There is an assumption (I've heard it many times in debates between theists and atheists/agnostics) that non-believers understand only "certain naive versions of God," and that theists in general have a much more subtle view. And yet, I would propose that classical theism (traditionally held by Jewish, Muslim and Christian theologians, the Abrahamic religions) would plausibly assert all of the following statements about God. God is:
- A person (behaves purposively, acts to achieve desired ends which implies ends that have been conceived, thus thinks, imagines, chooses, calculates, etc.)
- A spirit (not physical in any way, no atoms, quarks, energy, etc.)
- All-powerful (they all say that everything that is made comes from God. God can do, according to most theists, anything that is logically possible to do.)
- All-knowing (we can ignore the future, but for sure god must be aware of everything that has happened and is happening, everything that any human can know and more)
- Omnipresent (not localized in space -- if god can know everything and intervene everywhere, then he must be everywhere)
- All good (can never do evil, although whether good is good because god says so, or good and bad are independent of god but recognized by him is up for dispute)
- Interested in humanity (involved, caring, usually assumed to be at an individual level, although theologians disagree on how that interest might be manifested)
- Made the universe (or somehow caused the universe to be, out of nothing. And since the universe contains, at both the macro and micro levels, almost nothing, I would not consider that such a great feat
) - Never changes
- Exists necessarily (see Spinoza)
Now, I realize that there are many here who have quite different conceptions of God, but I would be really interested in understanding which of those 10 points of classical theolgoy those other definitions would explicitly disagree with, and why.
And the reason I would like to know that, is because those classical assumptions about God lead, when one really begins to do the hard analysis, to any number of ludicrous contradictions. And that, of course, means that -- if nothing else -- the God of classical theology cannot exist.
(I paraphrased the 10 points above from "Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy" by David Ramsay Steele)