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God: Views
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In the art of rhetoric or debate, citing God's will is the ultimate trump card. However, this is generally considered equivalent to playing "nuclear bomb" or "supernova" in a game of rock-paper-scissors, or hitting the restart button during a multiplayer video game. The use of God is now heavily discouraged and is viewed as poor sportsmanship.
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Conceptions of God vary widely. Theologians and philosophers have studied countless conceptions of God since the dawn of civilization. The Abrahamic conceptions of God include the trinitarian view of Christians, the Kabbalistic definition of Jewish mysticism, and the Islamic concept of God. The dharmic religions differ in their view of the divine: views of God in Hinduism vary by region, sect, and caste from monotheistic to polytheistic; the view of God in Buddhism is almost non-theist. In modern times, some more abstract concepts have been developed, such as process theology and open theism. Conceptions of God held by individual believers vary so widely that there is no clear consensus on the nature of God.[7] The contemporaneous French philosopher Michel Henry has ... proposed a phenomenological approach and definition of God as phenomenological essence of Life.
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Divine goodness raises the question of whether God wills x because it is good, or x is good because God wills it. The former seems to weaken divine sovereignty, but the latter seems to make goodness arbitrary. The arbitrariness may be somewhat relieved if God's will is understood as bounded by his unchanging character. God would not, for example, decide to make torturing for enjoyment right since his nature forever condemns it. The issue has implications for divine command ethics, according to which acts are right or wrong because God commands or forbids them (as opposed to, for example, a competing view that acts are right or wrong according to whether they promote the greatest happiness).
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From the biblical viewpoint it is generally agreed that it is impossible to give a strict definition of the idea of God. Defining, which means limiting, involves the inclusion of the object within a certain class or known universal and the indication of its distinguishing features from other objects in that same class. Since the biblical God is unique and incomparable (Isa. 40:25), there is no universal abstract category of the divine. Studies in comparative religions reveal that "god" is, in fact, conceived in the most different ways. Attempts to provide a general definition that encompasses all concepts of the divine, such as Anselm's "that than which nothing greater is conceivable," or "the supreme Being," do not convey much of the specific characteristics of the God of Scripture.
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Having been born out of Judaism, Christianity was unambiguously monotheistic and affirmed that God created the material of the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo). But it ... affirmed the Trinity as multiplicity within unity, a view it regarded as implicit in Judaism.
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