Is God More Like a Rock or the idea of a rock?
Is God more like a rock or the idea of a rock? If you had to choose one or the other, which would it be? On its face, the answer seems obvious. Rocks represent matter at its most obdurate state, while ideas transcend matter altogether. Ideas are the proper activity of the intellect. They live in minds, while rocks don’t live at all. Isn’t God infinitely closer to an idea—indeed, the idea of just about anything, let alone a rock—than he is to anything that is, well, any kind of thing?
We could answer that God is infinitely dissimilar to both an idea and a thing. That move, however, would leave us with very little idea of what God is. And it would go against the grain of classical theism, a formidable consensus that includes Plato, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas. They contend that God is absolutely simple, immaterial, and indivisible. God is pure being, not a being in the world. That makes God much more like an idea of a rock than a rock.
Following this train of thought gives you an immaterial God outside of time and space—much closer to an idea than a rock. This God thinks, and beings appear. Created things can be this or that, which means that they have a mutable nature. God, as their source, cannot be among these things. When classical theists state that God is the being of all things, they could just as easily say that God is the thinker of all things, the eternal knower whose thinking is what we perceive as reality.
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