Topics Religion

Question A friend argues that if a perfect God creates something different from himself, then it's necessarily imperfect, because, if perfect, it would still be God. So the universe implicitly entails evil and our universe is, if not exactly the best of all worlds, the least evil of all worlds. But then I ask: "Why did God create anything at all?" and my friend replies it's not his responsibility to answer that question and we end in deadlock. Is there any way to break the deadlock?

Accepted:
August 19, 2008

Comments

I am not sure you should accept what your friend suggests, that God creates something that has to be imperfect. We normally expect someone who is good at something to infuse their product with their skill, so why should we not expect God to create something perfect? Philosophers sometimes say his product is imperfect because the material he works with, matter, is imperfect, but then there is an English saying, I believe, that a poor workman always blames his tools.

A further thought here: I think part of the issue has to do with the phrase "something perfect." Assuming it makes sense, to talk, for example, about a perfect piccolo (keys work flawlessly, correctly placed to produce notes that are in tune, etc...) Then I'd certainly agree with Oliver: nothing wrong with the idea that God could make such a thing. But this may not be what you're worried about, because presumably you'd agree that a perfect piccolo wouldn't be God. The point is that there could be a perfect thing of a certain sort that wasn't on that account part of God or an aspect of God, let alone identical with God. (It would certainly take an argument to show that nothing could count as a perfect piccolo unless it was God or an aspect of God, and I can't come up with a plausible one.)

However, perhaps the question is whether God could create a perfect being in the sense of the phrase "perfect being" that's sometimes used, for example, in the Ontological Argument for God's existence. A perfect piccolo isn't a perfect being, after all, which is why there's no worry that the piccolo would somehow be God. But there may be something paradoxical in the idea that there could be two distinct perfect beings. The problem would arise around the idea of omnipotence. It's long been held that a perfect being would have to be omnipotent -- all-powerful. That there could be two distinct all-powerful beings is problematic. Call them X and Y. If X has power over Y in some respect, then Y isn't fully omnipotent. If neither X nor Y has power over the other in any respect, each seems to be less than all-powerful. And if each has power over the other in one and the same respect, we seem to have an outright contradiction.

And so perhaps we should conclude that a perfect being, if such there be, can't create another perfect being. This may seem problematic too: it may seem to mean that the very idea of a perfct being is incoherent, since a perfect being must be all-powerful, and yet necessarily a perfect being doesn't have the power to create another perfect being.

Whether this really shows that the concept of omnipotence is incoherent is open to argument. It's a bit like the so-called Stone Paradox: can God create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? If yes, then there's something God potentially can't do: lift that stone. If no, there's something God actually can't do: make that stone. In either case, omnipotence seems problematic. One solution is to say that asking God to create such a stone is asking God to perform a pseudo-task: a "task" that nothing would count as successfully performing. It's reasonable, so the argument would go, to say that in claiming that God is omnipotent, we aren't saying that God can perform pseudo-tasks.

If that makes sense (I'll leave it to you to decide) then perhaps the fact that God couldn't make another perfect being can be dealt with in the same way: the idea of two distinct perfect beings is incoherent, and so inquiring whether God could do it is inquiring whether God could perform a pseudo-task.

Needless to say, all this is in an "as if" spirit. If there is no perfect being to begin with, none of this comes up except as an exploration of the limits of various concepts.