Conceptions of God

In the ancient Greek philosophical Hermetica, the ultimate reality is called by many names, such as God, Lord, Father, Mind (Nous), the Creator, the All, the One, etc.

The Baháʼí Faith believes in a single, imperishable God, the creator of all things, including all the creatures and forces in the universe.

Baháʼí teachings state that God is too great for humans to fully comprehend, nor to create a complete and accurate image.

[19] Unitarians trace their history back to the Apostolic Age, arguing, as do Trinitarians and Binitarians, that their Christology most closely reflects that of the early Christian community and Church Fathers.

[21] Within Christianity, it is the belief that there were originally two beings in the Godhead – the Father and the Word – that became the Son (Jesus the Christ)[citation needed].

Much of this recent scholarship has been the result of the translations of the Nag Hammadi and other ancient manuscripts that were not available when older scholarly texts (such as Wilhelm Bousset's Kyrios Christos, 1913) were written.

According to the rationalist stream of Judaism articulated by Maimonides, which later came to dominate much of official traditional Jewish thought, God is understood as the absolute one, indivisible, and incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence.

[35] Jewish monotheism is a continuation of earlier Hebrew henotheism, the exclusive worship of the God of Israel as prescribed in the Torah and practiced at the Temple of Jerusalem.

Kabbalistic thinkers have held the belief that all of existence is itself a part of God, and that we as humanity are unaware of our own inherent godliness and are grappling to come to terms with it.

"[41] According to Qais Al-Saadi, "the principles of the Mandaean doctrine: the belief of the only one great God, Hayyi Rabbi, to whom all absolute properties belong; He created all the worlds, formed the soul through his power, and placed it by means of angels into the human body.

[53] Despite this apparent non-theism, Buddhists consider veneration of the Noble Ones[54] very important[55] although the two main schools of Buddhism differ mildly in their reverential attitudes.

An intelligent, metaphysical underlying basis, however, is not ruled out by Buddhism, although Buddhists are generally very careful to distinguish this idea from that of an independent creator God.

Brahman is the eternal, unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the divine ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being and everything beyond in this Universe.

Ishvara is a transcendent and immanent entity best described in the last chapter of the Shukla Yajur Veda Samhita, known as the Ishavasya Upanishad.

The theme of non-creationism and absence of omnipotent God and divine grace runs strongly in all the philosophical dimensions of Jainism, including its cosmology, concepts of karma and moksa and its moral code of conduct.

Nanak's interpretation of God is that of a single, personal and transcendental creator with whom the devotee must develop a most intimate faith and relationship to achieve salvation.

Sikhism advocates the belief in one god who is omnipresent (sarav vi'āpak), whose qualities are infinite and who is without gender, a nature represented (especially in the Guru Granth Sahib) by the term Ek Onkar.

God is genderless, fearless, formless, immutable, ineffable, self-sufficient, omnipotent and not subject to the cycle of birth and death.

The esoteric Christian teachings of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, promulgated to the western world in the early 20th century as Western Wisdom Teachings, present the conception of The Absolute -- unmanifested and unlimited "Boundless Being" or "Root of Existence", beyond the whole universe and beyond comprehension -- from whom proceeds the Supreme Being at the dawn of manifestation: The One, the "Great Architect of the Universe".

[73][74] According to these teachings, in the beginning of a Day of Manifestation a certain collective Great Being, God, limits himself to a certain portion of space, in which he elects to create the Solar System for the evolution of added self-consciousness.

In God there are contained hosts of glorious hierarchies and lesser beings of every grade of intelligence and stage of consciousness, from omniscience to an unconsciousness deeper than that of the deepest trance condition.

Unitarianism referred to a belief about the nature of Jesus Christ that affirmed God as a singular entity and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.

Some of these books posit that prophets or messiahs were sent to the human race in order to teach morality and encourage the development of civilization (see, for example, Rael and Zecharia Sitchin).

The sojourn of the soul is a thrilling divine romance in which the lover, who in the beginning is conscious of nothing but emptiness, frustration, superficiality and the gnawing chains of bondage, gradually attains an increasingly fuller and freer expression of love and ultimately disappears and merges in the Divine Beloved to realize the unity of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and eternal fact of God as Infinite Love.

He argues that man's unwillingness to accept his own ego has caused him to externalize these gods so as to avoid the feeling of narcissism that would accompany self-worship.

Could it be that when he closes the gap between himself and his "God" he sees the demon of pride creeping forth—that very embodiment of Lucifer appearing in his midst?

One common variation of this idea is the belief or aspiration that humans will create a God entity emerging from an artificial intelligence.

Clarke's friend and colleague, the late Isaac Asimov, postulated in his story "The Last Question" a merger between humanity and machine intelligence that ultimately produces a deity capable of reversing entropy and subsequently initiates a new Creation trillions of years from the present era when the Universe is in the last stage of heat death.

The Culture series, by Iain M. Banks, represents a blend in which a transhuman society is guarded by godlike machine intelligences.

Saying this we already know what is God the father the almighty, creator of heaven and earth, we know it not by the effect of a learning or of some knowledge, we don't know it by the thought, on the background of the truth of the world; we know it and we can know it only in and by the Life itself.