God as omniscient, omnipotent and supremely good, the meanings of these attributes, the paradox of the stone and the Euthyphro dilemma, and whether the attributes are compatible with each other and with human free will and divine foreknowledge.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain the traditional concept of God as omniscient, omnipotent and supremely good (omnibenevolent), to clarify what each attribute means, and to assess puzzles about their coherence: the paradox of the stone, the Euthyphro dilemma, and the tension between divine omniscience (foreknowledge) and human free will.

The three attributes

The paradox of the stone

The Euthyphro dilemma

Omniscience, foreknowledge and free will

If God is omniscient, God already knows every future action. But if it is already true that you will do X, it can seem that you cannot do otherwise, threatening free will, and so threatening moral responsibility and the justice of judgement. Responses include:

• Boethius and timelessness. God is outside time and sees all events in an eternal present, so divine knowledge does not causally determine or temporally precede your free choice.
• Restricting omniscience. God knows all that is logically possible to know; on some views (open theism) future free actions are not yet there to be known, so not knowing them is no defect, just as not knowing a round square is no defect.
• Compatibilism. If free will is compatible with determination, then foreknowledge is no special threat: being able to act on your own desires, rather than being uncaused, is all freedom requires.

The deeper point an examiner rewards is distinguishing two claims. Foreknowledge alone establishes only that your action is certain, not that it is necessary or caused: "God knows you will do X" entails "you will do X", but not "you must do X" in the sense that rules out doing otherwise. The threat to freedom only arises if we slide from the certainty of the action to the impossibility of doing otherwise, and the Boethian and compatibilist replies are different ways of blocking that slide.

Compatibility of the attributes

The attributes can also seem to conflict with one another. A supremely good being might be unable to do evil, which appears to limit omnipotence; defenders reply that the inability to do evil is a perfection, not a weakness, because doing evil is a failure of power and goodness, not an exercise of it. Omniscience can clash with goodness too: a being that knows what it is like to envy, lust or fear might thereby know what a perfectly good being arguably cannot experience, so either God's knowledge or God's goodness must be qualified. And perfect goodness plus omnipotence together generate the problem of evil, the sharpest coherence challenge, since a being able and willing to prevent all suffering would seem to leave none. The unifying lesson is that defending the concept of God almost always involves refining an attribute (omnipotence as power over the logically possible, omniscience as knowledge of all knowable truths, goodness as grounded in God's nature) rather than asserting it without limit, and the examiner's question is whether those refinements are principled or merely ad hoc rescues.