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61-428: God is conceived as unique and perfect, free from all faults, deficiencies, and defects, and further held to be omnipotent , omnipresent , omniscient , and completely infinite in all of his attributes, who has no partner or equal, being the sole creator of everything in existence. In Judaism, God is never portrayed in any image . The Torah specifically forbade ascribing partners to share his singular sovereignty, as he

122-590: A personal god , meaning that humans can have a relationship with God and vice versa. Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon wrote that "God as conceived by Judaism is not only the First Cause, the Creative Power, and the World Reason, but also the living and loving Father of Men. He is not only cosmic but also personal....Jewish monotheism thinks of God in terms of definite character or personality, while pantheism

183-448: A Cartesian sense, would mean the omnipotent being is above logic, a view supported by René Descartes . He issues this idea in his Meditations on First Philosophy . This view is called universal possibilism. According to Hindu philosophy the essence of Brahman can never be understood or known since Brahman is beyond both existence and non-existence, transcending and including time, causation and space, and thus can never be known in

244-580: A God who is present, involved, near, intimate, and concerned for and vulnerable to what happens in this world. Modern Jewish thinkers claim that there is an "alternate stream of tradition exemplified by ... Maimonides", who, along with several other Jewish philosophers, rejected the idea of a personal God. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 's 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Americans who identify as Jewish by religion are twice as likely to favor ideas of God as "an impersonal force" over

305-545: A deity is or could be omnipotent, or take the view that, by choosing to create creatures with free will , a deity has chosen to limit divine omnipotence. In Conservative and Reform Judaism , and some movements within Protestant Christianity , including open theism , deities are said to act in the world through persuasion, and not by coercion (this is a matter of choice—a deity could act miraculously, and perhaps on occasion does so—while for process theism it

366-505: A modified view of omnipotence was also articulated by Alfred North Whitehead in the early 20th century and expanded upon by Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne proceeded within the context of the theological system known as process theology. Thomas Jay Oord argues that omnipotence dies a death of a thousand philosophical qualifications. To make any sense, the word must undergo various logical, ontological, mathematical, theological, and existential qualifications so that it loses specificity. In

427-399: A part of normal development. D. W. Winnicott took a more positive view of a belief in early omnipotence, seeing it as essential to the child's well-being; and "good-enough" mothering as essential to enable the child to "cope with the immense shock of loss of omnipotence" —as opposed to whatever "prematurely forces it out of its narcissistic universe". Some monotheists reject the view that

488-473: A single entity has given rise to considerable theological debate, prominently including the problem of evil , the question of why such a deity would permit the existence of evil. It is accepted in philosophy and science that omnipotence can never be effectively understood. The word omnipotence derives from the Latin prefix omni -, meaning "all", and the word potens , meaning "potent" or "powerful". Thus

549-506: A tool to relate to the infinite, although it should not be confused with the real thing. Omnipotence Omnipotence is the quality of having unlimited power . Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions , omnipotence is often listed as one of God 's characteristics, along with omniscience , omnipresence , and omnibenevolence . The presence of all these properties in

610-506: A world so constituted rather than by another. Indeed, the production of secondary causes, capable of accomplishing certain effects, requires greater power than the direct accomplishment of these same effects. On the other hand, even though no creature existed, God's power would not be barren, for "creatures are not an end to God." Regarding the deity's power, medieval theologians contended that there are certain things that even an omnipotent deity cannot do. The statement "a deity can do anything"

671-551: Is corporeal or anthropomorphic , views that Jewish sages sometimes rejected; rather, "personality" refers not to physicality, but to "inner essence, psychical, rational, and moral". However, other traditional Jewish texts, for example, the Shi'ur Qomah of the Heichalot literature , describe the measurements of limbs and body parts of God. Jews believe that "God can be experienced" but also that "God cannot be understood", because "God

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732-497: Is necessarily true is one whose negation is self-contradictory. It is sometimes objected that this aspect of omnipotence involves the contradiction that God cannot do all that He can do; but the argument is sophistical; it is no contradiction to assert that God can realize whatever is possible, but that no number of actualized possibilities exhausts His power. Omnipotence is perfect power, free from all mere potentiality. Hence, although God does not bring into external being all that He

793-420: Is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy". Similarly Freud concluded that "we can detect an element of megalomania in most other forms of paranoic disorder. We are justified in assuming that this megalomania is essentially of an infantile nature and that, as development proceeds, it is sacrificed to social considerations". Freud saw megalomania as an obstacle to psychoanalysis . In

854-424: Is a matter of necessity—creatures have inherent powers that a deity cannot, even in principle, override). Deities are manifested in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, not necessarily by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. Process theology rejects unlimited omnipotence on a philosophical basis, arguing that omnipotence as classically understood would be less than perfect, and

915-459: Is able to accomplish, His power must not be understood as passing through successive stages before its effect is accomplished. The activity of God is simple and eternal, without evolution or change. The transition from possibility to actuality or from act to potentiality, occurs only in creatures. When it is said that God can or could do a thing, the terms are not to be understood in the sense in which they are applied to created causes, but as conveying

976-670: Is an impersonal force or ideal rather than a supernatural being concerned with the universe. The name of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton ( Hebrew : יהוה , romanized :  YHWH ). Jews traditionally do not pronounce it, and instead refer to God as HaShem , literally "the Name". In prayer, the Tetragrammaton is substituted with the pronunciation Adonai , meaning "My Lord". This

1037-399: Is an important concept in many lives and religions . God or gods are often said to endure eternally, or exist for all time, forever, without beginning or end. Religious views of an afterlife may speak of it in terms of eternity or eternal life . Christian theologians may regard immutability , like the eternal Platonic forms , as essential to eternity. Eternity is often symbolized by

1098-524: Is considered to be the absolute one without a second, indivisible, and incomparable being, who is similar to nothing and nothing is comparable to him. Thus, God is unlike anything in or of the world as to be beyond all forms of human thought and expression. The names of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible are the Tetragrammaton ( Hebrew : יהוה , romanized :  YHWH ) and Elohim . Other names of God in traditional Judaism include Adonai, El-Elyon , El Shaddai , and Shekhinah . According to

1159-709: Is content with a view of God as impersonal." This is shown in the Jewish liturgy , such as in the Adon Olam hymn , which includes a "confident affirmation" that "He is my God, my living God...Who hears and answers." Edward Kessler writes that Hebrew Bible "portrays an encounter with a God who cares passionately and who addresses humanity in the quiet moments of its existence." British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests that God "is not distant in time or detached, but passionately engaged and present". The "predicate "personal" as applied to God" does not necessarily mean that God

1220-412: Is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them

1281-424: Is itself partly active, then there must be some resistance, however slight, to the "absolute" power, and how can power which is resisted be absolute? The argument can be stated as follows: For example, although someone might control a lump of jelly-pudding almost completely, the inability of that pudding to stage any resistance renders that person's power rather unimpressive. Power can only be said to be great if it

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1342-414: Is not a power but a defect or infirmity. In response to questions of a deity performing impossibilities, e.g. making square circles, Aquinas says that "everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have

1403-402: Is only sensible with an assumed suppressed clause, "that implies the perfection of true power". This standard scholastic answer allows that acts of creatures such as walking can be performed by humans but not by a deity. Rather than an advantage in power, human acts such as walking, sitting, or giving birth were possible only because of a defect in human power. The capacity to sin , for example,

1464-477: Is other than God merely by way of absolute equivocation. There is, in truth, no relation in any respect between God and any of God's creatures. In Kabbalistic thought, the term "Godhead" usually refers to the concept of Ein Sof (אין סוף), which is the aspect of God that lies beyond the emanations ( sephirot ). They are considered to be a dynamic and organic unity whose nature depends on humanity. The "knowability" of

1525-532: Is over something that has defenses and its own agenda. If a deity's power is to be great, it must therefore be over beings that have at least some of their own defenses and agenda. Thus, if a deity does not have absolute power, it must therefore embody some of the characteristics of power, and some of the characteristics of persuasion. This view is known as dipolar theism . The most popular works espousing this point are from Harold Kushner (in Judaism). The need for

1586-564: Is possible to understand one thing from another. However, concerning Ein Sof, there is no aspect anywhere to search or probe; nothing can be known of it, for it is hidden and concealed in the mystery of absolute nothingness. In modern articulations of traditional Judaism, God has been speculated to be the eternal , omnipotent , and omniscient creator of the universe , as well as the source for one's standards of morality , guiding humanity through ethical principles . Maimonides describes God in this fashion: "The foundation of all foundations and

1647-486: Is referred to in the Tanakh with masculine imagery and grammatical forms, traditional Jewish philosophy does not attribute gender to God . Although Jewish aggadic literature and Jewish mysticism do on occasion refer to God using gendered language, for poetic or other reasons, this language was never understood by Jews to imply that God is gender-specific. Some modern Jewish thinkers take care to articulate God outside of

1708-556: Is referred to primarily in the Torah: " Hear O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is One " ( Deuteronomy 6:4 ). Current scholarly consensus generally reconstructs the name's original pronunciation as " Yahweh ". In the traditional interpretations of Judaism, God is always referred to with masculine grammatical articles only. In Judaism, Godhead refers to the aspect or substratum of God that lies behind God's actions or properties (i.e., it

1769-405: Is simply power. From this premise, Charles Hartshorne argues further that: Power is influence, and perfect power is perfect influence ... power must be exercised upon something, at least if by power we mean influence, control; but the something controlled cannot be absolutely inert, since the merely passive, that which has no active tendency of its own, is nothing; yet if the something acted upon

1830-594: Is that God has the power to intervene in the world. "That the Lord, He is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath" (Deut. 4.39) Maimonides infers from this verse that the Holy One is omnipresent and therefore incorporeal, for a corporeal being is incapable of being in two places simultaneously. "To whom will ye liken me, that I should be equal?" (Isa. 40,25) Maimonides infers from this verse that, "had He been corporeal, He would be like other bodies". Although God

1891-525: Is the essence of God). In the philosophy of Maimonides and other Jewish-rationalistic philosophers, there is little which can be known about the Godhead, other than its existence, and even this can only be asserted equivocally. How then can a relation be represented between God and what is other than God when there is no notion comprising in any respect both of the two, inasmuch as existence is, in our opinion, affirmed of God, may God be exalted, and of what

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1952-457: Is therefore incompatible with the idea of a perfect deity. The idea is grounded in Plato's oft-overlooked statement that "being is power". My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being

2013-415: Is to know what must be done, so it does not make sense to speak of God as what God is, but rather what God commands. For Mordecai Kaplan , the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism , God is not a person, but rather a force within the universe that is experienced; in fact, anytime something worthwhile is experienced, that is God. God is the sum of all natural processes that allow people to be self-fulfilling,

2074-465: Is utterly unlike humankind" (as shown in God's response to Moses when Moses asked for God's name: " I Am that I Am "). Anthropomorphic statements about God "are understood as linguistic metaphors, otherwise it would be impossible to talk about God at all". According to some speculations in traditional Judaism, people's actions do not have the ability to affect God positively or negatively. The Book of Job in

2135-518: The Age of Enlightenment drew on the classical distinction to put forward metaphysical hypotheses such as "eternity is a permanent now". Today cosmologists, philosophers, and others look towards analyses of the concept from across cultures and history. They debate, among other things, whether an absolute concept of eternity has real application for fundamental laws of physics ; compare the issue of entropy as an arrow of time . Eternity as infinite duration

2196-774: The Authorized King James Version of the Bible , as well as several other versions, in Revelation 19:6 it is stated "the Lord God omnipotent reigneth" ( Ancient Greek : παντοκράτωρ , romanized :  pantokrator , "all-mighty"). Thomas Jay Oord argues that omnipotence is not found in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. The Hebrew words Shaddai (breasts) and Sabaoth (hosts) are wrongly translated as "God almighty" or "divine omnipotence". Pantokrator,

2257-475: The Hebrew Bible states: "Gaze at the heavens and see, and view the skies, which are higher than you. If you sinned, how do you harm God, and if your transgressions are many, what do you do to God? If you are righteous, what do you give God? Or what does God take from your hand? Your wickedness [affects] a person like yourself, and your righteousness a child of humanity." However, a corpus of traditional Kabbalistic texts describe theurgic practices that manipulate

2318-434: The gender binary , a concept seen as not applicable to God. Kabbalistic tradition holds that emanations from the divine consist of ten aspects , called sefirot . The Torah ascribes some human features to God, however, other Jewish religious works describe God as formless and otherworldly. Judaism is aniconic , meaning it lacks material, physical representations of both the natural and supernatural worlds. Furthermore,

2379-531: The Godhead in Kabbalistic thought is no better than what is conceived by rationalist thinkers. As Jacobs (1973) puts it, "Of God as God is in Godself—Ein Sof—nothing can be said at all, and no thought can reach there". Ein Sof is a place to which forgetting and oblivion pertain. Why? Because concerning all the sefirot, one can search out their reality from the depth of supernal wisdom. From there it

2440-591: The Greek word in the New Testament and Septuagint often translated in English as "almighty", actually means "all-holding" rather than almighty or omnipotent. Oord offers an alternative view of divine power he calls "amipotence," which is the maximal power of God's uncontrolling love. Trying to develop a theory to explain, assign or reject omnipotence on grounds of logic has little merit, since being omnipotent, in

2501-516: The aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them. Nor is this contrary to the word of the angel, saying: 'No word shall be impossible with God.' For whatever implies a contradiction cannot be a word, because no intellect can possibly conceive such a thing." C. S. Lewis has adopted a scholastic position in the course of his work The Problem of Pain . Lewis follows Aquinas' view on contradiction: His Omnipotence means power to do all that

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2562-474: The child lives in a sort of megalomania for a long period; he knows only one yardstick, and that is his own over-inflated ego ... megalomania, it must be understood, is normal in the very young child". Bergler was of the opinion that in later life "the activity of gambling in itself unconsciously activates the megalomania and grandiosity of childhood, reverting to the "fiction of omnipotence"". Heinz Kohut regarded "the narcissistic patient's "megalomania" as

2623-530: The choices open to each individual, but that God does not know the choices that an individual will make. Abraham ibn Daud believed that God was not omniscient or omnipotent with respect to human action. Jews often describe God as omnipotent, and see that idea as rooted in the Hebrew Bible. Some modern Jewish theologians have argued that God is not omnipotent, however, and have found many biblical and classical sources to support this view. The traditional view

2684-426: The creation of the universe while rejecting Aristotle's conception of God as the unmoved mover , along with several of the latter's views such as denial of God as creator and affirmation of the eternity of the world . Traditional interpretations of Judaism generally emphasize that God is personal yet also transcendent and able to intervene in the world, while some modern interpretations of Judaism emphasize that God

2745-519: The dead. Some thinkers, such as Aristotle , suggest the eternity of the natural cosmos in regard to both past and future eternal duration. Boethius defined eternity as "simultaneously full and perfect possession of interminable life". Thomas Aquinas believed that God's eternity does not cease, as it is without either a beginning or an end; the concept of eternity is of divine simplicity , thus incapable of being defined or fully understood by humankind. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and many others in

2806-509: The founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, views God as a process. To aid in this transition in language, he uses the term "godding", which encapsulates God as a process, as the process that the universe is doing, has been doing, and will continue to do. This term means that God is emerging, growing, adapting, and evolving with creation. Despite this, conventional God-language is still useful in nurturing spiritual experiences and can be

2867-424: The idea of a Being, the range of Whose activity is limited only by His sovereign Will. Aquinas says that: Power is predicated of God not as something really distinct from His knowledge and will, but as differing from them logically; inasmuch as power implies a notion of a principle putting into execution what the will commands, and what knowledge directs, which three things in God are identified. Or we may say, that

2928-482: The idea that "God is a person with whom people can have a relationship". Modern Jewish thinkers who have rejected the idea of a personal God have sometimes affirmed that God is nature, the ethical ideal, or a force or process in the world. Baruch Spinoza offers a pantheist view of God. In his thought, God is everything and everything is God. Thus, there can be conceived no substance but God. In this model, one can speak of God and nature interchangeably. Although Spinoza

2989-460: The knowledge or will of God, according as it is the effective principle, has the notion of power contained in it. Hence the consideration of the knowledge and will of God precedes the consideration of His power, as the cause precedes the operation and effect. The adaptation of means to ends in the universe does not argue, as John Stuart Mill would have it, that the power of the designer is limited, but only that God has willed to manifest his glory by

3050-430: The pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a Primary Being who brought into being all existence. All the beings of the heavens, the earth, and what is between them came into existence only from the truth of His being." Jews often describe God as omniscient, although some prominent medieval Jewish philosophers held that God does not have complete foreknowledge of human acts. Gersonides , for example, argued that God knows

3111-492: The power that makes for salvation. Thus, Kaplan's God is abstract, not carnate, and intangible. In this model, God exists within this universe; for Kaplan, there is nothing supernatural or otherworldly. One loves this God by seeking out truth and goodness. Kaplan does not view God as a person but acknowledges that using personal God-language can help people feel connected to their heritage and can act as "an affirmation that life has value". Likewise, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi ,

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3172-599: The rationalistic Jewish theology articulated by the Medieval Jewish philosopher and jurist Moses Maimonides , which later came to dominate much of official and traditional Jewish thought, God is understood as the absolute one, indivisible, and incomparable being who is the creator deity —the cause and preserver of all existence. Maimonides affirmed Avicenna 's conception of God as the Supreme Being, both omnipresent and incorporeal , necessarily existing for

3233-649: The same material sense as one traditionally "understands" a given concept or object. Eternity Eternity , in common parlance , is an infinite amount of time that never ends or the quality, condition or fact of being everlasting or eternal. Classical philosophy , however, defines eternity as what is timeless or exists outside time, whereas sempiternity corresponds to infinite duration. Classical philosophy defines eternity as what exists outside time, as in describing timeless supernatural beings and forces, distinguished from sempiternity which corresponds to infinite time, as described in requiem prayers for

3294-480: The second half of the 20th century object relations theory , both in the States and among British Kleinians , set about "rethinking megalomania... intent on transforming an obstacle... into a complex organization that linked object relations and defence mechanisms " in such a way as to offer new "prospects for therapy". Edmund Bergler , one of his early followers, considered that "as Freud and Ferenczi have shown,

3355-423: The supernal realms, and Practical Kabbalah (Hebrew: קבלה מעשית‬) texts instruct adepts in the use of white magic . A notion that God is in need of human beings has been propounded by Abraham Joshua Heschel . Because God is in search of people, God is accessible and available through time and place to whoever seeks God, leading to a spiritual intensity for the individual as well. This accessibility leads to

3416-421: The term means "all-powerful". The term omnipotent has been used to connote a number of different positions. These positions include, but are not limited to, the following: Thomas Aquinas acknowledged difficulty in comprehending the deity's power: "All confess that God is omnipotent; but it seems difficult to explain in what His omnipotence precisely consists: for there may be doubt as to the precise meaning of

3477-484: The two other words 'God can.'... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. Sigmund Freud freely used the same term in a comparable way. Referring with respect to an adult neurotic to "the omnipotence which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings", Freud reckoned that "this belief

3538-450: The word 'all' when we say that God can do all things. If, however, we consider the matter aright, since power is said in reference to possible things, this phrase, 'God can do all things,' is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible; and for this reason He is said to be omnipotent." In Scholasticism , omnipotence is generally understood to be compatible with certain limitations or restrictions. A proposition that

3599-466: The world. This is because God is "One", unique and unlike anything else. One loves and worships God through living ethically and obeying His moral law: "love of God is love of morality." Similarly, for Emmanuel Levinas , God is ethics, so one is brought closer to God when justice is rendered to the Other. This means that one experiences the presence of God through one's relation to other people. To know God

3660-420: The worship of idols is strictly forbidden. The traditional view, elaborated by figures such as Maimonides , reckons that God is wholly incomprehensible and therefore impossible to envision, resulting in an historical tradition of "divine incorporeality". As such, attempting to describe God's "appearance" in practical terms is considered disrespectful, and possibly heretical. Most of classical Judaism views God as

3721-471: Was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza's concept of God was revived by later Jews, especially Israeli secular Zionists. Hermann Cohen rejected Spinoza's idea that God can be found in nature, but agreed that God was not a personal being. Rather, he saw God as an ideal, an archetype of morality. Not only can God not be identified with nature, but God is also incomparable to anything in

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