Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

purposeful. Purpose suggests a passage of time leading to a fulfilment of purpose. How could an eternal God outside of time have purposes? And thirdly, with regard to omnipotence, there are such intriguing questions as: Could God create a stone that He couldn’t lift? Or even: Could God create a stone that doesn’t exist? Theologians normally restrict God’s power to things that are not logically impossible.

The Christian religion adds a few further characteristics to God besides those mentioned above. So far as mainstream Christendom is concerned, God is divided into three Persons — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. All three Persons of the Godhead are male. The justification for this belief is based on the assumed authority of the Bible. The Christian idea of God seems to have come from Apollo, but by contrast, there has been some interest in a comparison with Dionysius. Some of the stories of Jesus, for instance, would suggest something of a Dionysian character. And the Greek followers of Dionysius seemed to be possessed of his spirit, rather like the way many Christian churches view the indwelling of God’s Spirit in the believer.

The question of God's existence has, for philosophers, been broken down into four main arguments — the teleological, the cosmological, the epistemological and the ontological. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

The teleological argument for the existence of God is more commonly referred to as the argument from design. Typically this argument takes as its starting point the beauty and

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