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Classical theism holds that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and eternal. But what do these attributes actually mean, are they internally coherent, and do they sit together without contradiction? The AQA 7062 specification focuses on exactly these classical divine attributes and the puzzles they generate — the paradox of the stone (omnipotence), the foreknowledge–free will problem (omniscience), the Euthyphro dilemma (omnibenevolence), and the dispute over whether eternity means timeless or everlasting — and sets against classical theism the radical alternative of process theology (the God of Whitehead, Hartshorne and Griffin, who is neither omnipotent nor the sole creator). Getting the nature of God right matters for the whole course: every other topic — the problem of evil, miracles, religious experience, the arguments for God — presupposes some conception of what kind of God is in question. The AO2 task throughout is to judge whether the classical attributes can be coherently held together, and whether the process alternative is a rescue or a surrender.
Omnipotence means God is all-powerful — but "able to do anything" needs careful definition, and the difficulty is exposed by the paradox of the stone: Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?
| If God CAN create such a stone | …then there is something God cannot do (lift it) — so God is not omnipotent |
|---|---|
| If God CANNOT create such a stone | …then there is something God cannot do (create it) — so God is not omnipotent |
Either way, it seems, no being can be omnipotent. The standard responses turn on what omnipotence includes:
Key term: Omnipotence (and the paradox of the stone) — the attribute of being all-powerful. The dominant view (Aquinas) restricts it to whatever is logically possible, so that "a stone God cannot lift" is no genuine task; Descartes extends it even to the logically impossible.
A further refinement notes that there are things God cannot do that everyone agrees do not count against omnipotence — God cannot sin, lie, break a promise or cease to exist — because these are imperfections, incompatible with God's perfect nature. So omnipotence is best understood as the power to do all that is logically possible and consistent with being God, which already shows the attribute must be defined in concert with the others.
There is a deeper objection lurking here, sometimes called the paradox of omnipotence in its stronger form. It is not merely whether God can make an unliftable stone, but whether an omnipotent being can create anything genuinely independent of itself — for instance, free creatures whose choices God does not control. If God can create free agents, then God has given away some power (God cannot now guarantee what they will freely do); if God cannot create such agents, there is something God cannot do. This version cannot be dismissed as a mere verbal trick, because free creatures are not logically impossible, and it connects omnipotence directly to the free-will defence in the problem of evil: a God who limits the exercise of divine power to make room for genuine freedom is a coherent and arguably more admirable conception than one who micromanages every event. Many theologians therefore speak of God's omnipotence as self-limiting — God voluntarily restrains divine power (in creation, in covenant, supremely in the self-emptying of the Incarnation, the kenosis of Philippians 2) — which preserves omnipotence while explaining the world's apparent autonomy. The process theologians, by contrast, will say this concedes their central point: that a God who works by love must work by persuasion rather than coercion.
Omniscience means God knows all truths — past, present and future. Its sharpest difficulty is the foreknowledge–free will problem: if God knew, before I was born, exactly what I would choose tomorrow, in what sense am I free to choose otherwise?
The argument for incompatibility:
Key term: The foreknowledge–free will problem — if God's infallible knowledge that I will do A is already true before I act, it appears I cannot do otherwise, so the action is not free; divine omniscience seems to entail determinism.
Three classic responses:
| Response | Source | How it dissolves the problem |
|---|---|---|
| Timeless / eternal knowledge | Boethius (a classic contributor to this debate) | God is outside time and sees all events in one "eternal present"; God does not fore-know my act but sees it timelessly, as I see a present event — and my watching a thing happen does not make it unfree. |
| Middle knowledge (Molinism) | Luis de Molina (1535–1600) | God knows the counterfactuals of freedom — what each free creature would freely choose in any circumstance — so God can know my choice without causing it. |
| Open theism | Clark Pinnock, William Hasker | The future free act is not yet a truth to be known; God knows all truths (so remains omniscient) but future free choices are genuinely open until made. |
Each has costs. Boethius's solution depends on the contested claim that God is timeless (see below), and critics (notably the modern philosopher Anthony Kenny) argue it only relocates the difficulty rather than removing it: if all my acts are eternally present to God and God's knowledge is infallible, then it is still fixed — from my temporal standpoint — that I will do A, so it is unclear how timelessness restores my power to do otherwise. Boethius himself added a subtle reply, distinguishing simple necessity (what must be, full stop) from conditional necessity (what must be given that it is being observed) — just as your walking is "necessary" while I see you walk, yet you walk freely — so God's seeing my act makes it conditionally but not simply necessary, leaving the freedom intact. Molinism faces the "grounding objection": what makes the counterfactuals of freedom (what I would freely do in circumstance C) true, if those choices are never actually made? There seems to be no fact to ground them. Open theism preserves freedom most straightforwardly but at the price of limiting God's knowledge of the future free, which many regard as a denial of full omniscience (though open theists insist it is not, since they hold there is no truth yet about the future free act for God to fail to know). A further classic option, compatibilism, simply denies that foreknowledge and freedom conflict, by holding that "free" means "able to act on one's own desires without external constraint" — which is consistent with the act being foreknown. Note that Boethius is a classic contributor to this debate rather than a scholar the 7062 specification "sets"; cite him for the timeless-knowledge solution, not as a mandated authority.
Omnibenevolence means God is perfectly good — all-loving, all-just. Two challenges dominate. The first is the problem of evil: if God is all-good (and all-powerful), why is there suffering? The spec-named responses are Hick's soul-making theodicy, the free will defence, and the process theodicy of Griffin (treated in detail in the evil and suffering topic); each tries, in different ways, to reconcile perfect goodness with the reality of evil.
The second, which the specification names specifically under omnibenevolence, is the Euthyphro dilemma (from Plato's Euthyphro), adapted to theism: Is an action good because God commands/wills it, or does God command it because it is (independently) good?
Key term: The Euthyphro dilemma — the dilemma for divine goodness: either (a) the good is good because God wills it (so morality is arbitrary — God could have made cruelty good), or (b) God wills it because it is good (so there is a standard of goodness independent of and above God, compromising God's ultimacy).
Neither horn is comfortable. Embrace (a) — theological voluntarism / divine command — and goodness becomes arbitrary: had God commanded torturing the innocent, it would thereby be good, which seems monstrous, and "God is good" shrinks to the empty tautology "God does what God wills." The voluntarist also struggles with biblical episodes such as the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), where God appears to command killing — does that show that anything God commands is good, however repugnant? Embrace (b) and there is a standard of goodness higher than God, to which even God must conform — undermining God's sovereignty and aseity (self-existence), and making God not the ultimate source of all things but a being answerable to an external moral order, as Zeus was answerable to Fate.
The favoured theistic escape (Aquinas; in modern form Robert Adams's "modified divine command theory") is to go between the horns: goodness is grounded neither in an external standard above God nor in God's arbitrary will, but in God's own nature. God is goodness itself (Aquinas's identification of God with the Good); God wills the good because God's will flows necessarily from God's essentially good and loving nature, not from a sovereign whim. Cruelty is "unwillable" by God not because an external rule forbids it but because it is contrary to what God is — so morality is neither arbitrary (it is fixed by God's unchanging nature, not God's caprice) nor independent of God (it is God's nature). Adams refines this by identifying the good with resemblance to God and moral obligation with the commands of a loving God, so a command to gratuitous cruelty would not bind, because it could not issue from a loving God. Critics reply that this only relocates the dilemma — we can still ask "is God's nature good because it is God's, or by some independent standard of goodness it happens to meet?" — but defenders hold that at the level of being-itself the question loses its grip, since "good" just means, at bottom, conformity to the ultimate nature of reality, and there is nothing more ultimate than God against which to measure God. Whether this is a genuine solution or a sophisticated restatement of horn (a) is a live AO2 question.
A central dispute concerns what God's eternity means, and it bears directly on omniscience and on whether God can be personal.
On the timeless (atemporal) view, God exists wholly outside time, experiencing no succession of past, present and future but possessing the whole of life in one changeless "now." Boethius (c. 480–524), in The Consolation of Philosophy, gave the classic formula: eternity is "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life" (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio). God does not foresee the future from a distance but beholds all times at once, as a watcher on a hilltop sees the whole road that travellers experience stretch by stretch.
On the everlasting (temporal, sempiternal) view, defended by Swinburne, God exists within time and does experience succession, but without beginning or end — God has always existed and always will. Swinburne argues that a personal God must be temporal: to act, to respond to a prayer, to deliberate, or to love someone in a living relationship all seem to require temporal sequence (a response comes after the request, an action brings about a change that did not obtain before), and a wholly timeless, changeless being could do none of these. A timeless God looks more like an abstract Platonic principle than the living, acting, covenant-making God of the Bible, who is repeatedly described as responding, relenting and acting at particular moments.
The dispute is not merely terminological; each view buys an advantage at a price. The timeless view elegantly defuses the foreknowledge problem (God does not foresee, but eternally beholds) and secures God's transcendence, immutability and independence from the flux of time — but it strains to explain how such a God could do anything in time, answer a prayer offered today, or know the tensed truth about what is happening now (a timeless being seems unable to know "it is now 3pm," since that truth changes). The everlasting view secures a genuinely personal, active, responsive God — but it appears to make God subject to time, to deny the strong immutability the tradition prized, and to put real foreknowledge of free future acts back in question (since an everlasting God, located in the present, faces the original foreknowledge dilemma head-on). A theologian must therefore decide which they will qualify — God's timelessness or God's personal responsiveness — and the choice ramifies across the whole doctrine of God. Note again that Boethius here is cited as the classic exponent of the timeless view, not as a scholar the 7062 specification formally "sets."
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