It's only natural that God is ...
Apologetics · Natural Theology
It's Only Natural That God Is…
Understanding the Divine Attributes Through Reason Alone
Having established that God exists through rational argument in the Five Ways, we now face a harder question: what must God be like? If reason can reach God's existence, can it also tell us something of His nature?
The answer is yes and no, and the "no" comes first. We can never comprehend God as He is; that would take an infinite mind to grasp infinite being. But we can establish certain attributes that God must necessarily possess. These are not arbitrary features we assign to Him. They are logical necessities that follow from what it means to be the ultimate source of all existence.
Think of it this way. If we know something is the first cause of everything, the unmoved mover, subsistent being itself, then we can deduce what such a being must be. These are God's natural attributes: knowable by reason, before any word of revelation is spoken.
Before we attribute a single thing to God, we have to answer a question most popular treatments skip entirely, and it is the first place a sharp critic will press.
When I say "this man is good" and then say "God is good," am I using the word "good" in the same sense?
God is not the greatest item on the list of good things. He is the source of the goodness by which everything else on the list is good at all. So the resemblance runs one way: a creature is good because it participates in Him, not because He resembles it.
This is why every statement in this article is true and yet inadequate. It tells you something real about God without pretending to encompass Him. Hold that in mind for everything that follows.
The Three Ways of Knowing God by Reason
The tradition works by three moves, always in this order:
1. The way of negation (via negativa): strip away every limitation. God is not material, not composed, not changing, not limited. A great deal of what we know of God is what He is not.
2. The way of causality (via causalitatis): whatever perfection is found in the effect must exist in the cause. Creation contains wisdom, goodness, beauty; therefore their source must possess them.
3. The way of eminence (via eminentiae): whatever perfection God possesses, He possesses it in a way that infinitely exceeds the creaturely version, and without its imperfections.
Not every perfection can be attributed to God. The tradition divides them:
Pure perfections (perfectiones simpliciter simplices) contain no imperfection in their very notion: being, goodness, truth, wisdom, life, love. It is simply better to have them than not. These belong to God formally and eminently.
Mixed perfections have imperfection built into what they are. To reason discursively is to move from what you don't yet know to what you do, which presupposes ignorance. To sense requires a body. To repent requires having erred. These cannot be attributed to God, however good they are in us.
So God is not "a very intelligent being who thinks very fast." God does not reason at all; He simply knows, in one eternal act. The difference is not one of speed.
These are not a list of separate features bolted together. They form an interlocking chain, each following from the last. Watch how they fall.
You have existence. You received it and you could lose it; you can coherently imagine yourself never having been. Your existence is something added to what you are.
Not so with God. He does not have existence; He is existence. In Him, essence and existence are not two things at all. This is the conclusion the Five Ways arrive at, and it is the root from which every other attribute grows.
Which is why, when Moses asked for a name, the answer was not a title but a fact of being: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14).
"Simple" here does not mean easy to understand. Quite the reverse. It means God is not composed of parts of any kind: no physical parts, no metaphysical parts, no distinction between what He is and that He is.
Why must this be so? Because whatever is composed depends on its parts, and on whatever holds those parts together. That uniting principle would then be prior to God, and more fundamental than Him. But God is the first cause, dependent on nothing.
So in God, His wisdom is not one thing and His power another. His justice is not in tension with His mercy. God's wisdom is His power is His goodness is His existence. We pull them apart because our minds are finite and must take one thing at a time. In God they are one.
Recall from the First Way: everything in the world is a mix of what it actually is (act) and what it could become (potency). A seed is potentially an oak. To move from potency to act, it must be acted upon by another.
God has no potency whatever. There is nothing He could become that He is not already, no perfection He lacks and might acquire. He is complete actuality.
This does not mean God is static or inert. Quite the opposite: potency is a lack, and God lacks nothing. He is not frozen; He is infinite activity with no passivity in it, pure dynamism, the fullness of life.
God cannot change, and this follows in one step from Pure Act. To change is to gain something you lacked, or lose something you had, that is, to move from potency to act. But God has no potency. Therefore God cannot change.
People hear this as coldness, as though an unchanging God were an unfeeling one. It is the reverse. Change would mean God could get better (so He was deficient) or worse (so He is not perfect). Immutability is not rigidity. It is the impossibility of improvement.
His love for you cannot grow, cannot cool, cannot waver, and cannot be traded for something better. It is not a mood.
Eternity does not mean "lasting a very long time" or "existing at every moment forever." That is everlastingness, and it would still put God inside time.
Boethius gives the classical definition, and Aquinas adopts it: eternity is
interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio
the complete possession, all at once, of unending life
Not a very long line. No line at all. God does not live through a succession of moments, waiting for tomorrow and remembering yesterday. He possesses the whole of His life in a single, undivided now.
God is not made of matter. This follows straight from simplicity: every material thing has parts (at minimum, spatial parts), is changeable, and is limited by its boundaries. God is none of these.
Note this is not a lack in God, as though He were missing out on having a body. Immateriality is a positive perfection and a greater one: an immaterial being can be wholly present everywhere without being stretched thin, can know without sense organs, and can act without pushing.
What limits a thing? Its form being received in matter, and its essence limiting its existence. A dog is limited by being a dog; it cannot be more than dog-ish.
But God's existence is not received into any essence that would cap it, because His essence is His existence. There is nothing there to do the limiting. Therefore He is infinite, not merely very large, but without limit in every pure perfection.
So His wisdom is not enormous; it is unbounded. His goodness is not impressive; it is limitless. And note what that means for our knowing: when we say God is infinitely wise, we are saying His wisdom exceeds our grasp without limit. We know the direction. We do not reach the end.
Monotheism is not merely something the Bible reports. It is a conclusion reason can reach on its own.
Suppose there were two such beings. Either they are identical in every respect, in which case there is no principle by which they are two, and they are one being. Or they differ, in which case one of them possesses something the other lacks. But what the Ways establish is a being that is Pure Act and infinite, lacking nothing whatever.
Therefore there cannot be two. There is not room in reality for two infinities.
God can do all that is absolutely possible, that is, everything that does not involve a contradiction.
No, and the reason is not that God's power runs out. It is that the question does not describe anything.
"A rock too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift" is not a possible object that God is failing to produce. It is a string of words that cancels itself, exactly like "a square circle" or "a married bachelor." There is no thing there. Aquinas puts it precisely: God's omnipotence extends to whatever does not imply a contradiction, because what implies a contradiction is not a thing at all, and so falls outside the scope of power, not because power is weak but because there is nothing there to do.
Nobody thinks a man feeble because he cannot draw a square circle. God's inability to do the impossible is not a defect in His power. It is a feature of His rationality: God cannot be absurd.
By the same principle God cannot sin (that would be to turn against Himself), cannot cease to exist (He is existence), and cannot lie (He is Truth). These are not shackles. They are the shape of infinite perfection.
God is present everywhere, but not the way a gas fills a room. A physical thing is in a place by excluding other things from it. God's presence is of a different order entirely.
He is present to each thing as the cause of its existing at all, holding it in being at this instant. God does not need to travel anywhere, because He is the reason "anywhere" exists.
So He is not spread out across the universe, with more of Him in a galaxy than in your kitchen. He is wholly present at every point, entirely and undividedly, because He has no parts to divide.
God knows all truth, perfectly and immediately, in a single act. Not by looking, not by inferring, not by learning. He knows all things in knowing Himself, since everything that exists is a participation in His being.
Yes, this means God knows what you did last summer at band camp. It also means He knows the number of hairs on your head and the thing you have never told anyone.
And now the hardest objection on this page.
The objection dies on the word fore.
Remember eternity. God does not foreknow your choice, because for God there is no "before" and no "later." He is not sitting in the past, peering ahead down the corridor of time. He possesses all of time in one undivided now. Your choice tomorrow is present to Him, in exactly the way your choice this morning is present to you as you remember making it, freely.
You knowing what you freely chose does not make it unfree. Neither does He.
But there is a second half, and it matters more. Some defenders answer that God merely observes our choices without causing them, the way your knowledge that the sun rose did not cause the sunrise. Do not use that answer. It quietly concedes the atheist's premise, and it is not what Aquinas teaches. He says plainly that God's knowledge is the cause of things (ST I, Q.14, A.8). God is no passive spectator.
The real answer is that divine causality does not compete with creaturely causality. They are not two forces on the same field, dividing the work between them, where more of one means less of the other. God is not one cause among causes. He is the transcendent cause who gives every creature its own real causal power, and gives free creatures their real freedom.
So God does not cause your act despite your freedom, nor alongside it. He causes it as free. Your freedom is not a gap that God's power fails to reach; it is a gift that God's power establishes. Remove God and you do not get more freedom. You get no acting agent at all.
Goodness, philosophically, means desirability, being worth wanting, being fulfilling. Since God is infinite perfection lacking nothing, He is infinitely good: the ultimate object of every desire, whether the desirer knows it or not.
And so God is perfectly happy, not because He gets what He wants (He lacks nothing to get), but because He is infinite goodness eternally delighting in itself. God's happiness does not depend on creation. He did not make the world because He was lonely, or bored, or incomplete.
Which raises the obvious question, and gives it a beautiful answer. If God needed nothing, why create at all? Because goodness of its nature pours itself out (bonum est diffusivum sui). Not from need. From sheer generosity. You exist for no reason other than that Goodness wished to share.
Throughout, we have said these attributes are necessary to God, not optional features He happens to have. It is worth being precise about what that means, because a common illustration gets it wrong.
One might say: "a human can lose sight or limbs and still be human, but cannot be human without human DNA." That last clause is not quite right, and the error is worth catching.
On the classical view, what makes a thing human is the rational soul as substantial form, informing matter. DNA is a disposition of the matter, a material condition, not the essence itself. The essence is the form.
This is not pedantry. It is the very foundation of hylomorphism, and it carries directly into how we speak about the human person from the first moment of existence. Get the metaphysics right and the ethics follow.
So when we say God is necessarily simple, or necessarily infinite, we do not mean these are properties He reliably exhibits. We mean that a being who is subsistent existence itself could not fail to be these things, on pain of contradiction. Take one away and you are no longer describing God. You are describing a creature.
Return to divine simplicity, and you will see that everything we have done in this article is, in a sense, a concession to our own weakness.
These attributes are not components assembled into a God. In God's perfect simplicity, they are all one and the same reality. God's infinity is His goodness is His knowledge is His existence. We march through them one at a time because a finite mind cannot take in infinite being in a single glance.
It is like describing the ocean by speaking of its depth, then its breadth, then its motion. Each is a real aspect. None is a separate part. The ocean is one thing.
And this is why every negative theologian is half right. We say more truly what God is not than what He is. Every affirmation on this page must be immediately qualified: yes, and infinitely more than that, and not in the way you are picturing.
From Natural Theology to Revealed Religion
Notice what reason has and has not delivered. It has given us a God who is infinite, simple, one, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and perfectly good. That is a great deal, and every word of it is available to a pagan philosopher who never opened a Bible.
But it has not given us a Father. It has not given us the inner life of God as a communion of Persons. It has not given us Bethlehem, or Calvary, or an empty tomb. Reason takes you to the door. It does not take you inside.
Yet see how the two fit. When Scripture says "God is love" (1 John 4:8), we now understand that this is not sentiment but metaphysics: God does not merely have love, He is it, as He is His own existence. When the Church teaches the Trinity, we know in advance it cannot mean three gods, because reason has already shown there cannot be two.
Natural theology does not replace revelation. It prepares the mind to receive it intelligently. The God whom reason discovers as the source of all being, and the God who reveals Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are one and the same. Truth cannot contradict truth.
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