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A Level Religious Studies, Nature or Attributes of God - Coggle Diagram

- - - - However sex is highly contextual, and changes its nature depending on whether it is part and parcel of a genuine relationship between two human beings, however brief, or merely the satisfaction of a brute urge. Mill was therefore right to believe that pleasures come in higher and lower forms but wrong to think that we could distinguish them on the basis of what we take pleasure in. What matters is how we enjoy them, which means that higher and lower pleasures are not two discrete categories but form a continuum.
        
        Mill tries to address this concern. He argues that utility is not simply a measurement of the psychological feeling of pleasure; rather, there are different qualities of pleasure, and only people with a broad range of experiences can dictate which pleasures are of a higher quality. Thus all actions and experiences are not judged by one reductive standard, but rather according to a variety of different qualities of pleasure in correspondence with the type of experience. Higher pleasures would be weighted heavily by utilitarianism, and Mill argues that they are therefore not cheapened by the utility measurement.
- - - - John 3:16 "For he loved the world so much that he gave his one and only son" The sacrificial death of Christ is seen as conclusive evidence of the Love of God.
      - Due to God's love for his people he is also able to be hurt and angry, "woe to them for they have strayed from me"
      - Psalm 118 "Give thanks to he lord, for he is good; his love endures forever" The Psalms emphasise the reliability of God's love.
  - - - Can God be just, loving and moral and still create hell and commit people to be there for eternity? Is infinite punishment really fair for sins committed in a finite life?
        
        Some Christians might argue that just because God is loving, does not mean that he loves everything—there are some things that God doesn’t love, that in fact he hates, such as murder, or abuse, or selfishness, or pride. Actually, if he is loving, then he will hate these things. It wouldn’t be very loving of God to look at child abuse and say: “Well, I’m not really that bothered.” God is all-loving towards his people, not always their actions. Thus he sends those to hell because he is loving.
        
        C.S.LEWIS argues that in fact people send themselves to hell, saying "the damned are successful rebels to the end, the doors of hell are locked from the inside" Hell is a place without God and all goodness comes from God. So in reality the unbeliever gets what he wants when he goes to hell - God's absence - yet with it he gets what he does not want - the loss of all good.
        
        Additionally God cannot be seen to be very loving If there is no hell. If being sent to hell is just punishment, then the absence of hell would itself be evil.
        
        Furthermore, LEWIS asks to all those arguing against hell, "What are you asking God to do? To wipe put their sins, at all costs and give them a fresh start?" God has - through Jesus' sacrifice - already done all he can do for the so called problem of Hell.
    - - What does it mean to call God good? The Euthyphro suggest that either God defines goodness (and so it become arbitrary) or God is subject to an independent standard of goodness (and so isn't the highest being) - either way one could come to the conclusion that God is not worthy of worship.
        
        The dilemma of often thought to be solved by AQUINAS approach that God can only be command out of his goodness, so by definition no commands could be arbitrary, but also goodness is part of God so it is not higher than him. AQUINAS said "It is impossible for God to will anything but what his own wisdom understands as good"
- - - - Can God have free will himself? The timeless four-dimensionalist God as presented by BOETHIUS and ANSELM does not seem to have free will as his timeless nature makes it such that he can not have options available to him and subsequently choose between them as there is no 'subsequently' for God. Everything God thinks and does is restricted by his timeless and perfect nature. Additionally If God is really seeing the whole of time at once it makes it difficult to understand how he might react to certain situations, such as miracles or prayer.
- - - - Perhaps the idea of God having a range of attributes is an effort to break down God into manageable pieces so that we can comprehend him more easily. For example, if we were trying to understand a magnificent building we might look at it from south then the north, look for a floor plan, then look inside at the different rooms. We would not be able to take it all in at once since it is such an enormous building. This would give rise to apparent contradictions, which only demonstrates the different limited perspectives of the viewers not the fact that the building doesn't exist.
  - - - To Dawkins who sees everything in a naturalistic sense there should be a definitive way to know God Fully. However, if there really is a God with supernatural or transcendental properties then it is part of his nature that we cannot know him fully.
      - Additionally, Aquinas' view that God cannot be known effectively ignores all of the flaws of the attributes of God so in a sense he doesn't really answer the question as to whether those flaws can be solved, but instead claims that they are flaws within out own reasoning and are thus not flaws at all. So in a sense his argument is quite weak as it is not really an argument at all.
        
        Furthermore, Christians have no problem criticising Bertrand Russel when he says that the universe just is, but see no flaw in Aquinas' argument when he does the same for God's attributes, God just is unknowable.
        
        However, Aquinas' argument is very different to Russell's as he provides justification as to why we cannot fully understand God whilst Russell provides no such justification.
- - - - However, most Christian scholars argued that this kind of understanding of omnipotence is mistaken - logical contradictions aren't 'things, ' as doing the logically impossible is nonsense.
        
        Descartes would argue that for God was truly perfect and could do anything then he could make them things. The laws of logic were made by him so although we make think that logical impossibilities are impossible for God who is above logic they are possible.
      - DESCARTES' view of God creates him into an unpredictable being and so, cannot be relied upon. If God is all-powerful, then he is capable of doing evil, being unforgiving, and capable of failure. He is also capable of creating a self-contradiction, for instance, making promises but breaking them. This also makes God's moral rules as being subject to change and simultaneously being true and false, making it difficult for people to have a stable relationship with God or to trust him for salvation.
      - Theodicies put forward by IRENAEUS, AUGUSTINE and HICK suggest God cannot act in any other way without taking free will. Suffering and evil is a price to be moral agents and act autonomously
      - Conversely in Titus 1:2 it reads, "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began". If it was said that God cannot lie, then it either means that he does not have the ability to lie or he limits himself so that he does not lie. This view as supported by scripture contradicts Descartes view of God as it is saying that there is something God cannot do.
      - This view might make God into an arbitrary figure who becomes unpredictable. Additionally an arbitrary God does not fit in with the God seen in the bible. In the bible God makes covenants with his people Genesis 17, he also sends Jesus to die on the cross 1 John 4:9. These actions do not seem like a God who arbitrarily does things, one that a completely random entity.
- - - - However, some argue that this thinking hasn't solved the problem at all, God still knows our choices with certainty, and while this may not be beforehand for God it is still beforehand for us, as we do exist in time.
        
        Alternatively one could argue that there is no way for a silent observer to affect the will of those he watches regardless of whether he can guess with certainty their actions. Even if God knows with certainty what actions we may take, that does not detract from our freedom and responsibility of those actions.
    - - Conversely, it could be said that this is an unfair analogy, as there is only one path that the person can make whereas with life there are multiple paths people can make.
      - If we are to go along with this analogy as God viewing people actions from a lofty peak, that raised questions as to how God can interact with the world if he is just a silent observer.
  - - - However, this view has some problems. According to SCHLIERMACHER, there is nothing God knows that could be untrue. He knows the future rather than predicting it. It's the certainty of omniscient knowledge that makes it difficult to reconcile with human freedom of choice. We cannot, therefore, be held morally responsible for actions if we can only behave in an apparent way; we are limited.