Could God make a stone too heavy to lift? Philosophers have answers
The English word God probably grew from an ancient root meaning to call or to invoke, and it was grammatically neuter until Germanic peoples converted to Christianity. The concept behind it has provoked some of philosophy's sharpest puzzles, from the unliftable stone to whether a God who foresees your choices leaves you free.
In theistic systems, God is the ultimate cause of everything, usually seen as creator, sustainer and ruler of the universe and often as independent of matter. The oldest written Germanic form appears in the Codex Argenteus, a sixth-century Gothic Bible. English inherited the word from Proto-Germanic guthan, traced to a Proto-Indo-European form built on a root meaning to call on. Capitalised, it names a single supreme deity; lowercase, it can mean any deity.
Ideas about God branch widely. Judaism is among the oldest monotheisms, Islam centres on tawhid, oneness, and Christianity describes one God in three persons. Most Hindus hold faith in a supreme reality, Brahman, expressed through many chosen deities, which some call polymorphic monotheism. Spinoza's pantheism made God and Nature one substance, prompting Schopenhauer to quip that pantheism is only a polite word for atheism. Deism accepts a creator who never intervenes afterwards. Greek philosophy offered its own versions: Aristotle's uncaused first mover, perfectly beautiful and unchanging, and the One of Plato and Plotinus, beyond being itself.
The famous attributes generate paradoxes. If God is all-powerful, can God create a stone too heavy to lift? A common reply limits omnipotence to what befits God, so contradictions and lies fall outside it. Omniscience raises the question of whether foreknowledge makes free will an illusion; open theism answers by limiting what God can know of the future, and process theology holds that God is changed by creation. Medieval negative theology avoided the trap by describing God only by what God is not, not ignorant rather than wise.
The problem of evil sharpens everything: an all-good, all-powerful God must answer for suffering, and dystheism concludes God is not wholly good. On worship, many traditions say God gains nothing from it and the benefit falls to the worshipper. Gandhi described prayer not as asking but as a longing of the soul.
Source: God
