Alfred el grande

Its exact design varying with various the Religion S, God generally indicates “the supreme” or “ultimate” Being, the personal or impersonal individualization of the principle of the Univers, i.e. its reason “first” as a gasoline paramount and original: God is then often the Démiurge or creator; and its “last” reason as a finality and “direction of the life”.

Etymology

The word God comes from the Latin deus , him even resulting from the root Indo-European “dei wo”, light of the sky, of the day, of the base “dei-”, to shine, shine.

Divine qualities

There exists probably as many notions of the divinity than there exist cultures or individuals; and qualities which are lent to him vary from as much.

In philosophy, from the believing point of view, God is the Être par excellence; one also speaks in Métaphysique about final Main cause and/or . In Théologie it receives the following attributes traditionally: for the existence: infinity, immutability and perfection; for the will and the understanding: absolute power, wisdom, justice and kindness. In the abrahamic meanings, like in other more recent religions or counting less followers, it is Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omniprésent. Certain approaches limit this omnipotence by the free-referee conceded with the human ones.

God can be included/understood as being personal , such God the Father, Ishvara, Mahadevi, or like impersonal , such CAT, the Brahman, the Spirit of the Amerindian religions, etc It can be conceived like Transcendant or Immanent, i.e. it is out of, or in creation or the world. Often he is a god anhistoric and does not intervene séculairement, or he can be a historical god of insertion like the Christ. He can be subjugated with the destiny (Wyrd, Moïra, Fatum), or the régenter while being the source about it. Another option still made that it subjects itself to its own laws.

God can have an antithesis, in the forms of the bad Démiurge of the Gnostique S, the twin principle of the evil like Ahriman, a divinity of the chaos, of a divinity Chtonien such as Apophis, or perhaps of Human itself, as a person in charge of his misfortune. One finds usually units antithetic: Titan S, giant S, Ensured S, Rakshasa S, demons, etc In Christianity, one associates sometimes the Fallen angel, Lucifer, with the antithesis of God, but in this context, Lucifer remains a creation of God, not strict opposed, as there are some in the Gnosticisme. God can have a troop of auxiliaries, Ange S, Saint S, spirits various, in opposition to the antithetic units mentioned above.

God, especially but not only in his impersonal forms, tends to being “ beyond good and badly ” in what it includes or transcends this opposition in the Not-duality of his ultimate nature. The conflict of the good and the evil follows then a intention, an incomprehensible and mysterious purpose, which however is even solved as a God.

It can have a definite name (Yahvé in form hébraïsante, Latinized Jéhovah in form, or Allah in Arabic) name which one often states with reserve and respect, preferring the use of his nicknames or attributes, which tend to approximate its land ineffability. It may be often that one never owes even pronocer his name, out of a ritual and crowned context.

God can be Anthropomorphe, or in animal or mixed form (e.g.: Horus) and can be sexué, asexual or Hermaphrodite, although the majority of the great monotheisms tend to the dépersonnaliser. Thus within the Hindouisme one saw to open out the designs of the Polythéisme, then monotheism, and finally an impersonal design, the Oneself, “individual heart”, being identified with the Brahman, “universal heart”. Quite to the contrary the historical propagation of impersonal religions such as the Buddhism and the Taoism, originally to the limits of atheism, tends to personalize the divine one, or to even generate a plethora of Déités. It is said whereas these last are secondary incarnations or representations of the various aspects from the divine one.

Thus, according to the various traditions and religions, God can be single and/or composite, appearing under various aspects, like, for example, the Trinité of the Christian chalcédoniens. For the Roman catholics in particular, the Wire , one of the three people of the trinity, is “present ” at the time of the Eucharistie, by Transsubstantiation. Some other religions, manifestly the Islam and the Sikhisme, stick to a strict monotheism.

Beliefs and doctrines

Within a religion, many tendencies coexist. Thus preserving currents, fundamentalist currents and currents progressists are met. Certain currents can see excommunicated S by others or declared Anathème S, and qualified heretic S, especially in the religions dogmatic S, i.e. having a given corpus of doctrines, often reinforced by one or more authorities. The believer recognizes the existence of God or gods, contrary to the atheistic , sometimes qualified antitheist S (uncommon). For the Agnostic S, a being or a divine fact is indémontrable or unknowable, whereas for the Mystique S and some Gnostique S, one can have a expérientielle “knowledge of it”. The Théiste S believe in a more or less defined supreme Being and add the obligation to it to return a worship to him, to obey the “natural law”, unlike the Déiste S which are satisfied to accept the existence of God.

Finally, as it is not simple indifference, the Athéisme is basically a religious position. The majority of criticisms which he addresses to the religion are either logical, or psychological, calling in question the motivation of the believer which “creates God with his image” in order to be reassured, as in the projection of a father or a cosmic mother, for example. One must distinguish the atheist from the anticlericalist who rather addresses a sociological criticism against the religion ( the opium of the people ), and particularly towards political control by the church S and their hierarchies.

Typology

The description of the Natural and the divine Substance is the characteristic of a Occident which, under this aspect includes the the Middle East. The description of the attributes of God in a detailed form names cataphatism , sometimes Théosophie, while the refusal to come to a conclusion about the divine Ontologie names Apophatisme . All the religions experience a development of these two currents. From a general point of view, the apophatism frequently is fought or reserved for initiates while in other cases, more minority, to describe " Dieu" constitute the beginning of the Idolâtrie. One then speaks about current esoteric in opposition to the current Exotérique which represents the lesson on God or the gods of a religion given, when they are opened with all, sometimes even the abroads with this religion.

In addition to the theology of Jehan Eckhart, the apophatism can be illustrated in the absence of being defined by this quotation of the Jewish theologist Marc-Alain Ouaknine who expresses in a joke something which could be more easily comprehensible by our contemporaries than the language symbolic system of the medieval mystic:

“ God on hundred pages. Here, I accepted the challenge. My first movement is to offer to the editor hundred empty pages. Not by play but by respect. The only thing which one can really say on God, it is nothing. Nothing to say! negative Theology radical. Nothing to say but say it well! I give up this possibility. Not because that could have been interpreted like a facility, but because the idea is not original. I find a book on the rays of my library: “all that the men know about the women”. 200 white pages! Lucid! ”

Sociological aspects

In Occident, starting from Descartes and Pascal in particular, the existence of God became prone to the demonstration, and increasingly exposed to concomitant criticism with the crisis of the Christian religion and the appearance of the Protestantisme.

One must with Friedrich Nietzsche the formula celebrates “God died”, which echoes the changes of the modern Western company: the Scientism, the Theory of the evolution of Darwin, the Socialism, the Psychoanalysis, inter alia, in common have a criticism of the religious dogmas which opens the way with the Athéisme which considers the concept of social built God as unreal.

However the belief in the existence of God and political activism were sometimes bound, as it show the life of Gandhi, the first Christian socialist militants, or the Théologie of the release in the countries of the Tiers-monde. The reference to God remains a sensitive topic in particular in Europe, where the assertion of the Christian origins of the European Union caused stormy debates during the drafting of the European Constitution.

Even if the Laïcité is a principle of government strongly anchored in France, and even if Europe seems to count the strongest proportion of atheists in the world, rare are the countries which do not have a national religion (England, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Malta, Norway, etc) or made from the agreements of Concordat with one or more religious authorities (Italy, Germany, Portugal…), also the principle of separation of the Church and the State " with the française" remain among the exceptions.

Contemporary approaches

Beside the revival of philosophy thomist, it developed with the whole beginning of the 20th century a contemporary Métaphysique which takes account of scientific progress such that represent it the Quantum physics, the theories of the evolution, the Psychanalyse.

Theology of the process

The Théologie of the process is the name under which one gathers works of the thinkers of this metaphysics for our time . This metaphysics, contrary to the preceding ones transcends the borders of the religious denominations. Even if the Christian thinkers (Protestant with Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb or catholics with, in a certain way, Pierre Teilhard of Chardin and Jean-Luc Marion, or laic with Louis Bergson) published more works, one also finds thinkers of the process in the Judaism, the hindouism and to a lesser extent in Islam. It developed around two poles:

the critic of the Cataphatisme by a distinction enters the representation of God and his ontological nature. Thus Paul Tillich invites to think the distance between the representations of God (transcendent, therefore beyond the possibilities of human expressions) and the reality of God. The maxim which would summarize this aspect of the thought of Tillich would be “ God is other thing that what one of known as ”. In God beyond God , It thus invites to an extreme prudence in the assertion which such doctrines would be the ultimate Vérité and by there a reflection already started by Maïmonide in its Guide of the Stray ones continues, and to a lesser extent under certain aspects by Ibn Arabi and Mollah Sadra.
critic of the thomism of the seven attributes, in particular omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, the ubiquity which made the celebrity in the Anglo-Saxon world of the book of Charles Hartrshorne (death at 104 years in 2000) " Omnipotence and other theological mistakes ". Though this book dates from the years 1980, the english language version was not translated into French; one finds echoes this criticism in a French theologist former good Wilfred Monod, in his conferences " with the believers and the atheists " data around 1926.

However, the leader of this theology is the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead whose book Process and Theology could constitute the systematic Théologie well. An introduction to various theologies of the Lawsuit (which it would be preferable to translate by Théologies of the dynamism) was given in 1975 by André Gounelle under the title " creative dynamism of God " republished by Van Dieren in an edition increased about 2000.

One could summarize in a diagrammatic way this current of thought by saying that beside the believers for whom God exists or of those for which it is, is done day a metaphysics in which God occurs. This idea can perfectly enraciner in the Bible as well in a meditation on the rest of the Shabbat as on a development on Exode 3:14 whose Frenchwoman translations using one present of eternity (thus immutable, in a thought modelled by the aristotelism) does not give an account of the potential character of the Inaccompli used in the Hebrew verb .

Contemporary apologetic approach

The philosopher Michel Henry defines God from a phenomenologic point of view, in his book It is me the Truth, for a philosophy of Christianity , Éditions of the Threshold, 1996, p. 40:

God is Vie, it is the gasoline of the Vie, or, if one prefers, the gasoline of the life is God. Saying that we know already what is God, we do not know it by the effect of a knowledge or of an unspecified knowledge, we do not know it by the thought, about the bottom of the Vérité of the world; we know it and let us can the knowledge only in and by the Life itself. We can the knowledge only as a God.

However, the fact that this approach is expressed in the only terms of the Christianisme and starting from the Christian writings (cf at the end of this paragraph) which could not give an account of what each one names God in other religions, conduit to requalify the approach of Michel Henry in " apologetic contemporary " . Phenomenology, as for it, had been pluralist.

The Life of which it is here question is not the life with the biological direction of the term defined by objective and external properties, nor an abstracted philosophical concept and vacuum, but the absolute phenomenologic life, a life radically immanente which carries in it the capacity to appear in itself without distance, a life which appears itself at every moment. A demonstration of oneself and a autorevelation which does not consist in the fact of seeing out of oneself or of perceiving the outside world, but in the fact of feeling and of feeling oneself, to test in oneself its own interior and emotional reality.

As also Michel Henry in this same book says it, “God is this pure Revelation which reveals only oneself anything else, God appears. The Revelation of God is his autorevelation”. God is in itself revelation, it is the paramount Revelation which tears off any thing with nothing, a revelation which is the pathetic autorevelation and the absolute car-pleasure of the Life. Like known as Jean, God is love, because the Life likes itself of an infinite love and eternal.

Michel Henry opposes to the concept of creation, which is the creation of the world, the concept of generation of the Life. The creation of the world consists in the opening of this horizon of externality where any thing becomes visible. Whereas the Life does not cease being generated itself and generating all the alive ones in its radical immanence, in its absolute phenomenologic interiority which is without variation nor distance.

Since we alive and are thus generated at every moment by the infinite Life of God, since it does not cease giving us the life, and since we do not cease being born in these eternal from the life by the action in us from this absolute Life, God is with the eyes of Christianity our Father and we are his well liked Sons, the Wire of alive God. What does not want only to say that it created us at the time of our design or the beginning of the world, but that it does not cease permanently generating us in the Life, which it is always with work in us until in the least of our subjective impressions.

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