Formless God?

Divine attributes have in actual fact been enumerated to counter deviation, as has been mentioned in the Quran (7:180). Deviation has occurred mostly in philosophy. In philosophy God is conceived of as a Being without attributes. It is under the influence of this philosophical concept, that some have developed the concept of a formless God. The famous German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831) has expressed this as ‘world spirit’. Another philosopher has called God an ‘abstract idea’.

According to this philosophic concept, God has no permanent and separate personality and it is without attributes. That is to say, He is like ‘gravity’ or ‘cosmic rays’. The Quran has mentioned God’s names to refute this philosophic deviation, rather than purely to specify the divine names.

In philosophy, God has not been conceived of as a Creator, but rather that all the phenomena of creation are manifestations of God Himself. This is without doubt an abstract philosophic construct. It is obvious that in the universe diverse phenomena are to be found. This being so, it is baseless to conjecture that such a God, who is free from all kinds of attributes, may appear in the diverse forms of creation. Such contradictions prove that this concept of God is only a matter of philosophic conjecture. It has no scientific base in fact.