90 CONCEPTIONS OF ULTIMATE REALITY2 God exercises weak providence.
3 The world exists because God wants it to.
4 It is not the case that whatever is everlastingly true is necessarily true.
5 That the world exists is not necessarily true.
Hindu monotheism embraces both a beginningless world and a doctrine of creation.
Here, the idea that God (Brahman with qualities) creates the world teaches that while
the world is everlasting toward the past, having no first moment of existence, it depends
at each moment of its existence on the sustaining activity of God. God could cease
sustaining the world in existence, at which point God would continue to exist but the
world would not. There is an asymmetrical dependence relation between God and the
world: the world depends for its existence on God’s activity, but God’s existence does
not depend on there being a world.
The relationship between God and history, as seen by Hindu monotheism, is complex.
Hindu monotheism is a religion of reincarnation and karma, with karma being viewed
as under God’s control. In response to a person’s repentance and faith, God can remit
punishment, cancelling negative karma. Escape from the reincarnation cycle comes by
God’s grace. There are incarnations of a sort – God causes theophanies or appearances.
For example, Krishna is said to appear to a devotee and to instruct him or her to build a
temple on the site where the appearance occurred. Temple traditions include stories that
trace the temple’s history back to such appearances. But Hindu monotheism does not
include any claim to the effect that God is uniquely incarnate in any human being or
provides a means for redemption in such a manner. God is capable of controlling the
mind of a particular person in as extended a way and period as God wishes, and God is
capable of causing whatever visions, auditory or visual, God wishes to bring about.
Further, gods or goddesses, who exist dependent on God and under God’s control, may
take upon themselves human form. But nowhere is there a unique and definitive
incarnation in which God is incarnate in order to redeem the world. If nothing else, this
is precluded by the fact that Hindu monotheism is not trinitarian.
There are other possibilities. Neo-Platonism, for example, is a form of monotheism
distinct in various ways from those sketched here. I make no pretense to being exhaustive.
My claim is only that the considerations that apply to the sorts of monotheism we shall
discuss apply as well to those we do not.
Monotheisms and atheisms
A different way of distinguishing monotheisms
Monotheisms can be distinguished on different criteria from those discussed above.
Coming to grasp this requires learning some distinctions that will be useful, even