Assuming that God exists, we still need to ask, 'What is God like?' Given the obvious imperfections of the world, can we believe in a God who is both loving and all-powerful? Can our own experiences tell us anything about God? How should we communicate with God and how does God communicate with us? Is faith an essential part of the relationship, or can we go beyond faith, to knowledge? Is the doctrine of the Trinity a hindrance or a help to our understanding? And if we are made in God's image, how does that help us to look at ourselves?

Most religious people are united by a belief in God - but what is 'God'? There are many different answers to this question and quite clearly the nature of belief will be affected by the nature of the god that is believed in.

Gods in the image of man

In ancient times some cultures had anthropomorphic gods - that is, gods that are human-shaped and have exaggerated human qualities. In Ancient Greece, like in Ancient Scandinavia and Ancient Rome, there was a whole family of deities to be worshipped, served and understood. The gods were also associated with actual places and actual events and worship of them tended to be limited to the area around those places and where people remembered those events.

Worshipping deities

Worship usually involved bringing the god(s) gifts which were often handed to priests or priestesses who were thought to know just how and when to offer what gifts in order to win favour. Temples were built close to the places associated with the god(s) and at these temples, when people gathered to give their gifts, they shared stories and legends about the god(s), sometimes in the form of epic poems or songs, perhaps with parts acted out or danced.

Victory legends

The legends of these gods often related to legends about great heroes of the past and worship was bound up with respect for the ancestors and national pride. People believed that their local god was stronger than other gods, they did not believe that their god was the only god to exist. Nevertheless people are people and often competed with each other in telling stories of their gods, claiming that their god(s) were stronger or more cunning than others. Victories in battle or good luck in a harvest were put down to the gods' favour - and defeats or famines caused people to question their god(s), even to find other deities to worship.

Cultural identity

Images of the god(s), often depicted as part of a scene from a famous legend, became a mark of a particular culture - they might be placed on pottery, currency or other items for export. When a culture was economically sucessful the images of their deities would be found far and wide, sometimes causing other peoples to adapt their local legends to show how their god(s) related to these powerful god(s) from abroad. Thus the people of Rome identified members of their family of gods with members of the Greek family of gods and claimed that they worshipped the same gods with different names.

Gods linked to animals or the elements

Other cultures developed to have animistic deities, gods with animal as well as human qualities, or gods which were responsible for the elements - the sun, the moon, the tides or winds. Belief in these Gods had the potential to go beyond local and national boundaries. All people have contact with and depend on animals, all people are affected by drought, floods and storms. These gods were less personal but believed to be more powerful. People believed that they were mysterious, that they did not necessarily care about human beings, even those who worshipped them, at all.

Appeasing angry gods

Worship could be more about appeasing the god(s), stopping them from being angry, rather than about communication. In some cultures appeasement involved great sacrifice; priests believed and told the people that they must give up large portions of their crops or livestock, even children, to be burned or drowned in the hope that this would satisfy the appetites of the god(s). The priests came to be very powerful and mysterious, identified with the inhuman appetites of the gods they served and able to humble kings and princes by demanding things on their behalf.

Understanding such gods

Understanding animistic and elemental gods was believed to require special abilities coupled with years of study and practice. Priests used astrology and the study of the natural world for omens and portents as well as all manner of means of entering trance-like states in which they received symbolic revelations. People from outside the priesthood had no hope of understanding the god(s) themselves and therefore bound to employ priests to explain and foretell their fortunes. Kings and emperors hired teams of learned magi to tell them when to fight battles, who their next enemy was likely to be - even who to marry. The magi had enormous political power and influence. The book of Daniel in the Old Testament gives some insight into this.

Towards monotheism

Perhaps it was a small step from believing in a God responsible for one element to believing in a God responsible for all the elements, for creating the world itself. It was another small step from believing in a God who had the best qualities of one species to believing in a God who embodied pure powers without the limitations, from believing in one God among many to believing that only one God exists. However, though the majority of the world's population now believe in one all-powerful God, there are still many different understandings of the nature of that God.

In the Old Testament

The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament of the Christian Bible, reflects one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Close study of the text illustrates the development of ideas about God over a period of over 500 years. Scholars believe that the concept of God was influenced by the experiences of the Hebrew people and by neighbouring cultures' religions. The Babylonian Exile (sixth to fifth centuries BC) marked the most dramatic change in the concept of God. Whereas pre-exilic texts such as Amos and Hosea reflect an anthropomorphic God, like a super-king, post-exilic texts such as Jonah and Daniel suggest that God is inscrutible, all-powerful, all-knowing and eternal and that all other "gods" simply don't exist.

In Greek philosophy

It was in Greece that the first philosophical concept of a single God was worked out. Epicurus (341-270 BC) argued that a single God would have to be all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient) and all-good (omnibenevolent) and this definition of God came to be adopted by philosophers of religion from Jewish, Christian and Muslim backgrounds over time. However, although Epicurus' definition makes logical sense, it does not always fit in with the God described in sacred texts such as the Bible and Qur'an.

The problem of evil

What does it mean to say that the creator-God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is all-powerful when evil so obviously exists in His creation? JL Mackie pointed out that an all-powerful God could have created a better world than this! What does it mean to say that the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is all-knowing when those religions teach that human beings are free and therefore morally responsible for their actions? How can we be free when God knows what we are going to do? What does it mean to say that the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is all-good when he allows people to suffer so horrendously and makes the business of having and living with faith so very difficult? Surely a good God would not want people to suffer and would make it easy to earn a heavenly reward? These questions have puzzled philosophers of religion and theologians for millenia.

God limited by his own design?

Some have reconciled the philsophical concept of God with the reality of their faith and experience by seeing God within time and confined by the basic laws of logic and possibility. This God is everlasting. He may be the creator of all, but once he has created things one way he is not able to change the characteristics of His creation. If God creates human beings free he cannot know the future or intervene to prevent the consequences of their actions.

Benevolent but distant?

Others are not satisfied with this approach however, and see God as all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, unaffected by any limitations. The most usual way of retaining God's perfection is to interpret his existence as eternal, outside time and space. Such a God would be wholly simple, perfect and unchanging, unaffected by anything. His power is seen in terms of having created the framework of time, space and possibility itself, His knowledge in terms of creation as a whole rather than resulting on reflecting on aspects within time and space and His goodness in terms of having created a universe that perfectly fulfills God's design in creating it. This God is admittedly distant and it is difficult to reconcile faith in a wholly simple God with the business of institutional religion, with worship, prayer, Bible stories, even with our moral characters and judging us fit for an afterlife.

A solution in the Trinity

Within the Roman Catholic Christian tradition faith in a wholly simple God is made possible by the doctrine of The Trinity. God is of one substance (homoousion) but can be understood through three persons. The Father is eternal but through the Son understands our human condition, what it is to be time-limited and frail, and gives everything to make our situation better out of his great love. The Holy Spirit works in all times and in all places to inspire and strengthen people, to answer prayers, affirm belief, sanctify worship, even to change history.

The nature of the Trinity

It is important to understand that Christians do not believe in three Gods - rather in one perfect God, so far above human comprehension and the normal limits of existence that He has to be understood through the analogy of three persons. No one person of the Trinity is greater than any other, nor is any one person adequate to express the whole nature of God. The mystery of the Trinity is revealed to help the limited human mind go beyond normal concepts and begin to grasp the divine nature.

Creation and revelation

The nature of God for Christians is revealed through Creation and through specific revelations, whether through the Bible, prophets or individual experiences. Revelation is, for many believers, the basis for faith. It is probably fair to say that more people are likely to believe and worship something they encounter through personal experience or testimony than something they arrive at through argument or reasoning.

Religious experiences have been studied and categorised at length by scholars from William James and Rudolph Otto to William Alston. There is some agreement over the characteristics of such experiences - particularly that they tend to be transient, passive and are often life-changing. However it is a mistake to stress the similarity of experiences when, in fact, they are diverse. Experiences may be solitary or they may be corporate (as in the Toronto Blessing of the 1990s), they may be fleeting or they may endure for hours or days. Scientifically the diversity of experiences makes them difficult to explain. Though some specific phenomena may have a physiological cause (for example the sensation of being in a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end in a near-death experience), and others may have a psychological or hormonal cause (for example the sensations of heightened physical awareness often reported by teenage girls and menopausal women), the whole variety and prevalence of "religious experiences" is difficult to explain away.

Over-reliance on religious experience

Of course it is difficult to rely on religious experiences as an argument for God's existence, just as it is difficult to rely on miracles as an argument. David Hume's famous attack on miracles may be applied to religious experiences just as well.

Hume defined miracles as "a transgression of the laws of nature by particular volition of the deity" and argued that it would be wrong to accept testimony of miracles as support for the existence of God because:

1. It is always more probable that the miracle did not occur than that it did - the alternative scientific explanation is always more probable, however unlikely it seems.
2. Witnesses tend to be unreliable.
3. Most testimony comes from "ignorant and barbarous nations"
4. Testimony of miracles comes from competing religious traditions and claims to support the existence of different Gods.

Although Hume's critique is not conclusive (some people do not accept his definition of a miracle and each of the other criticisms may not apply to any one case), it does mean that miracles and religious experiences tend to be cited as part of cumulative arguments for God's existence rather than as stand-alone arguments in themselves.

The selectiveness implicit in miracles

The major problem with using them even in this context is, of course, the implications of miracles and religious experiences for our concept of God. Not only do the events suggest a God who has reflective knowledge of the universe and who acts in time, but they also raise questions over God's goodness and justice. Why would God reveal himself to some people and not others? Does this mean that people who have no faith are responsible if they also had no revelation? Is faith based on revelation more or less valuable to God than faith not based on revelation? Scholars from the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz to Oxford theologian Maurice Wiles have rejected miracles and religious experiences just because they raise such problems for the philosopher. They suggest that they have more to do with wish-fulfilment than with direct action.

Of course it may be that God has designed the world in such a way as to allow wishes to be fulfilled sometimes, or to allow intermediary beings (angels or saints) to act on his behalf to reinforce faith when it is appropriate and possible. This pushes miracles and religious experiences back from the realm of extra-special acts of providence into the realm of general or maybe special providence and does protect a philosophically coherent model of God - even if it would not seem very satisfactory to many ordinary believers.