History of What is God

	Revision 4 . . December 14, 2001 1:30 pm by RK [Beginning to add some other POVs]
	Revision 3 . . (edit) October 19, 2001 4:22 am by Bryan Derksen

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<The following is a portion of Larrys Text, wikification is invited>

The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all affirm theism - the belief in God. In practice, while religious people claim to affirm this belief as true, most have never seriously considered the question "What is God?" The problem is that merely stating that "God is real" says nothing about what God actually is. Claiming to believe in something without defining what that something is, is close to believing nothing at all. When pressed to describe specifically what they believe in, the average person only can repeat claims about God's actions, or about God's love for humanity. Even assuming that said actions actually happened, or that said relationship actually exists, this says little about the nature of God; it really only tells us about a particular historical incident, or about how people describe their relationship to the divine. Excerpt from Larrys Text. Wikification is invited.

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At the moment, I think that the following should be discussed in this entry. As good as Larry's essay is, I think we can include a few other points of view. Biblical definition of God The Tanach (Hebrew Bible, aka Old Testament) is notable for not describing God's nature. No attempt is made to give a philosophical rigourous definition of God, nor of how God acts in the world. The New Testament offers only a small discussion of such matters. Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian definitions of God Many medieval philosophers developed the idea of approaching a knowledge of God through negative attributes. For example, we should not say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; all we can safely say is that God is not nonexistent. We should not say that God is wise, but we can say that God is not ignorant, i.e. in some way God has some properties of knowledge. We should not say that God is One, but we can state that there is no multiplicity in God's being. Kabbalistic definition of God Process theology and process philosophy definition of God: Panentheism /Talk?