Divinity, at least according to followers of Abrahamic religions, involves five essential attributes: eternal existence, the divinity must have always existed and will always exist; omnipresence, i.e., the divinity must be ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; omniscience, the divinity must have permanent and eternal knowledge concerning absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; omnipotence, the divinity must necessarily be all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, the divinity must be omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity.

Other religions, more ancient religions as well as contemporary religions have been more realistic.  Deities, where they existed, were just more powerful than humans albeit not omnipotent, especially when they were plural.  If not ubiquitously omnipresent, they were perhaps not bound by the rules concerning time and space that apply to us and could show up when least expected.  Omniscient?  Not at all, although perhaps they, or some of them, were more cognitively gifted, at least sometimes.  Eternal?  Nope, they somehow came into being, usually sequentially, and in most cases, eventually expired, although the expiration was sometimes temporary.  And omnibenevolent?  Hell no!  They were willful and selfish and prone to emotional outburst.  Hmmm, that all sounds a great deal like the Abrahamic YHWH.

Still, to be fair, omniscience and ubiquitous omnipresence would seem possible if one eliminates time and space, treating them as illusions.  If time did not exist, then eternity would be either irrelevant or merely a natural state.  Perhaps in that context, since nothing would really exist, omnipotence might also be possible although not all that potent. But omnibenevolence is subjective although, in the absence of time and space and anything at all (other than perhaps, a sentient singularity), it might well be either irrelevant or natural, there being no choices to make.  In the foregoing context, an idealized divinity such as that imagined in Abrahamic religions might be possible, but only until time and space arrived, only until decisions became, not only possible, but necessary, even if any such decisions were merely illusions.

So, where does that leave us? 

Perhaps pondering on the nature of quantic phenomena and how they might impact the foregoing.  As I understand it, everything and anything is possible at a quantic level, sort of like the concept of chaos where, rather than consider it a negative, chaos is merely the confluence of every possibility; however, quantic activation would require an observer which would create a sort of bootstrap cosmogony.  Kind of like the ones were it is the worshippers who create the worshipped.

Or would that involve cosmology?

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.