On The Attributes Of God In The Contemporary Western Philosophy Of Religion

God is the creator and ruler of the world, who is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good; as a "personalness" , he has the duality of God and man, which is the most important doctrine of the Christian. Centered upon such attributes of God, the deabting history of religion philosophy could date back to Epicureans. The tremendous upheavels of the western society in the twentieth century led to a turbulence of the ideology of mankind, causing great changes in the theory of God's attributes of the western philosophy of religion, among them the most obvious being the vacilating of God's absoluteness inhabited in the traditional view of divinity. The traditional attributes of God began to arouse reconsideration and discuss among religion ideologists including philosophers and theologists, even under suspicion and revision.The British thinker Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), his process theology is a view angle to the God, which is constructed on the basis of the conception frame of "process philosophy" . The traditional theology holds that God is a pure entity above the dynamic world, while process theology explains the relationship between God and the world on the grounds of changes. It emphasizes the temporality of God, and insists that stillness is abstract and rigid. In the view of Whitehead, the existence of God covers two aspects: one is primodial nature, viz. inheret quality of itself; the other is consequent nature, which is constituted by its reaction to the dynamic world and is featured with process or variety. The previous is formal, conceptual and unconscious, while the latter is physical, definite and conscious. As such, Whitehead denies the position of God as the ultimate foundation, and believes the creativity is the ultimate priciple of the universe. No matter God or other actual entities, they are all concrete examples of creativity. Based on the principle of creativity, Whitehead defines the nature of God from two aspects and explains the relationship between God and the world: on one hand, God convinces the actual situation to realize this ideal by providing the initial purpose for the actual situation in terms of primordial nature; on the other hand, God conserves the creative achievement of all actual situations through consequent nature, and provides a new ideal factual basis.And then, Whitehead criticizes the three classic interpretive schemes of theology: God as the ruler, as the essential person of moral force, and as the ultimate. In addition, he makes rectification of the traditional God's nature of all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, and enriches and clarifies the nature of God.