Monotheism
is the belief in a single, universal, all-encompassing
deity.
Various forms of monotheism exist, including:
- Theism, a term that usually refers
to the belief in a 'personal' god, that is, a single god with a distinctive
personality, rather than just a divine force.
- Deism is a form of monotheism in which
it is believed that one god exists, however, a Deist comes to his belief through
reason, and rejects any religious revelations such as the Bible, the Tanakh, or
Qu'ran.
- Pantheism
holds that the
Universe is God. Depending on how this is understood, such a view
may be tantamount to atheism, deism or
theism.
-
Panentheism is a form of theism that holds that God contains, but is not
identical to, the Universe. This is also the view of
Process theology.
In contrast, see Polytheism,
which holds that there are many gods.
Dualism teaches that
there are two independent divine beings or eternal principles, the one good, and
the other evil, as set forth especially in
Zoroastrianism, but more fully in its later offshoots in
Gnostic
systems, such as
Manichaeism.
Most monotheists would say that, by definition, monotheism is incompatible
with polytheism. However,
devotees within polytheistic religious traditions often behave like monotheists.
This is because a belief in multiple gods does not imply the worship of multiple
gods. Historically, many polytheists believe in the existence of many gods, but
worship only one, considered by the devotee to be the supreme being. This
practice is termed
Henotheism.
There are also monotheistic theologies within polytheistic cultures, such as
some schools of thought within Hinduism
which teach that the many gods merely represent aspects of a single or
underlying divine power. Worship of a single god within a pantheon may also
evolve into a form of monotheism, as in the case of the
Aten cult in the
reign of the Egyptian pharaoh
Akhenaton.
Zoroastrianism is
considered by some to be the earliest monotheistic view to have evolved among
mankind, though it is not fully so, as the chief god
Ahura Mazda is not the sole creator. It has been theorized
that Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism as well as by Greek philosophy
before arriving at its modern monotheistic view of God. Earlier Judaism is
assumed to have claimed only that
Yahweh was a tribal deity who was the patron of the descendants of
Abraham, or that
there were many gods but that theirs was the most powerful. This view is not
compatible with the modern self-understanding of the
Abrahamic religions - Judaism,
Christianity,
Islam - which traditionally insist that
exclusive monotheism is the original religion of all mankind, all other gods
being viewed as idols and creatures which wrongly came to be worshipped as
deities.
The Christian belief in the
Trinity is
monotheism, the worship of the one God of Abraham according to Trinitarian
tradition. However, many Jews, Muslims, and
Unitarian Christians question this classification. Such
critics claim that the Trinity is in fact a form of
Tritheism,
a hypothetical belief system which teaches that there are three gods -- that is,
that the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost are, specifically, three distinct Gods
