God

The God of the philosophers is the First Mover, the cause of the movement of things in the world.

For Aristotle, God causes the movement of the things of the world not by thrust, but as the object of their desire. He says the ancient myth may be true that the heavenly beings are gods, and sees them as aspiring to God as their supreme object.

The Greeks saw the world as eternal and there­fore not created at some point of time. As God did not create, so He is not provident of care for the world, not involved in the fortunes of the world and of man; "a monarch who reigns but does not rule".

Aristotle, however, also says that the highest good is in the world "both as something separate and by itself, and as the order of the parts."

The Greeks saw the divine life as emotionless and self-sufficient. Aristotle saw God as enjoying the (for Aristotle) highest form of activity, that of the intellect. But God has nothing beyond Himself to stand as His object of thought, and He must therefore stand to Himself as His own object. God's activity is "thinking about thinking", an act­ivity blissful to Him, but unknown to the non­intellectual who acts only for material gain.

Christianity derives from Judaism a belief that God is interested in the historical process in which humanity is involved and in which the Incarnation took place.

The mystics see God as needing His creation. "God needs me as much as I need Him."

For EH God is the Absolute, the Infinite Sent­ient Motion or Power of Eternity, the motions of which pattern themselves as the world. As Absol­ute Infinite it is omnipresent, and there in its ab­soluteness changeless; yet its motions produce the world of change within it. From the intersection of its motion arises the world and all the individ­ualities within it. God's actions constitute in­dividual centres, and these are, therefore, motion­ patterns of God, and therefore "needed", that is, not severable from God, any more than the wav­ing of a hand is separable from the hand-waving.