Thus understood, God’s properties are merely human ones, albeit extended to the maximum degree possible. As conceived of by perfect-being theologians, therefore, God turns out to be simply the greatest thing around, some kind of super-being that would be quite capable of evoking admiration and wonder, but who could scarcely be described as being absolutely transcendent, or as being worthy of worship. [...] The Anselmians’ God is therefore anything but ineffable, for not only can we talk about him, we can do so in precisely the same terms as those we use in talking about humans. Such a view succeeds in presenting God in terms that are comfortingly familiar, but only at the price of being discomfortingly anthropomorphic. [...] Negative theologians and Anselmians have now presented us with two radically opposed notions of God and his attributes. On the one hand, there is a God so lacking in plurality as to be marked by no internal distinctions whatever; on the other hand, a God so riven with distinctions, so characterized by plurality, as not to be identical with all his attributes, nor they with each other. On the one hand, a God so far from being anthropomorphic as to be shrouded in the negations of human properties; on the other hand, a God so anthropomorphic as to be describable by predicates which remain basically human ones, even when qualified by the likes of ‘maximally’ as in ‘maximally wise’ or ‘omni) as in ‘omniscient’ or ‘unsurpassably’ as in ‘unsurpassably generous.’- Barry Miller in A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Nature of God
I think Barry Miller’s remarks accurately portray the contrasting views of God (personalistic vs classic) today. Aside from my studies on ethics, I’ve been picking up my studies on philosophy of religion, with a particular look at the doctrine of divine simplicity and the two big contrasting views of God that I mentioned earlier: theistic personalism and classical theism. What turns me away from Theistic personalism is how anthropomorphic God is made out to be and how similar he is to us. Also, proponents of the DDS argue that theistic personalist’s denial of the DDS forces them to accept that God must be dependent on his attributes for his existence. What attracts me at the moment about DDS is how much of a rich understanding it gives to the fact that God is an uncaused first cause. That, and the fact that anthropomorphism is avoided entirely (some see this as a weakness in that God seems to be this distant abstract object).
