Abstract:
Philosophers generally believe that God's essential attributes are identical to His essence, although their concepts and meanings are different. They have proposed three criteria to prove the identicality of His attributes and essence, and thus justify and prove the identicality of God's attributes and his essence. This article presents and criticizes the three criteria that philosophers have put forward in this regard: First, The existential union of the essential attributes and the essence of God, and this is the most famous criterion. Second, God’s essence being an instance for the concepts of essential attributes, without the intervention of anything else (including existential, non-existential or relative matters or forged matters). Third, The annihilation of attributes and their concepts in the essence of God (this criterion is taken from mystics). There are some drawbacks to each of these three criteria, from the perspective of mystics, which make it unreasonable and unacceptable