God

In plain terms

Most arguments about God are not about whether something exists. They are about which concept is in play.

Classical theism specifies a being that is all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, outside time, and utterly simple - not made of parts, not one thing among others. That is a demanding specification, and nearly every famous problem attaches to it: how a timeless being acts, how an immutable one responds, how omniscience leaves room for choices, how perfect goodness coexists with suffering.

Other conceptions dissolve some of these and create others. A God within time can respond and cannot be immutable. A God who is not omnipotent has no problem of evil and is not what most traditions have claimed.

So the arguments are downstream of a definition that was itself argued into place.

As a philosopher would put it

The classical package is developed jointly by Maimonides, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī and Aquinas, and the attributes interlock. Divine simplicity - that God is not composed of parts and is identical with the divine attributes - is the load-bearing one, and it generates the difficulties: if God is identical with his goodness and his knowledge, then those are identical with each other, which is hard to state coherently.

The internal tensions are well catalogued. Omnipotence meets the paradox of the stone and, more seriously, the question of whether God can do the logically impossible. Omniscience meets foreknowledge and freedom. Timelessness meets the problem of how a being outside time can act at a moment or respond to a prayer.

The apophatic tradition responds by denying that any positive predicate applies literally - Maimonides is the strictest, holding that we may say only what God is not. Process theology takes the other exit, giving up immutability and unlimited power to keep responsiveness.

What is actually disputed

Whether the classical concept is coherent.

The attributes are individually plausible and jointly strained. Divine simplicity appears to conflict with God having distinct attributes at all; timelessness with acting or responding; omnipotence with the existence of anything God cannot do, including the impossible; omniscience with libertarian freedom.

Each has proposed solutions and none commands agreement.

The modern division is between classical theists, who accept the package and work at the tensions, and open or process theists, who revise the attributes to remove them - typically giving up unlimited foreknowledge or unlimited power. Critics of the revisions argue they produce a being not worth calling God; critics of the classical view argue it produces a being nobody could relate to.

And the non-theistic traditions raise a prior question: whether an ultimate reality has to be a being at all, which Advaita and Buddhism both answer no.