LYCOS RETRIEVER 
God: World
built 640 days ago
Jesus explained to the Samaritian woman why she should worship God in spirit and in truth. God is spirit (John 4:24). The noun pneuma occurs first in the sentence for emphasis. Although some theologies consider "spirit" an attribute, grammatically in Jesus' statement it is a substantive. In the pre-Kantian, first century world of the biblical authors, spirits were not dismissed with an a priori, skeptical assumption.
Source:
Similarly, the New Testament contains no systematic theology: no attempt is made to give a philosophical or rigorous definition of God, nor of how God acts in the world. The New Testament does... provide an implicit theology as it teaches that God became human while remaining fully God, in the person of Jesus, and that he subsequently sent the Holy Spirit. In this view, God becomes someone that can be seen and touched, and may speak and act in a manner easily perceived by humans, while also remaining transcendent and invisible. This appears to be a radical departure from the concepts of God found in Hebrew Bible. The New Testament's statements regarding the nature of God were eventually developed into the doctrine of the Trinity.
Source:
The history of Christian thought reveals persistent problems concerning the nature of God and his relation to the world. These involve the related issues of transcendence/immanence, personal/nonpersonal perspectives, and the knowability of God. The earliest Christian theologians, who attempted to interpret the Christian faith in terms of Greek philosophical categories, tended toward an emphasis on the abstract transcendence of God. He was the timeless, changeless Absolute who was the final and adequate cause of the universe. Little could be predicted of him, and his attributes were defined primarily in the negative. He was the uncaused (possessing aseity), absolutely simple, infinite, immutable, omnipotent Being, unlimited by time (eternal) and space (omnipresent).
Source:
Avicenna (Ibn Sina; 980-1037), a Muslim... distinguished between God as the one necessary being and all other things, which are contingent. The world is an emanation from God as the outworking of his self-knowledge. As such it is eternal and necessary. God must be eternal and simple, existing without multiplicity. In their essence, things do not contain anything that accounts for their existence. They are hierarchically arranged such that the existence of each thing is accounted for by something ontologically higher.
Source:
Einstein once said that God does not play dice, but later after time travel paradoxes, Einstein was found playing dice with God in Las Vegas. God ... says he is into role playing games, and often rolls dice to see what happens with the world. God claims this is a random element that takes away whatever responsibility others might place on him. Blame it on bad dice rolls, not God. Roll DC 15 to get this joke.
Source:
There are several famous arguments for the existence of God. The argument from the First Cause maintains that since in the world every effect has its cause behind it (and every actuality its potentiality), the first effect (and first actuality) in the world must have had its cause (and potentiality), which was in itself both cause and effect (and potentiality and actuality), i.e., God. The cosmological argument maintains that since the world, and all that is in it, seems to have no necessary or absolute (nonrelative) existence, an independent existence (God) must be implied for the world as the explanation of its relations.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
World