FOREWORD
The word God is often misused and to some it refers to a bad or amoral being or blind but intelligent force or even a symbol of morality. Be warned that many who say they accept the following meaning do not and inside think of something other than God. There is reason to believe that the "something rather than nothing" argument we will meet later is hiding something.
God means the conscious being who is all-powerful and all-good and with whom a relationship is possible. That seems to make it simple but it is part of a bigger dimension. As God is related to morality you would need to make a list as long as ten arms about how you understand God. For example, is God okay with abortion to save a life? What does he think of you if you tell a white lie to an ugly bride?
Too many believers have never considered the possibility that their religion is based on the notion of a God that is incoherent They are not told by their conniving clergy just how bizarre the doctrine of God is. If they knew there would be less believers and less cash in the coffers of the Church.
Assuming God exists or needing him to exist doesn’t prove he should be assumed or that the idea is coherent. It has nothing to do with it.
A spirit God is an abstract one. An abstract God is really an attempt to fake devotion to a personal God so that you can be the boss not God. It dilutes God into little more than an idea. If that is what you have to do to believe in God then that is another reason for saying that if God is good then you are being inconsistent.
A contradiction means you refuting yourself. If believers in God are self-contradicting then they need to be told what they are: people who do not realise that they do not in fact believe. Habit often is taken for faith.
WHAT DOES THE WORD GOD OR DEITY OR DIVINITY MEAN?
The more "educated" believers think that God is non-physical - that is, he is spirit.
God for Christians is a being without parts - that is spirit because nobody made him but he makes all things. God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good. A being who is not all-powerful is not God. It means he is not supreme over all things and there are things he cannot control. A being who is not all-perfect is not God either for he cannot be fully trusted and also he is not fully in control. No being however great can be entitled to worship if he is merely a superhuman entity. If Superman really existed and was the kindest and most powerful person in the universe we would not worship him. We would be demeaning ourselves if we did.
The danger with the idea of spirit is that we think of God as a gas that is not made up of atoms or parts. But then this gas would just consist of one part. It is its part. This part does not consist of any other parts. Do you see the implication of all that? A God without parts is no more existing than a square circle. He is a something that is a nothing. Christians say he is indeed a something that is a nothing which is best taken as reification. They mistake an imagined power for a thing. God is the nothing and their imagination is the something.
Occam's Razor says to avoid unnecessary explanations. Reification is common. We mistake our feelings and notions for information. "I don't like being around John therefore he is evil." We turn our idea that the room is cold into the idea that the cold is really a sign of a ghost. Theism and belief in spirits is down to reification not reason and not divine prompting.
Something that is a nothing? The idea that nothing consists of two or more nothings would make more sense than that for something can never be nothing to any degree. Christianity degrades everybody especially impressionable children by playing conjuring tricks with words. The idol worshipper adores a god of wood or stone or so the Christian says. They bemoan how demeaning that is. But how much more is it demeaning to adore nothing and call it God? At least the idol worshipper adores something real. And he adores something that is more understandable than a being that is supposed to be pure spirit. Christianity demeans all whom it gets to adore its God. To the mind of a child, God is just like pretending the naked emperor is wearing clothes as in the children's tale The Emperor's New Clothes. It's pretending that something that cannot be seen or examined or verified by the senses is real. The God concept is disrespectful and therefore an abuse of the mind of a child.
People feel they want nothing that is something and omnipotent and looking after them to exist. That is, their belief in spirit is not belief at all but a feeling that they hypocritically disguise as a belief.
FRANK SHEED
"God’s knowing is not distinct from Himself. God and His knowledge are one. God is His knowledge. God’s knowledge is God. Once again, there may be vast difficulties for the mind in actually seeing it so, but there is no great difficulty in seeing that it must be so. For if God’s knowledge were not identical with God Himself, then there would be some distinction between God and His knowledge, something that God has and that His knowledge lacks: but that would mean that His knowledge would not be infinite: which is impossible. A moment’s reflection will show us that the same line of thought, which leads us to see that God and His knowledge are one, applies to all the other attributes of God—His love, His justice, His mercy, any you please. God’s mercy is not something God has; it is God. If His mercy or His justice were in any way distinct from Him, it would mean that there was something in Him that they lacked, and so His mercy or His justice would not be Infinite, and that again is impossible. Thus there is no distinction between God’s attributes and God, and therefore no difference between one of God’s attributes and another. God’s justice is God Himself, and God’s mercy is God Himself. Infinite justice and infinite mercy are not two opposing tendencies in God: they are one same God."
"Spirit is the being which has its own nature so firmly in its grasp that it can never become some other thing."
Comment: This says God and morality mean the same thing. But this is contradictory. Justice will do for an example, Just because God is by definition just or is justice does not mean he really is. What standard says that he is justice? "Justice is justice just because it is God" that reads like words trying to make the reader feel stupid and that this is something profound. We still can't see how. If we can't see how justice can be its own standard and declare itself justice either, that would still be much better. To say justice shows itself right just like a grain of sand shows itself to be a grain of sand rules out God and forbids attempts to deflect from that. In other words, to say justice is God is an injustice and an attack on real justice.
Back to Sheed. God having the property of wisdom and God having the property of being able to produce stunning forms of art is nonsense for it would mean that as God is one simple being that wisdom is artistic. Wisdom is an umbrella term not for one thing but for many different forms of wisdom. Notice how he does not explain how knowing the dog has vomited is the same as making sure John gets a fair reward for what good he has done. He disingenuously declines to give such a horrid example for it gives his musings away as nonsense.
He says God must be his knowledge for it would follow that if he wasn't there would be something he does not know - in other words, it would not be infinite. But that is like arguing, "John and Bert must be the same person for the evidence says that John pulled the trigger and shot Paul but other evidence just as good says it was Bert." It is choosing the desired conclusion and working back to it. Logic bans that for it is worse than a circular argument. Justice is an umbrella term. The guilty is sent to a complicated existence in jail and its never the same for any two people. So in reality justice is a summary word for countless justices.
It follows that if you think it is fair for God to send a baby to Hell forever just for fun then you have the wrong God even if everything else is fine. Sheed says that each attribute is like the whole of God. So that one difference from a God who would not do that overthrows the whole thing. It puts God into a different category.
The definition of spirit is interesting. It follows that if it is true that our spirits are sinful from conception then if baptism takes away that sin then we are not the same person. If our spirits are good then sin must not touch us at all and have no meaning. The nonsense about God totally debunks any doctrine that God and morality or justice/love are somehow the same.
NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
Religion says that God has attributes or qualities but each of them are different aspects of the attribute of divinity.
Believers say the most accurate way to talk of God is to say not what he is but what he is not.
He is not hate. He is not visible. He is not unfair. He is not stupid. He is not human. He is not matter. He is not controlled by anything else. He is not fiction. He is not abstract in the way that a number is abstract. He is not limited by time or space. He is not complex. He is not changing.
It has been pointed out that you cannot tell the difference between this negative God and a non-existing God. Thus God is also unknowable so to talk about him and worship him is a waste of time. You don’t know what you are worshipping or serving.
God is not really God to you even if there is a God for you don't really know what you are talking about. And you are a deceiver for talking and acting as if you do.
DIVINE PERFECTION
God has many perfections and no perfection in God is less perfect than any other or less valuable. That is what God being perfect means. But it makes no sense. God being perfect at maths cannot equate to God being perfect at determining right and wrong as moral concepts. Maths i is not morality and morality is not maths.
Love is generous and justice is strict and impersonal. God is supposed to be both love and justice. This does not fit. That is the bottom line - the talk about the perfection of God is nonsense and it is not good for our moral perception to say otherwise or worship him.
THE QUESTION
How is moral perfection possible without omniscience and omnipotence? You need to know what moral is as in 100% though we have to make do with what light we have. The more certain you are that x is right the more moral or decent it is to do it. In that way morality is not black and white.
Can you be moral without having the power to act on it? Yes if you don't want to call people who are paralysed less than human. This suggests that intention comes first or is the only thing that really matters. Good results from good intentions are only side benefits. Yet a morality that cares so little about the quality of what you do is hardly a real morality. The focus on intention is a form and outlet of narcissism. A good person who uses that outlet to perform narcissism safely is still a narcissist.
It is narcissist to worry so much about God being the representative of morality or as the same as morality. And that is because our morality does not agree with itself and is too internal. We want a God as a crutch to validate our moral inventions, so that we feel better about them.
FINALLY
God for religion is really a word-play imagined to be something more. Nothing about the concept is coherent. If we had a real need for God, we would be lapping up the things like Frank Sheed writes the way we do self-help books and health manuals. I want to know my body and what it needs but what God is like doesn't interest me the same. Religion is about getting something out of God-talk not God.