The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Lecture 2
The Idea of God
I said that in this lecture I would ‘‘discuss this God whose non-existence
the argument from evil is supposed to prove’’. My purpose in this lecture
is to say what a being would have to be like to be God, to count as God,
to have the attributes, qualities, properties, characteristics, or features
that are the components of the concept of God. But can this be done in
any principled way? Do people who say they believe in God not disagree
about his attributes? Who’s to say what features God is supposed to
have? I will respond to these questions with a proposal, a proposal I
do not think is arbitrary. It is this: the list of properties that should
be included in the concept of God are just those properties ascribed
to God in common by Jews, Christians, and Muslims—the properties
that adherents of these religions would all agree belong to God. 1
Having said this, I now qualify it. If we obtain a list of properties by
the method I have proposed, the list will contain some properties that
are thought to belong to God only contingently or accidentally: the
property of having spoken to Abraham, for example. Let us therefore
restrict our list to properties that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will
agree would have been properties of God no matter what—that belong
to God independently of the contingencies of history, independently,
indeed, of whether there is such a thing as history, independently of the
existence of a created world, independently of any contingent matter of
fact. Thus our list of properties, the defining properties of the concept
of God, will be a list of his essential properties—although, of course, it
is not meant to be a complete list of his essential properties.
Now a further qualification. By ‘‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims’’,
I mean those Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have attained to a
high level of philosophical and theological reflection; for some of the
properties in the list I shall propose will be ones that most ordinary
believers will not have so much as heard of. (I do not take seriously the
idea that ‘‘the God of the philosophers’’, the bearer of the attributes in