The reason why people believe that God has attributes is — once again — a literal understanding of Scripture. Because “the Torah speaks in the language of man”, it tends to explain the nature of God using terminology that is intelligible to ordinary people. When the Bible describes God as having attributes, it is usually in terms of attributes possessed by living beings encountered by humans in their daily experience, attributes which people naturally assume are ‘proper’ to a great living being.

Maimonides has an analogy for how a unitary essence can give rise to a multiplicity of actions, without the need for (or existence of) multiple attributes: fire. Fire burns, boils, hardens, melts, and blackens, but it would be wrong to assume that fire has several different constituent elements that separately cause each of these effects and are now brought together in fire. Instead, “by virtue of one quality in action, namely, by heat, it produces all these effects.” Similarly, for God, it is not true that “He contains one element by which He knows, another by which He wills, and another by which He exercises power”, etc.

What exactly are the ‘essential attributes’ which people ascribe to God? Maimonides lists four of these: life, power, wisdom, and will. “They believe that these are four different things, and such perfections as cannot possibly be absent from the Creator, and that these cannot be qualifications of His actions” and therefore they believe these are ‘essential attributes’. Maimonides disagrees;

we, who truly believe in the Unity of God (muwahhideen موحدين), declare, that as we do not believe that some element is included in His essence by which He created the heavens, another by which He created the elements, a third by which he created the ideals, in the same way we reject the idea that His essence contains an element by which He has power, another element by which He has will, and a third by which He has knowledge of His creatures. On the contrary, he is a simple essence (ذاته واحدة بسيطة), without any additional element whatever.