Abstract
Perfect being theism is the view that the perfect being exists and the property being-perfect is the property being-God. According to the strong analysis of perfection, a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies all perfections. On the other hand, the weak analysis of perfection says that a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies the best possible combination of compatible perfections. Strong perfect being theism accepts the former analysis while weak perfect being theism accepts the latter. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to reject both versions of perfect being theism. On the one hand, strong perfect being theism is false if there are incompatible perfections; I argue that there are. On the other hand, if either no comparison can be made between sets of perfections, or they are equally good, then there is no best possible set of perfections. I argue for the antecedent of this conditional statement, concluding that weak perfect being theism is false. In the absence of other analyses of perfection, I conclude that we have reason to reject perfect being theism.
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Notes
This was pointed out to me by Paul Draper.
Though not the only nor (perhaps) the main one. Theists (and non-theists) might reject the strong analysis, not because it leads to the conclusion that God does not exist (that would be bad reasoning), but because they just don’t think it is true by definition that a perfect being is perfect in every way. Instead, what it means to be perfect is to be as intrinsically valuable as it is possible to be.
In fact, this was Nagasawa’s (2017) brilliant insight. One can reject 1 on the grounds that being perfect just requires exemplifying the best possible combination of compatible perfections. This way, Nagasawa, by rejecting 1, provides an argument against the problem of incompatibility without having to tackle each incompatibility argument for 2.
Chang would also say that for other people being a lawyer is better than being a musician, for instance, those who dislike or do not have a talent for music, and vice versa!
I think a logical consequence of B(x, y, V) is that it is always true that B(x, y, x) for any y. Anything is better than any other thing with respect to the first thing. The Eifel Tower is better than New York relative to being-the-Eifel-Tower. Similarly, pleasure is better than compassion relative to being-pleasurable.
Recall, I(Φ) abbreviates the sentence ‘the set Φ of all perfections is inconsistent’. By adding the subscript, I intend ‘\({I(\Phi )}_{i}\)’ to be read as ‘the set Φ of all perfections is inconsistent and those members of Φ that are incompatible with each other are incomparable’.
Note that this is true because of the monotonicity of classical logic (which is the one I employ here). What this means is that a valid argument cannot be made invalid by adding new premises. If p entails q, then p and r and s entail q also. In our case, if a perfection pn entails ~ pm, then pn and q1 and q2 and… entail ~ pm also, where qi is a perfection.
An anonymous referee points out correctly that this claim is dubious. I address this worry in the Objections section below (see objection II).
See Rubio (forthcoming, 8).
See footnote 12.
n! is the product of all the integers \(i\le n\). In other words, \(n!=n\times \left(n-1\right)\times \left(n-2\right)\dots \times 2\times 1\).
That is: if we consider all of the compatible sets of comparable perfections, God has the best of those. More precisely, suppose that there is a "largest" set of comparable perfections. Consider all of the compatible subsets of that set. Whichever of those is best is what God has.
My gratitude to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
I take this case for ease of exposition, but the same applies with other cases (e.g., Δ is a subset of Γ or vice versa; Δ and Γ have some (but not all) members in common but neither is a subset of the other).
I am very thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. The reviewer also rightly points out that “it might be said that this objection overlooks that appeal to optimality: a perfection is the optimal degree of a great-making property (see p.2). But whether there is such a thing as “the optimal degree of a great-making property” depends upon whether what a given perfection contributes to intrinsic value depends upon what other perfections it is coinstantiated with.
See Fine (1975) for an elaborate trivalent logic.
Note that this is true even if any s.1–7 holds.
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Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Paul Draper and Troy Seagraves for helpful discussions and reading earlier drafts of the paper, and to an anonymous reviewer for helpful and insightful comments.
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Resto Quiñones, J. Incompatible and incomparable perfections: a new argument against perfect being theism. Int J Philos Relig (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09910-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09910-8