What Does It Mean To Be Unchanging?

The Search for God Page 2.1.2.1.4.1

We continue to develop the heavy burden of finding God and the attributes of God we expect to find—the attributes this being should possess to be considered the greatest conceivable being.

The driving force for God’s attributes is the requirement for all-knowledge. Since humans demand true answers about ultimate reality, death, and evil, we seek a being who must know everything.

An all-knowing being.

We continue to hit upon and grapple with the changing nature of human bodies and knowledge. When we considered the laws of identity and change, we often talk about things going out of existence. Leaves wither and fall, the beauty queen wrinkles and ages, and stars explode.

The identity of everything we know changes. In the famous play Hamlet, Hamlet contemplates action and the future. He kicks off this soliloquy by uttering the phrase, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Death, for humans, is the ultimate known ending, yet the change involved with death is unknown.

What attributes would be required to not change? You would have to be eternal because if you are a created or dependent being, you change. In addition, we have to consider timelessness. You could not be affected by the changes of time, so the being would have to be outside of time.

You would have to have all knowledge. If you gained knowledge, you would change. You would have to be immutable in any physical or spiritual sense, whatever substance or essence the object was made of could not change, degrade, or grow.

You would have to be non-dependent in any way upon anything of matter or immaterial substances, time, or other beings. If you are affected by an outside being, you could change, especially in knowledge. So, I see, to be completely unchanging, you would have to be all of the following:

We witness this idea as well with knowledge. To possess all-knowledge, one cannot gain more knowledge. There cannot be something that God does not know, which means God’s knowledge, at least, must be unchanging. But there is more.

If God’s substance changed, then God is becoming something more or God’s substance is dependent. If God is subject to an outside force that changes him or is dependent upon some outside substance, then we must question God’s ability to possess all knowledge.

Man might have knowledge of the wind but cannot fully understand all hurricanes; so too, forces outside of God would lead to insufficient knowledge. Next, if God is “becoming” something else, which would also mean there is some time factor applied to God, would he know what he is becoming? 

Things that change imply time—a before and an after. If God has a before and an after, is there some greater cosmic time to which God is subject? Binding God to another timeline would mean God would lack all-knowledge. 

There could exist a changing universal being with all knowledge inside our universe, but with changing substance, changing external knowledge, and bound to some different timeline.

We could theorize about this “universal” being who is easier to understand. We could search for this pantheistic God who is changing, who has all-knowledge of our universe, became the God of our universe, and therefore knows about human death.

But;

So while I acknowledge that these changing attributes are possible, in the end, the greatest conceivable being we are looking for should possess an eternal, timeless, all-knowing, non-dependent, unchanging being.

Another option involves an eternal, timeless God who lives outside time but is stuck in His own timeline with something outside himself, one of many eternal ‘gods’. This being is, for all intents and purposes, all-knowing about this universe and all-powerful within this universe.

This “lesser” God would know about death because he created this universe, so he can answer all our questions about death. But what about ultimate reality? This being would have limited knowledge and limited presence outside His existence, just like the pantheistic being.

So again we must ask, “What is ultimate reality?” What other being or substance exists? We might say this “lesser” God has sufficient knowledge for our human questions, but not complete knowledge of all reality. While this lesser changing universal being is possible, I am making a case based on evidence that the “greater” single God should exist, even if a lesser god exists.

We can make God easier to understand to our rational mind or we can search for a being beyond our comprehension that everything in the universe of logic and experience suggests should exist. Either way, whether this lesser god, a pantheistic god, or the greater eternal God exists, he must speak with humans for us to have certainty about who or what exists.

We can make God easier to understand to our rational mind or we can search for a being beyond our comprehension that everything in the universe of logic and experience suggests should exist. Either way, whether this lesser god, a pantheistic god, or the greater eternal God exists, he must speak with humans for us to have certainty about who or what exists.

Everything we know, everything we experience changes. We reviewed two changing beings in the unchanging attribute article to demonstrate that to truly possess all-knowledge about ultimate reality, a being’s knowledge and substance must be unchanging.

There can exist only one unchanging, non-dependent substance, just like there can only be one all-knowing, omnipresent living being. The substance of this being would undergird all of reality.

• What is the crucial concept?
  • To be unchanging, your substance must be unchanging. For a being to be unchanging, he must possess all knowledge. To have all-knowledge, the knowledge level must be unchanging.
• Why is that significant?
  • The single eternal God must possess unchanging knowledge and substance unaffected by time.
• If you agree, the next steps.
• If you disagree, please consider reading.

• Pantheism
• The greatest conceivable being