Is God a person? If we think of God as a person, that might seem to mean that he thinks things over,

does his best to figure out what to do, and hopefully doesn't mess up too often. After all, we're persons,

and that's what it's like for us. So if God is a person then presumably

that's what it's like for him too. Well obviously that's inadequate. Obviously we should

specify that God is omniscient and omnipotent and so on. Since he's all knowing, he can't

make mistakes when figuring out what to do. Since he's all knowing, he can't make mistakes when figuring out what to do. Since he's all

powerful, he can't mess up once he's decided, and so forth. But even on this picture,

something's not quite right. God is still being portrayed as an agent within the world,

a super agent, but still an agent in much the same sense as we are.

True, he's better than we are at dealing with reality, but he's still dealing with it, which means he's subordinated to it, which doesn't really sound like God.

Also, inasmuch as he's dealing with it, he's dealing with us too, because we are part of it.

This suggests that his power and our power are, at least potentially, in competition. he must decrease so that we might increase.

If this is what it means to call God a person, then maybe we would do better to just ditch that idea

and go for something very different. For example, maybe God is something impersonal,

like the fundamental laws of physics or the fundamental forces of physics.

Presumably those don't have to deal with anyone or anything.

On the contrary, everything and everyone deals with them.

We just arrived at the idea that God isn't a person, but starting from a rather non-Christian way

of thinking about God, traditional Christian theology has a different notion of God. It says not

only that God is different from us, but also that he's different from us not by being higher up on the same scale.

It's not that he's like us, only with the knob turned up to 11.

It's much more radical than that.

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