GOD

God is the deity believed by monotheists to be the supreme reality. He is believed variously to be the creator, or at least the sustainer, of the universe. Theologians and philosophers have ascribed a number of attributes to God, including omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. He has been described as incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the greatest conceivable existent. These attributes were all supported to varying degrees by the early Jewis, Christian and Muslim scholars, including Augustine, Al-Ghazali, and Maimonides. Freud regarded this view of God as wis fulfillment for the perfect father figure, while Marxist writers see it as rooted in the powerlessness experienced by men and women in oppressive societies. All the great medieval philosophers developed arguments for the existence of God, [3] attempting to wrestle with the contradictions God's attributes seem to imply. For example, God's omniscience implies that he knows how free agents will choose to act. If he does know this, their apparent free will is illusory; and if he does not know it, he is not omniscient. [4] Similar difficulties follow from the proposition that God is the source of all moral obligation. If nothing would be right or wrong without God's commands, then his commands appear arbitrary. If his commands are based on fundamental principles that even he cannot change, then he is not omnipotent. [5] The last few hundred years of philosophy have seen sustained attacks on the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments for God's existence. Against these, theists (or fideists) argue that faith is not a product of reason, but requires risk. There would be no risk, they say, if the arguments for God's existence were as solid as the laws of logic, a position famously summed up by Pascal as: "The heart has reasons which reason knows not of.