Conceptions of God

de: Hauptgebäude der Universität Hamburg. Erbaut 1909 bis 1911 nach Plänen von Distel & Grubitz für das Allgemeine Vorlesungswesen. en: Main building of the University of Hamburg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Four-armed Vishnu, Cambodia, 11th/12th century CE, bronze, 42 cm. Donation Paul Czerlitzki, Berlin. Located in the Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin-Dahlem. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo, face detail of God. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Conceptions of God in monotheist, pantheist and panentheist religions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:

• as a powerful, human-like, supernatural being, or as the deification of an esoteric, mystical or philosophical entity or category;
• as the "Ultimate", the summum bonum, the "Absolute Infinite", the "Transcendent", or Existence or Being itself;
• as the ground of being, the monistic substrate, that which we cannot understand; and so on.

The first recordings that survive of monotheistic conceptions of God, borne out of henotheism and (mostly in Eastern religions) monism, are from the Hellenistic period. Of the many objects and entities that religions and other belief systems across the ages have labeled as divine, the one criterion they share is their acknowledgement as divine by a group or groups of human beings.

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