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The Immutability or Unchangeability of God is an attribute that "God is unchanging in his character, will, and covenant promises." [1] The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that "[God] is a spirit, whose being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable." Those things do not change.
[18] Millard Erickson calls this attribute God's constancy. [3] The immutability of God is being increasingly criticized by advocates of open theism, [19] which argues that God is open to influence through the prayers, decisions, and actions of people.
Classical theism is characterized by a set of core attributes that define God as absolute, perfect, and transcendent. These attributes include divine simplicity, aseity, immutability, eternality, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, each of which has been developed and refined through centuries of philosophical and theological discourse.
Process theology does not deny that God is in some respects eternal (will never die), immutable (in the sense that God is unchangingly good), and impassible (in the sense that God's eternal aspect is unaffected by actuality), but it contradicts the classical view by insisting that God is in some respects temporal, mutable, and passible.
The divine nature accordingly has no emotions, changes, alterations, height, width, depth, or any other temporal attributes. While Jesus Christ's human nature was complete, and thus Christ possessed a human body, human mind and human soul, and thus human emotions, this human nature was hypostatically united with the timeless, immutable, impassible divine nature, which retained all of its ...
Ward defended the utility of the five ways (for instance, on the fourth argument he states that all possible smells must pre-exist in the mind of God, but that God, being by his nature non-physical, does not himself stink) whilst pointing out that they only constitute a proof of God if one first begins with a proposition that the universe can ...
According to Thomas Aquinas, God is God's existence and God's essence is God's existence. [2] Divine simplicity is the hallmark of God's transcendence of all else, ensuring that the divine nature is beyond the reach of ordinary categories and distinctions (or, at least, their ordinary application).
The book was written in the context of the natural theology tradition. In earlier centuries, theologians such as John Ray and William Derham, as well as philosophers of classical times such as Cicero, argued for the existence and goodness of God from the general well-being of living things and the physical world.