Logically Faithful-Beyond Opinion

What are some of these attributes that make God, God? Here are a few :

3.5 WHAT IS GOD? The Attributes of the Divine – A Philosophical and Theological Examination

By Khaldoun Aziz Sweis, PhD

The Ultimate Question: What is God?

To even dare to ask “What is God?” is to step onto the precipice of the infinite, to stare into the abyss of Being itself. This is no mere intellectual exercise—it is the most profound inquiry a human mind can undertake. Because if God exists, then God is the ground of all existence, the precondition for reality itself. And if that is so, then to misunderstand God is to misunderstand everything.

So let us begin with the most fundamental assertion: God is not a thing among things. He—or It, or the Ground of Being—is not an object in the world, but rather that which makes the world possible.To speak of God is to speak of the absolute, the necessary, the uncaused cause.

The Attributes of the Divine: A Map of the Ultimate

When we attempt to define God, we are not describing a being like us, only bigger. We are pointing toward the transcendent, the ineffable, that which exceeds all categories. And yet, we must try—because if we do not, we risk collapsing into nihilism or shallow materialism, both of which lead to despair.

The ancient Greeks spoke of the Logos—the rational principle governing the cosmos. The Judeo-Christian tradition declares, “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

This is not mere poetry. It is a metaphysical claim: Reality has an intelligible structure. The fact that the universe is comprehensible, that mathematics and logic work, that truth exists—this is not an accident. It points toward a deeper order, a divine rationality.

Ask yourself: Why is there something rather than nothing? And why does that “something” behave according to laws we can discover? That is the signature of the Logos.

Every human civilization has discovered, in some form, the moral law: Do not murder. Do not lie. Do not betray. Care for the weak. Seek justice.

Where does this law come from? Is it merely a social construct? Then why does it persist across time and culture? Why does violating it lead to psychological disintegration, guilt, and societal collapse?

The answer is terrifying: There is a moral reality as absolute as gravity. And God, in this sense, is the source and judge of that morality. To stand before God is to stand in judgment of your own actions, to confront the gap between what you are and what you ought to be.

Here we encounter the most shocking claim of Christianity: That God, in Christ, entered into suffering to redeem a broken world. This is not a God who remains aloof, but one who descends into the chaos to rescue us.

What does this mean? It means that the highest ideal—the ultimate Good—is not power, but sacrificial love. It means that evil is real, that suffering is real, but that meaning can be found even in the darkest depths.

The Classical Attributes of God: A Perfect Being

God, by definition, is not merely great—He is maximally great, the greatest conceivable being, possessing the most consistent and complete set of perfections. This is not abstract theology; it is the foundation of all meaning. If God were less than perfect, He would not be God.

Consider these attributes, each one a thunderclap of metaphysical truth:

• Necessary Existence (Anselm): God does not happen to exist—He must exist. His being is not contingent; He is the bedrock of reality itself.
• Omnipotence: Not mere power, but maximal power—the ability to actualize all that is possible, constrained only by His own nature (He cannot lie, cannot cease to be, cannot create a square circle—not because He is weak, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even for God).
• Omniscience: God knows all that is, was, and will be—not as a passive observer, but as the sovereign architect of time.
• Omnipresence: He is not in space; space exists because of Him. There is nowhere you can flee from His presence.
• Eternality: God is outside of time. He does not have a past or future—He is the eternal now.
• Impassibility: He cannot be manipulated, cannot be surprised, cannot...

Public Live Philosophical Lecture.

Do All Religions Worship the Same God? How should we think about Universalism or pluralism in religion?

This is a lecture delivered to my philosophy of religion class. It is a podcast. I look forward to your feedback