divine attributes properties of God; especially, those properties that are essential and unique to God. Among properties traditionally taken to be attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are naturally taken to mean having, respectively, power, knowledge, and moral goodness to the maximum degree. Here God is understood as an eternal (or everlasting) being of immense power, knowledge, and goodness, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is worthy of human worship.
Omnipotence is maximal power. Some philosophers, notably Descartes, have thought that omnipotence requires the ability to do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible. Most classical theists, however, understood omnipotence as involving vast powers, while nevertheless being subject to a range of limitations of ability, including the inability to do what is logically impossible, the inability to change the past or to do things incompatible with what has happened, and the inability to do things that cannot be done by a being who has other divine attributes, e.g., to sin or to lie.
Omniscience is unlimited knowledge. According to the most straightforward account, omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions. But there may be reasons for recognizing a limitation on the class of true propositions that a being must know in order to be omniscient. For example, if there are true propositions about the future, omniscience would then include foreknowledge. But some philosophers have thought that foreknowledge of human actions is incompatible with those actions being free. This has led some to deny that there are truths about the future and others to deny that such truths are knowable. In the latter case, omniscience might be taken to be knowledge of all knowable truths. Or if God is eternal and if there are certain tensed or temporally indexical propositions that can be known only by someone who is in time, then omniscience presumably does not extend to such propositions. It is a matter of controversy whether omniscience includes middle knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what an agent would do if other, counterfactual, conditions were to obtain. Since recent critics of middle knowledge (in contrast to Báñez and other sixteenth-century Dominican opponents of Molina) usually deny that the relevant counterfactual conditionals alleged to be the object of such knowledge are true, denying the possibility of middle knowledge need not restrict the class of true propositions a being must know in order to be omniscient. Finally, although the concept of omniscience might not itself constrain how an omniscient being acquires its knowledge, it is usually held that God’s knowledge is neither inferential (i.e., derived from premises or evidence) nor dependent upon causal processes. Omnibenevolence is, literally, complete desire for good; less strictly, perfect moral goodness. Traditionally it has been thought that God does not merely happen to be good but that he must be so and that he is unable to do what is wrong. According to the former claim God is essentially good; according to the latter he is impeccable. It is a matter of controversy whether God is perfectly good in virtue of complying with an external moral standard or whether he himself sets the standard for goodness. Divine sovereignty is God’s rule over all of creation. According to this doctrine God did not merely create the world and then let it run on its own; he continues to govern it in complete detail according to his good plan. Sovereignty is thus related to divine providence. A difficult question is how to reconcile a robust view of God’s control of the world with libertarian free will. Aseity (or perseity) is complete independence. In a straightforward sense, God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his existence. According to stronger interpretation of aseity, God is completely independent of everything else, including his properties. This view supports a doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God is not distinct from his properties. Simplicity is the property of having no parts of any kind. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God not only has no spatial or temporal parts, but there is no distinction between God and his essence, between his various attributes (in him omniscience and omnipotence, e.g., are identical), and between God and his attributes. Attributing simplicity to God was standard in medieval theology, but the doctrine has seemed to many contemporary philosophers to be baffling, if not incoherent. See also DESCARTES, DIVINE FOREKNOWL – EDGE , MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE , MOLINA , PHILOS – OPHY OF RELIGIO. E.R.W.