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One Kind of God—and a Few Alternatives

Every newborn baby is an atheist. An atheist is a person without any belief in God.

Atheism is the absence of a certain type of belief. We do not have a special word for lack of belief in psychic spoon-bending, unicorns, cold fusion, or alien abductions, but we do have a special word for lack of belief in God. This usage arose because for many centuries deeply devout theists were in control of the state and used it to assault people whose opinions they found distressing. For a person to admit to being a non-believer in God could easily result in that person being vilified, tortured, and killed.

Since atheism is merely a negative aspect of people’s beliefs, atheists are not united in any of their other beliefs. To illustrate this diversity, here’s a handful of notable atheists (though not all notable for being atheists):

Lance Armstrong
Isaac Asimov
Dave Barry
Béla Bartók
Warren Buffett
Penn Jillette and R.J. Teller
Katherine Hepburn
H.L. Mencken
George Orwell
Pablo Picasso
Ayn Rand
Jean-Paul Sartre
Thomas Szasz
Mark Twain
H.G. Wells
Joss Whedon

As you can see, atheists are a mixed bunch,¹ and you must not expect them all to agree on anything except their atheism. An atheist, as I have defined it, may not even prefer to be called an atheist, and atheists don’t even agree on what to do about atheism.

God’s Ten Qualities

Different people have many different ideas of what ‘God’ Means. But there is one quite precise conception of God, traditionally held by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theologians. I will refer to this as the God of ‘classical theism’.

According to classical theism, God is:

1. a person

2. a spirit

3. all-powerful (omnipotent)

4. all-knowing (omniscient)

5. everywhere at once (omnipresent)

6. all-good (omnibenevolent)

7. interested in humans

8. creator of every existing thing other than himself

9. unchanging (immutable)

10. necessary.

Any Christian, Jewish, or Muslim religious leader who questioned any one of these ten qualities would not be considered entirely orthodox.

Such lists of the qualities of God have often been compiled, and they do not seriously disagree. For example, the Christian philosopher Van Inwagen (2006, pp. 20-32) provides a list which includes all of the above with the exception of 2 and 7, though his discussion makes clear that he takes 2 and 7 for granted. His list also includes God’s “eternality” and his “uniqueness,” and his discussion of #3 suggests that he may not accept God’s omnipotence in the traditional sense. Other lists include God’s ‘perfection’, his ‘freedom’, his indivisible simplicity, or his ‘all-merciful’ quality, but I think it’s most convenient to omit these from my list.

Since reference to these ten qualities of God will keep cropping up in my discussion, I will now briefly expand upon each of them.

1. God is a person. A person behaves purposively—acts to achieve desired ends he or she has mentally preconceived. God has conscious preferences and behaves intelligently to bring about what he prefers. God thinks, imagines, chooses, calculates, and plans. In traditional accounts he experiences emotions, though some theologians repudiate this.

Theists usually say that referring to God as male is just a manner of speaking. God really has no sex. Albeit, the plumbing of the virgin birth would have aroused more comment if a virgin Joseph had been selected to impregnate an unembodied female God.

2. God is a spirit. This means that God is not physical. He is not made of atoms or quarks, or superstrings, or of energy. He cannot be detected by the naked senses or by scientific instruments. No flickering needle on a dial could ever cause some research worker to say ‘Hey, we’ve got some God activity here’.

3. God is almighty, omnipotent. This means he can do anything he likes, as long as it’s logically possible. Most theists say that God cannot do anything which is logically impossible, such as make a square circle. But with that restriction, he can do anything. For example, he could wipe out the entire physical cosmos in an instant, completely effortlessly. He could then bring a new cosmos into existence with entirely different physical laws, again completely effortlessly. Or he could intervene piecemeal in the cosmos, in a trillion different ways simultaneously, again without effort, and without his attention being distracted in the slightest from other matters.

4. God is all-knowing, omniscient. God knows everything every human has ever known, and a lot more besides. There’s nothing that can be known that God does not actually know. He knows every detail of the past. Some say he also knows every detail of the future, though this is disputed.

5. God is everywhere at once. He is not localized in space. God is, for instance, in the room with you as you read these words. As the Quran puts it (50:16), he’s closer to you than your jugular vein. And he’s just as fully present in the center of the Sun, on the icy surface of Pluto, and in every particle of the Horsehead Nebula, 1,600 light years away.

For all practical purposes, the claim that God can accurately perceive what is going on everywhere and can actively intervene everywhere is equivalent to the claim that he is everywhere.

6. God is perfectly good. He does no wrong and never could do any wrong. Theologians don’t agree on whether good is good and bad is bad because God has decided it that way, or whether good and bad are defined independently of God. But they do agree that, one way or another, God is entirely good and never commits evil.

7. God is interested in humans. He is usually reported to be intensely concerned about the life of each individual human. For example, he cares whether individual humans believe in his existence and, if they do, whether they have the appropriately awestruck attitude. Many people assume that God’s interest in individual humans follows automatically from his perfect goodness, but I think it’s so remarkable that it deserves a separate listing here.

8. God made the entire physical universe. If there’s more than one universe, God made the whole lot of them. And if there’s a spiritual universe, apart from God himself, God made that too. He made the universe, or all universes, out of nothing (‘ex nihilo’).

9. God never changes. He is “the same, yesterday, and today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). This at least means that his character never changes, but it’s usually taken to mean more than that, for example that he cannot learn from experience because he already knows everything. Theologians differ somewhat on this point.

They also differ quite sharply on a related point, whether God has existed for all of infinite time, or whether instead time is finite and God is ‘outside time’.

10. God is necessary. What this means is that it’s inconceivable that God could not exist: he has to exist. Why would anyone think this about God? We’ll look at some reasons in Chapters 6 and 7.

The God of Classical Theism and Other Gods

Today classical theism dominates the world of organized religion. Over half the world’s population is classified as Christians or Muslims. You will occasionally find individual Christians or Muslims who disclose in conversation that their conception of God is not quite the same as classical theism, but the leading spokesmen of these religions are all committed to classical theism. Several other major religions, including Judaism, Sikhism, and Baha’ism, also embrace classical theism or something very close to it.

Anyone reading that list of ten qualities will probably notice that it’s difficult to reconcile some of them with others. And it’s hard to reconcile some of them with observable facts about the world. Most obviously, it’s tricky to reconcile God’s all-powerful-ness and his all-goodness with the existence of the amount of evil we can observe in the world. (We’ll take a look at these difficulties in Part III.)

I find it natural to help the theist out by explaining these ten qualities as poetic exaggerations, and to develop some notion of a limited God or gods. After all, in most stages of history, people who have believed in anything that might loosely be called a god have not believed in any entity with these ten qualities. The Sumerian gods, Egyptian gods, Germanic gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, or Aztec gods do not possess these ten qualities, or even a majority of the ten. And to this day, no Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, or Jain believes in a God with a majority of these ten qualities. The current predominance of belief in the God of classical theism is a product of the evolution of human culture over the last two thousand years.

But most theologians don’t want my help and they don’t want a limited God or a godling. They want a God with the ten qualities. So it wouldn’t be of much use for me to take up most of this book developing a more defensible concept of God, in order to assemble a stronger hypothesis to attack. Most of the time, since I want to respond to the predominant kind of belief in God that is actually out there, I have to focus on the theologians’ God, and that means the God of classical theism, the God with these ten qualities.

However, some of the arguments can also apply to other kinds of gods. For example, John Stuart Mill entertained the notion of a Creator, who was very powerful by human standards, very knowledgeable, and fundamentally benign, yet limited in his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, and his benevolence towards humans. Mill accepted the possibility of such a God because he gave some weight to the Design Argument, which has always been the most popular argument for any kind of God, including the God of classical theism. If I can show that the Design Argument fails (and I do show just this in Chapters 3 and 4), then I refute one major argument for the God of classical theism, and I also incidentally refute Mill’s argument for his more limited God.

Before we get into the main discussion, let’s take a quick look at some concepts of God which do not comply with classical theism. These are gods who lack some of the ten qualities.

Alternatives to Classical Theism

A STUPENDOUSLY GREAT BUT STRICTLY LIMITED GOD

Just imagine a God who has qualities vastly greater than those of any human, or of any conceivable evolved animal, but not almighty. He is millions of times more powerful than any other intelligent entity, but not unlimited in his power. He may have a benign feeling for humans, but is not greatly concerned about their welfare. Olaf Stapledon’s “Star Maker” is dissatisfied with this universe and hopes to do better next time.

The arguments for and against this kind of God are very similar to those for the God of classical theism. It’s not so easy to show that the limited God doesn’t exist, because the believer in a limited God is claiming much less. But I can’t see any reason to take seriously the hypothesis that such a God exists.

THE GOD OF PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process theology is a fairly new trend in the thinking of some theists. Creation is going on now and we are participating in it. In opposition to classical theism, process theology holds that God is powerless to act except through his creation, which includes you and me.

Process theology has made serious criticisms of classical theism but has not done anything to develop a new case for God’s existence. Like belief in a limited God, process theology is not as easy to refute as traditional theism, simply because its claims are weaker.

GODLINGS

By a godling I understand some being like the Buddhist devas, or like the god Thor, or like Galactus in the early Fantastic Four comics.² A godling is superhuman but not supernatural. The universe is a big place and we can’t rule out the possibility that such evolved beings with powers vastly greater than ours might exist somewhere. But if they do, it’s almost certain that our paths will never cross.

PANTHEISM

Pantheism is the theory that God is the universe. It’s very hard to see any difference between pantheism and atheism. Though there are all kinds of pantheists, and there is no pantheist party line, most pantheists don’t claim that the universe thinks or acts. Perhaps the idea is that we ought to worship the universe, but atheism has nothing to say about what, if anything, we ought to worship, only about what exists, and we all agree that the universe exists.

The universe is so big compared with the human world that if the universe could have preferences or interests, we wouldn’t be able to affect their realization one way or the other. So even if the universe does have purposes or goals, that’s no concern of ours.

PANENTHEISM

Panentheism isn’t always opposed to classical theism. I mention it here because it could be confused with pantheism. Process theologians are radical panentheists, but most panentheists are not process theologians.

The distinctive view of panentheism is that the universe is not God but is part of God. This doesn’t seem to lead anywhere interesting. My fingernails, lungs, and brain are part of me, but my fingernails are more expendable than my lungs, which are more expendable than my brain.

DEISM

Like pantheism, deism comes in various colors and chest sizes. Deism usually sees God as a benign force, rather than truly a person, and it sees God as having set things off a long time ago, and then left them alone to work themselves out. This theory doesn’t have any advantages over the theory that there is no God.

Deism was popular in the eighteenth century—most of the Founders of the United States were deists. The name ‘deism’ doesn’t have much of a following today, but deism itself seems to be fairly popular in an unorganized grassroots fashion.

The religious assumptions of the Star Wars movies are deist, and therefore incompatible with classical theism. Everyone knows that Albert Einstein believed in ‘God’. However, Einstein was emphatic in rejecting the personal God of classical theism, and we can classify him as a deist. In 2004 it was widely reported that the well-known atheist philosopher Antony Flew had come to believe in ‘God’, though the God he had come to accept was deist rather than classical theist.

This may seem like a whole lot of nit-picking, but look at it this way: Today’s Christians are very ready to appeal to the fact that some notable people believe in ‘God’, while yesterday’s Christians would have burned at the stake anyone who upheld the God of Einstein, Flew, or George Lucas—not to mention François-Marie Voltaire, Tom Paine, or Thomas Jefferson.