On Monday we posted a piece on the essential beliefs held by Christians and remarked that we would be elaborating on some of those over the course of the next two weeks. I'd like to briefly consider the first of them today.
The most fundamental belief in Christianity, of course, is the conviction that God exists, but this claim means different things to different people. A recent poll shows that 94% of Americans believe that God exists, but it's not clear that these people all share the same concept of God. For example, is the God one believes exists intimately involved in the world or is He/It remote, indifferent, and impersonal? Is God just the universe, or some part of it, or is God a transcendent being which created the universe and cannot be identified with any aspect or combination of aspects of it?
Christianity has historically answered those questions by affirming that God possesses, at a minimum, the following attributes:
1. Personality: I.e. It is appropriate to refer to God as He. It is the case that God is self-aware and aware of the world in which we live. He cares about this world and cares about us. It makes sense to speak or pray to God because it matters to Him.
2. Transcendence: God is other than the world of space/time and matter and not identifiable with it.
3. Extraordinary potency: His power is at least great enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. He may be more powerful than this and, indeed, may be able to do anything which it is logically possible to do, but He is at least this powerful.
4. Extraordinary knowledge: God knows at least enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. His knowledge may be greater than this in that He may know everything that it is logically possible to know, but His knowledge is at least this great.
5. Eternality: God has no beginning and no end.
6. Moral perfection: God always acts in the best interest of His creation. He is the exemplar of Love and is the source of all moral categories and understanding.
7. Omnipresence: There is no place in creation, either spatially or temporally, where God is not.
8. Ultimate causality: God is the source of all that we can possibly experience. He is the creator and sustainer of the universe. The entire cosmos is ultimately contingent upon Him.
When Christians assert the existence of God they are claiming that a being with at least these attributes exists. Many Christian believers may not be able to articulate this concept of God off the top of their head, but if they were to be shown the list they would surely agree that these qualities accurately describe what they mean by God.
In any event, nothing else about Christianity (or anything else in the cosmos and in life, for that matter) would make any sense whatsoever were not the case that God exists. This is the foundational theological belief for theists in general and Christian theists in particular, and everything else is based upon it and flows from it.