Concept
Conceptions of God
Overview
Conceptions of God in classical theist, monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist traditions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:
as a powerful, personal, supernatural being, or as the deification of an esoteric, mystical or philosophical entity or category;
as the "Ultimate", the summum bonum, the "Absolute Infinite", the "Transcendent", or Existence or Being itself;
as the ground of being, the monistic substrate, that which we cannot understand; and so on.
The first recordings that survive of monotheistic conceptions of God, borne out of henotheism and (mostly in Eastern religions) monism, are from the Hellenistic period. Of the many objects and entities that religions and other belief systems across the ages have labeled as divine, the one criterion they share is their acknowledgment as divine by a group or groups of human beings. Gods are male counterparts to goddesses
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
c. The triad (_τριάς_) has now become a most important number, seeing that in it the monad has reached reality and perfection. The monad proceeds through the duad, and again brought into unity with this undetermined manifold, it is the triad. Unity and multiplicity are present in the triad in the worst possible way—as an external combination; but however abstractly this is understood, the triad is still a profound…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Conceptions of God is; the author is tied to Conceptions of God in the knowledge graph.
Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for the thesis that the knowledge of God and of truth must be immediate, or intuitive. At an earlier period all sort of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they are termed, were banished from God, as being finite and therefore unworthy of the infinite; and in this way God had been reduced to a tolerably blank being. But in those days the thought-forms were in general not…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Conceptions of God is; the author is tied to Conceptions of God in the knowledge graph.
In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There was not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being. I am not arguing that the…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
The author is tied to Conceptions of God in the knowledge graph; opens on Conceptions of God.
Related ideas
- Simon & Schuster
- Ātman (Hinduism)
- Jesus
- Monad (Gnosticism)
- Hellenistic Judaism
- Adam and Eve
- Artificial intelligence
- Ishvara
- Gnosticism
- Arianism
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Hinduism
- Philosophy
- Abrahamic religions
- Jain philosophy
- Abraham
- Holy Spirit
- Henotheism
- Moksha (Jainism)
- Ancient Greek
- Plural
- Isaac
- Atheism
- Judaism
Place in the tradition
Part of Meaning of life.