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Updated: May 11, 2025
Maimonides counts thirteen principles of Judaism as follows: Existence of God, Unity, Incorporeality, Eternity, He alone must be worshipped, Prophecy, Superiority of the prophecy of Moses, Revelation, Immutability of the Law, God's Omniscience, Reward and Punishment, Messiah, Resurrection. This list is open to criticism.
We must therefore insist on the absolute incorporeality of God and explain the purpose of Scripture in expressing itself in anthropomorphic terms, and on the other hand emphasize the absolute unity of God against the believers in essential attributes. Belief in God as body or as liable to suffer affection is worse than idolatry.
The incorporeality of God proves also his unity. For what is not body cannot have the corporeal attributes of quantity or number, hence God cannot be more than one. And there are many powerful arguments besides against a dualistic theory. A unitary effect cannot be the result of two independent causes.
Next in importance to the proof of God's existence, unity and incorporeality, is the doctrine of attributes. It was important to Jew, Christian and Mohammedan alike for a number of reasons. The crude anthropomorphism of many expressions in the Bible as well as the Koran offended the more sophisticated thinkers ever since Alexandrian days.
And thus while we see him in the manner of Saadia and Bahya follow the good old method, credited by Maimonides to the Mutakallimun, of starting his metaphysics with proofs of the world's creation, and basing the existence of God, his unity, incorporeality and other attributes on the creation of the world as a foundation, he turns into an uncompromising opponent of these much despised apologetes when he comes to discuss the nature of God's attributes, of the divine will, and of the nature of evil.
But we shall first take up the attributes of incorporeality and eternity, which can be dismissed in a few words. God is eternal because the only other alternative is that he is created.
If a man is not himself able to reason out the truth, there is no excuse for his refusing to listen to one who has reasoned it out. A person is not an unbeliever for not being able to prove the incorporeality of God. He is an unbeliever if he thinks God is corporeal.
And so he condemns the philosophers, though he cannot help using their method and even their fundamental doctrines, so far as they are purely theoretical and scientific. He is willing to go the full length of the Aristotelians only in the unity and incorporeality of God, though here too he vindicates sense perception to God, i. e., the knowledge of that which we get through our sense organs.
For Aristotle there is no creator, and his proof is adequate. But for Ibn Daud it is decidedly inadequate. We are so far minus a proof that God is a creator ex nihilo. Ibn Daud simply asserts that God created matter, but this argument does not prove it. As to the incorporeality of God Aristotle can prove it adequately from the eternity of motion.
And if a man does not believe in incorporeality, he disbelieves in the real nature of God, and it is as if he denied the original principle. From existence of God are derived four: Unity, Incorporeality, Independence of time, Freedom from defects. From Revelation are derived three: God's knowledge, Prophecy, Authenticity of God's messenger.
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