NEVER MIND hE LACKS THE THREE OMNIS...:

Belief in God is, naturally, the major and most consequential component in all theistic belief systems -- including their sense of ethics. While theologians and lay people alike have expended considerable time and effort trying to understand the nature of God, one question that has, regrettably, often been overlooked or neglected is what kind of God is ethically worth believing in.

Like other monotheistic traditions of the Axial Age, in the Islamic tradition -- to which I belong and with which I identify -- the question asked by theologians regarding the concept of the nature of God was primarily framed in terms of what kind of God is worthy of worship. Moreover, the answer to that question has predominantly placed the emphasis on the Divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence. Such approaches to the concept of God which emphasise transcendent attributes -- whether they be in the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic tradition -- not only tend to come at the expense of conceptions of Divine relational love, but are also unable to exonerate God from failing to prevent the occurrence and persistence of evil. This amounts to endorsing what I would refer to as unethical conceptualisations of the Divine.

But what does it mean for one's concept of God to be ethical? It means, at very least, a refusal to conceptualise the Divine in ways that would allow us to ascribe to the nature of God characteristics that we would find offensive if we encountered them in human beings. According to this litmus test, any belief in the Divine that conceptually allows for the existence of an evil that God could in theory prevent but, for whatever reason, permits to take place, or a belief in Divinely sanctioned misogyny, can never be ethically (and therefore theologically) justified.

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