Definition 1: God

It is quite tricky to determine whether something exists until you have decided what the something actually is. So we'd better get that out of the way.


Religions, to their credit, have a long history of writing things down. And religions have a natural ownership of the concept of God, so the sensible place to look for a definition of God would be in the writings of a religion. Clearly there are many religions and they do not necessarily share a common definition of God, so I am going to take the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and take their shared definition of God from the Torah/Old Testament.


There is an added complication, of course, in the fact that the Torah/Old Testament exists in various translations and versions, and the precise interpretation of its contents is debated within and between the religious groups and subgroups and offshoots. I'll have to cross those bridges when I come to them.


(Small but important aside: I'm not going to attempt to define God myself, and I'm not going to attempt to address other people's more recent definitions of God. It is quite easy to invent something that can be cunningly disproved and dismissed, and it is equally trivial to invent something that is next-to-impossible to dismiss. But it's not interesting or useful or big or clever. If I wanted to burn straw men, I'd have invested in an ill-judged remake of a classic horror film. More on this later. Even if it isn't interesting.)