Who is God

Not too much to add today. It is difficult to type with one wrist full of puncture wounds. However, I did have a couple of thoughts this past weekend.

The very first questions: Who or what is God. It is a question that is easy to ignore but it is important to have an answer in order to answer some of the more difficult questions. For example, if you are going to discuss whether or not God exists, you cannot do that meaningfully without defining what it is you are discussing. If you determine that part of the definition of God is that he must be red, and someone is able to prove that God cannot be red, then that person has proved God does not exist. It will not do to throw out a definition of God and then backtrack later when proof is presented that God cannot have all of the characteristics he was defined to have.

A more concrete example is this: God is generally believed to be omnipotent, meaning all-powerful. If you accept that definition in its broadest form, that is, that there is absolutely nothing that God cannot do, if someone proves that there is something God cannot do, he has disproved God's existence, right? Of course, there are innumerable things that God cannot do. He cannot create the well-known contradiction of an immovable object and an irresistible force. So we have to be careful in our definition of God.

Mostly God is defined by what he has done or what he can do, and what his personality is like. People are defined much the same way. Defining someone is different from describing them. We might describe a person as tall, heavyset, dark complected, or other physical characteristics. But if we were to define them, or for example, me, you would be more likely to ignore the physical descriptors and say that I am a lawyer, used to be a good runner, very evil, likes cats, etc.

So, who is God:

Is God the creator of the Universe? A side question is: Why?

Is God all-powerful, at least to the extent he can do anything that is not logically impossible or mutually exclusive with another thing?

Is God omniscient? Does he know everything? Does he know the future? Does he know what we are thinking?

The philosophical definition of God is a greater good than that which can be imagined. So imagine a god with the best traits you can, and the real God is better than that.