Christianity defines God with 3 characteristics: omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient or all-powerful, everywhere and all-knowing. These characteristics are immutable so however, they were before creation they are the same what after creation. each in a sense describes each other. ie. one cannot be omnipotent without being omnipresent and omniscient too.
omnipresence to me has been the most challenging logically speaking because in order for God to be everywhere does that not also mean he is everything? if not doesn't it mean God is not everywhere but instead fills in the gaps around everything? But in Christianity, there is an important distinction that God and his creation are separate and God is not his creation. So the best place I can put God is in a supraposition to creation that allows him to be omnipresent while also being separate from his creation.
So omnipresence could get thrown off of your checklist if you’re not tying yourself to the Biblical definition of God and you’re just thinking of it using logic, however on the flip side if you are tied to the Bible then it’s always possible that something could be fuzzy in the meaning and that the Biblical writers were actually trying to teach the concept of supraposition.
If Pantheism is true then omnipresence makes total sense, but for Pantheism to be true I could just use the words God and reality interchangeably, but does Panentheism imply conscious decision making by that reality at all? If not it’s just Atheism lol (just passive laws of nature). I feel like I haven’t thought my belief out enough to definitely say what I am. I say Deist because for things to come forth from God, but for those things to be separate from God, it seems like conscious decisions are being made to cause such a separation of things into two separate categories. If God is just free flowing reality without any decision making capacity (which to me just implies atheism) then why even make anything outside of itself at all? And I would only prefer Panentheism over Atheism if Panentheism implies that the universe/God actually makes decisions sometimes.
However Pantheism just sounds logically absurd lol because A would then equal B and C and D, etc, yet A is clearly different than B, and C, etc. I just try to think about decision making, period. Does ultimate reality make decisions or not is my biggest question. For me omnipotent and eternal is obvious, but does that omnipotent & eternal thing actually think and make decisions, or just produce organisms that do?
If God is immutable then before creation certainly he was omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient because there was nothing to compete with but the addition of creation doesn't change these characteristics. God is still immutable and still is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient
So at first glance it sounds like your basic definition of God doesn’t tie you to a personal agent, however, why create anything then? That’s a decision. So your definition demands that God is a conscious agent then?
I get pulled into Deism with the problem of evil, and how relative morals look from the viewpoints of different species. For a lion a lion eating a gazelle is good, for a gazelle a lion eating a gazelle is bad. God with a capital G might also care less about what gods with a lower case g do. Earth might be highly influenced by a god or gods, and God could care less. (G)od might just enjoy the circle of life running its course. Lower case gods just being more powerful entities in that grand circle of life. As if we are tiny fish but gods are whales.
