ABSTRACT
Theism (taken from the Greek word for God, theos), refers to the philosophy that the physical universe is a created whole, and God is the author or creator of this whole. In ‘classical theism’ this creator God is not, in any sense, a part of this created whole, and there is therefore a fundamental dualism involved, since there is an absolute divide between the creator and what is created. Aquinas’ ‘analogy of being’ was a way of expressing such a classical theism, since, as we have seen, only God has true ‘existence’ and all created things have ‘derivative’ existence. I do not propose to make this classical and dualist account a defining characteristic of theism, since many thinkers who wish to call themselves theists either reject this dualism, or wish to describe it in different ways. However there are some characteristics of the concept of God that can be described as defining characteristics, on the grounds that in their absence it would be misleading to speak of ‘God’ in the same sense as that used within the major forms of monotheism. In this section I shall list three such essential characteristics. It must be stressed that throughout the following discussion the primary concern is with the meaning of the concept of God, and therefore the religious power of the idea of God is not in the foreground. At the same time, without this religious power, and the overwhelming sense of ‘presence’ which ‘God’ implies within the religious life, the importance of the concept would be hugely diminished. Moreover, I shall return to the ‘faith’ context of the idea of God at the end of the chapter.
