What Are the Attributes of God?

The Project and Its Starting Point

When philosophers talk about the attributes of God, they are doing a specific kind of work. They are not cataloging what various religions happen to say about their deities. They are asking a more disciplined question: if there is a supreme being — a being worthy of the title "God" — what properties must that being have? The project assumes a working definition of God, and that definition has a history. Anselm of Canterbury gave it its most influential formulation in the eleventh century: God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." The attributes, then, are whatever properties a being must have to satisfy that formula. If having a property makes a being greater than lacking it, and if God is the greatest conceivable being, then God has that property.

This sounds straightforward, and in some cases it is. It seems greater to know everything than to know less, so God is omniscient. It seems greater to have unlimited power than limited power, so God is omnipotent. But the edges get fuzzy fast. Is it greater to be outside time, or greater to act in time? Is it greater to be unchanging, or greater to respond to your creatures? Is it greater to be simple (without parts) or to be a rich, complex personal being? Reasonable philosophers, working from the same Anselmian starting point, come to different conclusions. The attributes of God are not a settled list. They are a live philosophical conversation.

The Core Attributes

Most of the tradition converges on a central cluster of properties. Thomas Aquinas laid them out systematically in the Summa Theologica, and modern philosophers like Richard Swinburne have refined and defended versions of them. Here are the ones that come up again and again.

Omnipotence — God can do anything that is logically possible. The qualifier matters. God cannot make a square circle or create a married bachelor, not because God is weak, but because those are not things — they are contradictions in terms. The harder question, the one that generates real debate, is whether omnipotence includes the ability to do evil. Most classical thinkers say no: God's perfect goodness means God cannot act wrongly, and that is not a limitation but a perfection.

Omniscience — God knows all truths. This includes every fact about the past, the present, and — controversially — the future. The controversy is not about whether God knows the future. It is about what it means to know future free actions. If God knows today what you will freely choose tomorrow, is your choice really free? Boethius, Aquinas, and Molina each offered different reconciliations, and the debate has spawned an entire subfield. See our separate discussion of omniscience.

Omnipresence — God is present everywhere. This does not mean God is spread out like a gas filling space. It means that God is fully present at every point, that there is no place where God is absent, and that God knows and sustains every location directly. The classical distinction is between God's substantive presence (God's essence is nowhere in particular because it is not spatial) and God's operational presence (God acts at every point).

Omnibenevolence — God is perfectly good. This is sometimes called supreme moral perfection. God not only does not do evil; God cannot do evil, and God's nature is the standard of goodness itself. This attribute is where the problem of evil bites hardest. If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there suffering? The attributes do not sit in isolation. They interact, and the interactions generate the hardest questions.

The Contested Attributes

Beyond the core four, there is a set of properties that the classical tradition — Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas — treated as essential but that many contemporary philosophers treat with suspicion. These are the "classical" attributes in the strong sense, and they mark the difference between classical theism and personal theism.

Simplicity — God has no parts. God is not composed of form and matter, of essence and existence, of properties and a bearer of properties. God just is God's nature. The motivation is the Anselmian one: a composite being depends on its parts, and a dependent being is not the greatest conceivable. But simplicity has a steep cost. If God is identical to God's properties, and God is good, then God is identical to goodness. And if God is also wise, then goodness is wisdom, and mercy is justice. That sounds wrong to many philosophers. The debate over divine simplicity is one of the most technical in the philosophy of religion, and it is far from settled.

Eternity — Is God inside time or outside it? The classical answer, from Boethius through Aquinas, is that God is timeless. God exists in a single, unchanging now, and the whole of history is present to God at once. The alternative, defended by Swinburne and others, is that God is everlasting: God exists at every moment of time, experiences the passage of time, and responds to events as they happen. The timeless view preserves immutability and omniscience about the future. The everlasting view makes God more personal and more responsive, at the cost of some classical elegance.

Immutability and Impassibility — If God is timeless and simple, then God does not change, and God does not suffer. These flow from simplicity and eternity. They also generate resistance. A God who cannot change cannot respond to prayer, cannot be affected by human suffering, cannot grieve. The Augustinian tradition embraced impassibility as a perfection. Many contemporary theologians reject it as making God remote. The disagreement runs deep, because it is really a disagreement about what greatness means.

The Coherence Question

Here is the thing that makes the attributes of God a philosophical problem rather than a list to memorize. The properties have to fit together. They have to be mutually compatible, and they have to be compatible with what religious believers actually say about God.

J. L. Mackie pressed the most famous coherence challenge: if God is omnipotent and perfectly good, and if evil exists, then either God cannot prevent evil (not omnipotent) or God does not want to (not good). The problem of evil is the clearest case where the attributes collide with the world. The free will defense, the soul-making theodicy, and skeptical theism are all attempts to show that the attributes are compatible with the evil we see — but none of them is universally accepted.

There is also the collision between omnipotence and omniscience. If God knows the future infallibly, can God change it? If God cannot change the future, is God omnipotent? If God can change it, was God's earlier knowledge wrong? The classical answer is that God's knowledge is not predictive but presential — God sees all times at once. But that requires the timeless view of eternity, and if you reject timelessness, the puzzle returns.

And there is the collision between simplicity and personhood. A simple being has no internal complexity. A person, in anything like the ordinary sense, has beliefs, desires, intentions, and responses — an internal life. Can a being with no parts be a person? Classical theists say yes, in an analogical sense. Personal theists and process philosophers say the cost is too high. This is not a minor technical dispute. It is a disagreement about what kind of being God is, and it shapes everything from the doctrine of prayer to the problem of suffering.

Different Conceptions, Different Lists

Not everyone who talks about God assigns the same attributes. Classical theism, which runs from Augustine through Aquinas and into much of the scholastic tradition, emphasizes simplicity, eternity, and immutability. Personal theism, which is closer to the lived religion of most believers and to the work of philosophers like Swinburne, emphasizes God's personhood, agency, and responsiveness — and is more willing to treat the classical attributes as optional. Pantheism, in the tradition of Spinoza, identifies God with the universe and drops personhood and omnipotence in the personal sense. Deism keeps omnipotence and omniscience for creation but denies ongoing providence.

The upshot is that "the attributes of God" is not a single, fixed list. It is a family of proposals about what a supreme being must be like, and the disagreements within the family are as philosophically rich as the disagreements between theism and atheism. The question "What are the attributes of God?" is really the question "What would count as God?" — and that question is still open.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Omnipotence" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Omniscience" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omniscience/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Divine Simplicity" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/

Related Topics

• What Is Omnipotence? — the all-powerful attribute in depth.
• What Is Omniscience? — the all-knowing attribute and the foreknowledge puzzle.
• Theism vs Deism — different attribute lists for different conceptions.
• Why Is There Suffering? — the collision of omnipotence and goodness.
• Philosophy of God — the broader inquiry.