The belief that God is all loving.
What is the meaning of Everlasting?
What is the meaning of Predestination?
The belief that God already decided what will happen to you.
What is the meaning of Omnipotence?
The belief that God is all-powerfull.
What is the meaning of Omniscience?
The belief that God is all-knowing.
What is the meaning of Timeless?
The belief that God is outside of time
What are the 3 interpretations of God’s Omnipotence?
- God’s ability to do anything including the logically impossible.
- God’s ability to do what is logically possible for God to do.
- Omnipotence is a statement of the power of God.
Explain God’s ability to do anything including the logically impossible.
Interpretations of God’s Omnipotence
- Rene Descartes View.
- God is the creator of the universe, including the logic within it.
- God is above maths & logic, so not subject or bound to it.
- God can change it if he wan’ts to.
- God isn’t limited by our understanding of what is logically posible.
Explain God’s ability to do what is logically possible for God to do.
Interpretations of God’s Omnipotence
- St Thomas Aquinas.
- Certain Limitations placed on God. Including changing history, sinning, logical traps. E.g. Creating square circles.
- Omnipotence = only logically possible actions.
- It is a limitation of our own understanding, not Gods, e.g. if history = events that have happened then we cann’t logically expect God to make events that have happened, not happen.
Explain Omnipotence is a statement of the power of God.
Interpretations of God’s Omnipotence
Bible = primary source of understadning of God being omnipotent (Judeo-Christian Tradition).
-** Propositional** Reading: Accept all propositions about God’s power = statements of fact.
- Some statements, e.g. ‘God held the sun in the sky, give varied + inexplicable gauged for God’s power.
- Non-propositional Reading: Statements have a symbolic meaning + reflections of people’s understanding about God. E.g. ‘God made the world in 6 days’.
- However cannot accurately know what God’s monipotence is.
How can a benevolent God allow anyone to go to hell?
- Roman Catholic Church: God doesn’t want people to go to hell, God = love + humans have free will. Love must be all encompassing and all actions must be accepted. God bound by nature to allow hell.
- Hell = place people send themselves through own rejection of God’s love.
What is C.S.Lewis’s view on hell?
- ‘the door to hell is locked from the inside.’
- It is we who choose to condemn ourselves, not God who wishes to condemn us.
Boethius questioned how God could fairly reward and punish, particularly if we did not have will to decide our own actions?
- He resolved through the voice of Lady Philosophy, God has a different perspective on time. God has the ability to see every human being’s action in the present of his or her action.
- God can see all human action without interfering with it.
- God can see all human action across time, like an observer, God alone can judge human actions as they are free under thr gaze of God’s infalliable Providence.
- Fairness + Judgement is part of God’s Benevolence.
Explain Boethius argument for unlimited knowledge.
- Through voice of Lady Philosophy, God’s omniscience = unlimted. God knows all because of peculiar nature of God. God knows past, present and the future, because all time is present to God and so God has all knowledge of time.
Explain Aquinas argument for unlimited knowledge.
- Knowledge = immaterial, God who is immaterial, can possess knowledge.
- Nothing God cannot know.
- E.g. God reveals to Job in scripture, God himself put the stars iin the sky and built the foundations of the earth, so God alone knows all things.
- Any decision is known to God and nothing can fool him.
Explain Swinburne’s argument for limited knowledge.
- Didn’t accept God has all knowledge as it doesn’t fit with scripture where God responds to human actions in the world.
- Conflict between unlimited knowledge and human free will.
- God’s knowledge = limited as only knows the present + the past.
- God cannot know the future, so God cannot know our actions before they happen. God has no accountability for evil + suffering as God isn’t aware of it.
- E.g. Genesis, 1 Samuel. God learns Adam + Eve disobeyed him & displeased with David’s actions after all taken place.
What is Boethius argument for a timeless God?
- To solve conflict of omniscience + free will, Boethius tried to show that God’s nature = eternal.
- ## God existed completely apart from the world.
What did Augustine say about a timeless God?
God had to be transcendent otherwise God couldn’t be the creator of the world.
What is Boethius example to support his argument of a timeless God?
- A man watching another man sitting. (One places a necessity on the other)
- A must be sitting if B sees A sitting.
- B must be watching A sitting if A is actually sitting.
- God sees beforehand what I do and then necessitates it.
- Gods perspective = eternal God outside time
Why Boethius suggest that the problem was in the human understanding of eternity, not the problem of God’s knowledge?
- Knowledge is not dependent on the subject but the knower.
- E.g. Adult use a phone better than a baby.
- God knows us more sophisticatedly than we know each other.
- Presents 4 Spheres of knowledge.
- Gods eternal perspective = sees every event in history in perfect present, not in temporal sequence but a-temporal present.
- Gods time = static. Our time = dynamic.
- God knows everything without influencing them.
What was Augustine’s view on an eternal God?
Problem = considering a ‘time’ before God as God created time.
- God = transcendent (a-temporal + outside of space).
- God’s eternity = a timeless God.
- Questions of God’s nature must be considered from a non-spatiotemporal perspective.
- God = outside time, God cannot change as change requires time.
- God = immutable, suggesting God wills from eternity.
- Never a time when God changed what he wills. E.g. God willed the universe eternally.
What was Aquinas’s view on an eternal God?
- Influenced by Boethius + Augustine.
- God sees everything in an eternal, simultaneous present.
- God is the unmoved mover, uncaused cause.
- Only makes sense if God is eternal transcendent being.
- God = timeless.
What was Anthony Kenny’s criticism of Aquinas’s view on an eternal God?
- If own writings are simultaneous with eternity as is Rome’s burning under Nero. Writing of Kenny’s paper happens simultaneously with Nero’s actions.
- Criticism = misunderstanding.
- God sees simultaneously, doesn’t mean 2 temporal events happen simultaneously.
- Temporal events follow time. God observes simultaneously due to peculiar nature of God being timeless.
