God’s Existence and Attributes

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INTRODUCTION The question whether God exists and what his attributes are is not a philosophical concern in either the Hebrew Bible or in the classical rabbinic texts from the Mishnah to the Talmud. To be sure, the Bible includes texts bearing witness to a deep crisis of the conception of a providential God interacting with human beings, most importantly the books of Job and Ecclesiastes. It even reports that “the fool says in his heart: ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). Whereas the Athenian in Plato’s Laws responds to such a denial with the first extant proof for the existence of the Divine, no such attempt is recorded in the Bible however. Passages abound, moreover, which taken literally contradict crucial features of the conception of God held by medieval Jewish philosophers – God’s incorporeality, for example, or God’s internal unity. Jewish philosophical discussions of God usually arise at those intellectual intersections where natural theology – starting with the speculations of the pre-Socratics about the archē of nature – encounters the representations of God contained in the Jewish sources. It is important to stress that this encounter would be decidedly misconstrued as an encounter between the God of philosophy and the God of religion. Aristotle, for example, takes both the worship and the contemplation of God to be the highest human good. Conversely, for Jewish philosophers like Philo of Alexandria in late antiquity, Maimonides in the Middle Ages, and Spinoza in the early-modern period, the ideal of philosophy and the ideal of religion coincide in the intellectual love of God, much of which consists in reflecting on the issues discussed in the present chapter.