God

…proofs for the existence of God. The final proof, presented in the Fifth Meditation, begins with the proposition that Descartes has an innate idea of God as a perfect being. It concludes that God necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological argument for…

…science because they believed that God is omnipotent and that his will is entirely free; from this it follows that God could, if he so wished, make any apparent truth a falsehood and any apparent falsehood—even a logical contradiction—a truth. The human intellect, by contrast, is finite; thus, humans can…

…many religions, the abode of God or the gods, as well as of angels, deified humans, the blessed dead, and other celestial beings. It is often conceived as an expanse that overarches the earth, stretching overhead like a canopy, dome, or vault and encompassing the sky and upper atmosphere; the…

…or in the oneness of God. As such, it is distinguished from polytheism, the belief in the existence of many gods, from atheism, the belief that there is no god, and from agnosticism, the belief that the existence or nonexistence of a god or of gods is unknown or unknowable.…

…internal to the mind of God gave a very different character to the whole conception of the soul-mind and the goal of its knowledge. Mainly under the influence of the Christian philosopher St. Augustine (354–430), the vocation of the soul was redefined as an aspiration for a vision of and…

…the being of an infinite God—the very consciousness that had led so many into skepticism and religious despair—was the key to a revitalization of authentic religious faith understood as a “leap” into another dimension of reality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the great task for human beings was to fill the…

The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and existence. In general, it can be said that there is not one concept of God but many, even among monotheistic traditions. The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is…

As attested in the Bible, God established a covenant with the Hebrew people and gathered the disparate tribes into one religious nation, Israel, taking steps to overcome the alienation between God and humans and to reconcile God’s people. The tradition of ancient Judaism, therefore, was based on the reality of…

Theism’s view of God can be clarified by contrasting it with those of deism, pantheism, and mysticism.

…Trinity—that is, the threeness of God represented in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine’s Africa had been left out of much of the fray, and most of what was written on the subject was in Greek, a language Augustine barely knew and had little access to. But he was…

…the presence of a powerful God.

…leapt to the defense of God’s ways. That his readers and the doubters whose murmurs he had heard were themselves pagans is unlikely. At the very least, it is clear that his intended audience comprised many people who were at least outwardly affiliated with the Christian church. During the next…

…of his reverence for a God who is remote, distant, and mysterious as well as powerfully and unceasingly present in all times and places. “Totus ubique” was Augustine’s oft-repeated mantra for this doctrine, “The whole of him everywhere.”