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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
There have emerged two distinct approaches to preserving the coherence of theism. The most common approach involves explicating the concept of an absolutely perfect God in terms of the divine attributes (such as omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection) and then analyzing the divine-attribute concepts in such a way that they are rendered mutually consistent. According to this ‘multiple-attribute’ approach, the coherence of theism ultimately turns both on whether each divine-attribute concept can be coherently analyzed independently of the other divine-attribute concepts and on whether the divine attributes are then mutually consistent.
1 This strategy is adopted, for example, by Wierenga, Edward R. in The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
2 New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 4–34;Google Scholar all parenthetical page references in the present essay are to New Perspectives. Schlesinger first defends the Anselmian view in ‘Divine Perfection’, Religious Studies, XXI (1985), 147–58;Google Scholar for Leon Pearl's critique and Schlesinger's rebuttal see, respectively, ‘The Misuse of Anselm's Formula for God's Perfection’, Religious Studies, XXII (1986), 355–65Google Scholar and ‘On the Compatibility of the Divine Attributes’, Religious Studies, XXIII (1987), 539–42. Cf. St Anselm, Proslogium, chs. II, III and V.
3 Schlesinger attributes this version of the problem to R. LaCroix.
4 The defender of SDA1 would presumably take as primitive the concept of what it is for a property to contribute to an APB's excellence. Informally, the concept could be explicated this way: ‘In the same way that a human may be morally virtuous in virtue of her having certain (inherently laudable) character traits, the APB is maximally excellent in virtue of its having certain ‘excellent-making’ properties – properties on which an APB's excellence in some sense depends.’
5 DI leaves open the possibility that beings other than APBs may exemplify excellent-making properties.
6 The defender of SDA2 could take as primitive the concept of what it is for a property to diminish a being's excellence. Here is an informal explication of the concept: ‘Roughly, a property diminishes a being's excellence if having that property contributes to that entity's being inferior or bad at least to some degree. Thus, acquiring a property that diminishes a being's excellence involves a change for the worse: it involves that being's acquiring, in some sense, at least one flaw.’
7 If one allows, as Schlesinger does (New Perspectives, p. 28), that God may grant favours to those who pray, then one presumably should agree that an APB's excellence is neither diminished in a world in which few favours are granted because few inhabitants pray, nor enhanced in a world in which many favours are granted because many pray. Thus, if this view on prayer is right, then the property granting N favours in response to petitionary prayers (where ‘N’ refers to the number of such favours granted in the actual world) may also constitute a counter-example to PN: it is apparently a neutral property that is not a trivial essential property.
8 To object to the argument that evolution's apparent waste and inefficiency count against there being a ‘maximally perfect being’ who is thereby ‘maximally efficient’, Schlesinger replies that, just as there may be no single ‘correct formula’ for ‘the efficient car’, it may have been impossible for God to have created the universe ‘efficient in every respect’. See New Perspectives, pp. 17–20.Google Scholar
9 In ‘Something God Can't Know’ (paper presented to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology; Memphis, TN; 16 04 1922),Google Scholar this author argues that no being can both lack all evil desires and know all true propositions.
10 Blumenfeld argues that omnipotence are inconsistent since there is much about fear and frustration that an omnipotent being could not possibly know. See Blumenfeld's ‘On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes’, in Morris, Thomas V., ed., The Concept of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 201–15.Google Scholar
11 Interpreting SDA as a doctrine about how the excellent-making-property concepts are to be analyzed is consistent with Schlesinger's claim that ‘all Divine qualities are tightly interrelated’ by ‘the unique central property’ of absolute perfection and his subsequent analyses of omnipotence and omniscience (included above in Section I) cast in terms of absolute perfection.
12 SDA4 leaves open the possibility that God has both excellent-making and non-excellent-making properties.
13 See Plantinga, Alvin, God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 170;Google ScholarKenny, Anthony, ‘The Definition of Omnipotence’, in Morris, , ed., The Concept of God, p. 131;Google ScholarFlint, Thomas P. and Freddoso, Alfred J., ‘Maximal Power’, in The Concept of God, p. 138;Google ScholarWierenga, , The Nature of God, pp. 28–9.Google Scholar
14 Wierenga objects that the McEar counter-example is itself incoherent; see The Concept of God, pp. 28–9. Plausible replies to Wierenga's objections have been offered by Gary Rosenkrantz and Hoffman, Joshua in ‘Omnipotence Redux’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XLIII (1983), 300–1.Google Scholar
15 On p. 26 of New Perspectives, Schlesinger writes that ‘[t]o reduce God's impeccability by any amount in order to make Him more powerful would result in less Divine excellence’.
16 Cf. Carter's, W. R. discussion of ‘Dennis-hood’ and the essential incapacity to solve elementary geometry problems; ‘Impeccability Revisited’, Analysis, XLV (1985), 53–4.Google Scholar
17 Since OP3 implies that some omnipotent being's power may exceed the power had by an absolutely perfect God, it is at odds with Schlesinger's view that omnipotence is nothing more than the having of that amount of power consistent with absolute perfection.
18 See Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 179:Google Scholar ‘In claiming that God is by nature morally perfectly good, the theist means that God is so constituted that he never does any actions which are morally wrong.’
19 Cf. Rachels, James, ‘God and Human Attitudes’, Religious Studies, VII (1971), 329–31.Google Scholar
20 The definiens requires that an impeccable being have the concept of an immoral action to exclude dogs and rocks from the class of impeccable beings.
21 Pike, Nelson, ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, American Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1969), 208–16.Google Scholar
22 See Swinburne, Richard, Responsibility and Atonement, Clarendon Paperbacks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 See Swinburne, , The Coherence of Theism, pp. 141–5.Google Scholar
24 ‘Impeccability Revisited’, Analysis, XLV (1985), 55.Google Scholar
25 For their useful comments and criticisms of earlier versions of this essay, I thank Fred Elbert, Nita Hestevold, Delos McKown, Ralph Perhac, and Mark Rowlands. I am especially grateful to Norvin Richards and George N. Schlesinger for several long, extraordinarily helpful conversations.
