From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

God makes rage. Fights about God are frequent and fierce. Does God exist? What is God’s name? Who are God’s people?
To me, to ask questions about God without describing God—or at least defining God—seems aimless. Or meaningless. So what can we know about God?
What is God like? The easy answer is “nothing”: God is not like anything; God is so transcendent that our limited minds can never know a single thing about what God is really like. Some religious traditions assert that we can know only what God is not like (so-called apophatic or negative theology).
Is that supposed to be good enough?
Alvin Plantinga is a leading Christian philosopher who has energized intellectual believers. After a half century of thinking about God, a lifetime of worshiping God, how does Plantinga describe God?
“The concept of God is deeply embedded in the human psyche,” Plantinga says. “The vast majority of the world’s population now and throughout history believes that there is such a person as God. It’s part of our cognitive nature to think about God.” The basic idea, he states, “is that God is a being who is worthy of worship, who deserves our worship.” What is it about God’s nature then that makes God worthy of worship?
Plantinga says, “The basic idea is that God has to be very, very powerful, and in fact, God has to be thought of as he who has created the universe … and hence also very, very knowledgeable. And if God is really worthy of worship, God must also be perfectly good, a God of love …. It’s important to think about God being a perfect being. This [combination of perfections] makes God worthy of worship. I guess such a being would have to be the greatest possible being, such that there couldn’t be any being greater than God. So you quite quickly can go from the notion of this being who is worthy of worship to the classical Judaic-Christian-Islamic conception of what God is like.”
Does God have a “nature”?
Plantinga explains: “If God has a nature, then there are certain things that God can’t do. He can’t go against his nature. If it’s part of God’s nature to be, let’s say, omniscient, all-knowing, then it can’t be that God could decide not to be omniscient—to say, well, I’d rather not know everything, it’s terribly wearing to have to know all these things. This means that God … would have been all-knowing no matter how anything else had turned out. It would be impossible for God not to have been all-knowing.” On the other hand, Plantinga adds, “One reason to think that God does not have a nature is the idea that God really has to be sovereign, really in total control, completely independent of anything else.”
To Plantinga, worship comes first, and from worship, all of God’s characteristics follow. But if worship is anything organized, I don’t much relate. As for me, I can’t start with worship. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I seek God outside of traditional religion. So how to discern God without starting with worship?
Peter van Inwagen has “a philosophers and theologians list” to describe what he sees as the greatest possible being. “God is not only greater than every other being,” he says, “there could not be a being greater than God or even another being equally great.” If there were such a “greatest” being, what would it be like?
Van Inwagen presents a theist position: “First, the greatest possible being would be a person—that is, someone who could be addressed, someone to whom you can make requests and who would listen to those requests. In other words, God is not some impersonal thing like the dialectic of history or the Neo-Platonic One or The Force. Second, in the traditional list, God is omnipotent. There is absolutely nothing God cannot do. The only time you can say God can’t do something would be if it were something that was intrinsically impossible in the very strong sense of being self-contradictory. Even God cannot make it both rain and not rain at the same place at the same time. Even God can’t draw a round square. Even God can’t change the past. But God can do anything if doing that thing would be logically possible. Third, God is omniscient: God knows everything. Fourth, God is morally perfect, absolutely so.”
Finally, van Inwagen says, “God is eternal: God never began to exist, he never will not exist; God depends on nothing else for his existence. In fact, God has to exist in the same strong sense in which two and two has to equal four. Sometimes, philosophers state that God is a ‘necessary being,’ meaning that God’s existence is absolutely inevitable. God would have existed no matter what, under any possible conditions. It’s just impossible for God not to exist. All these traits of God are non-negotiable.”
Here’s van Inwagen flow of argument: He begins with the notion that God is perfect, and from God’s perfection, all else follows. But “perfect-being theology”—as this quest is called—can seem more like an intellectual beauty contest than a guide to God. Perfection may seem pure and absolute, but I fear that for finite human minds, perfection may be impossible to discern. It is a friend who is false.
What about the Jewish view of God, with all the strivings and strugglings between God and God’s people? According to Rabbi Neil Gillman, “Everything we say about God emerges out of the human experience. In my more heretical moments, I believe that when my ancestors talked about God, they looked in the mirror because there’s this humanization of God, this biblical God who is so vulnerable, who is so filled with feelings, who changes his mind back and forth. The Hebrew Bible uses human language. Its writers refused to anesthetize God.”
They humanized God, Gillman says. “And they projected a God who is sometimes demonic—sometimes God does terribly cruel things—but also a God who is vulnerable, able to be hurt, feels anger, has yearnings, can be upset or disappointed.”
Gillman claims this kind of humanized God is “infinitely richer” than the traditional philosopher’s God because “this is a God I can identify with. This is a God I can approach,” he says.
“The Hasidic masters did this all the time. They challenged God, even bringing in God’s sins. There’s this famous exchange about the Hasidic master who said to God before the High Holidays, ‘You know, I’ll forgive you for your sins if you forgive us our sins. And then, together, we’ll begin with a clean slate.’”
As I see it, Gillman’s God, the God of the Hebrew scriptures (as he sees it), appears rather human. Perhaps all too human. No grand perfections. Could this kind of God have created the universe?
When I spoke with Richard Swinburne, the eminent philosopher of religion, I arrayed for him, as if for my professor, what I thought he taught regarding what we are supposed to know about God:
“You have defined God as omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free, stressing that these three primary characters of God enable us to see all of God’s characteristics, perhaps in a way similar to how the three primary colors enable us to see all the colors of the world. In addition, you claim that the most fundamental thing about God is that God is a person, and then you build God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and being perfectly free out of God being a person,” I said.
“I am happy with that description,” Swinburne told me. “To be a person, you have to have powers, beliefs, and a freedom of choice of some sort—and what I am describing is the simplest sort of person there could be. So yes, you start with a person and then you would say that for a person to create the universe that person must obviously be very powerful and very knowledgeable and very free; the person would not be able to create the universe otherwise. So the only issue is: Does he have very great but limited power, very many true beliefs but some false ones? It’s far simpler to suppose there are zero limits than to suppose there are some large finite limits.”
Swinburne’s famous claim is that God’s characteristics are “coherent.” This means that if one defines and dissects God’s attributes carefully, no contradictions arise. But that only means such a God is not instantly impossible. As for whether such a God really exists, “coherence,” by itself, provides scant support.
In seeking to know what God is like, perhaps I’m too confined within the Abrahamic religions. No one is more familiar with diverse faiths than religious scholar Huston Smith, who has practiced Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism (a form of Islam)—all the while, he says, remaining a lifelong Christian. How can that be? How can Smith hope to harmonize what certainly seem to be warring beliefs about God?
Smith says that religion has “its own technical language—and just like mathematics uses equations, religion uses symbolism and metaphor and by extension art.”
Using this approach, he says, “all of the eight authentic religions which have shaped civilization make a distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric—esoteric being the essence, the inner, like the kernel of the walnut, and exoteric being the shell, the outer, that protects the esoteric. In describing God, the outer exoteric uses language and metaphor—God is loving, kind, and all the rest.”
But then, Smith continues, these religions look to the “inner esoteric where words drop out and one has to just intuit from the runways from which the thoughts are taking off. It’s more like seeing than like thinking.” In attempting to discern what God is like, “we can take all of the virtues we can think of and we can carry them as far as our words and our ideas can go,” he says. “They’re reliable pointers, but our words and our ideas can never themselves deliver what they are pointing at is really like.”
So what is God like? What do I conclude? What’s my (current) position? To dig deeply into the question of God, we must grasp the meaning of God. If there is a God, that God must have traits. If those traits are not coherent, if they do not make sense (e.g., if there is an internal contradiction), we should doubt there is such a being.
As much as I know how futile this whole project appears to be, I still rail against its endless barrier of unattainability (or absurdity, I can’t decide which).
When I challenge the question, I find two categories:

(i) “What is God like?” from our human finite perspective—what mortal people, pushing ourselves, try to imagine

(ii) “What is God like?” from God’s own infinite perspective—God’s self-conception of what God is like in God’s own self.

The former, which is what philosophers and theologians generally address, seems impossible enough. The latter, impossible to the impossibleth power. That said, even if I’ve no hope of even approaching real answers, I strive to formulate ultimate questions.
Where to start is key. With the human proclivity to worship? With God’s perfection? With God as a person? With a biblical God who changes? With what God is not? With an ineffable esoteric being?
All claim to be the way most revealing of God, most fundamental to whatever or whoever created the universe. Which is best? Does it even matter? It does, but only if God exists. That’s not as circular as it sounds. Striving to find out what God is like gets us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, Neil Gillman, Richard Swinburne, and Huston Smith in “What Is God Like?”—the second episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Each day this week leading up to Thursday, and then every Thursday going forward, participants will discuss an upcoming episode.

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