Theists: What do you mean when you say that God is 'perfect'?

[Angrboda]

Two things to note here.  First, this raises the question of what it means to be a 'good' example of the kind of which God is an example.  As noted with Steve, there appears to be some deep circularity here if God is both the specimen of a completed kind of his type, and also the standard setter as to what constitutes the completeness of his kind.

I don’t know if it makes any sense to consider God a species within some other genus. My place-holder thought is that God serves as maximally great all-encompassing category like Plotinus’s mystical notion of “The All” or from the Book of Revelation, “the All in all.” That said, I have to punt on your objection. I’m still puzzling over this issue and will keep your concern in the back of my mind while doing so.

I hope you're not defaulting to the supposition that God is "all things to all men" -- that God embodies all perfections that could possibly be. For reasons already stated, I consider such a construction incoherent. It does not seem that you do, for you suggest that God is in his allness "great", as opposed to simply being pan-everything. Regardless of the concerns of negative theology, we do say positive things about the particularity of God. He is good rather than bad, loving rather than cruel, omnipotent rather than powerless, this rather than that. As such it seems one cannot legitimately duck an argument on the basis that God lacks particularity -- he doesn't. Given that, it is perfectly logical to ask what the consequences of his particularity are. And by that I don't mean simply objections based upon this or that particularity of God, but questions raised based upon the mere fact of particularity itself, qua particularity. As noted previously, theists assert that our values cannot and do not come from the universe itself. If a theist is to justify why God is all loving, and that itself is supposed to be a desirable thing to be, the only place we can turn for that bias is to God himself. But then God's perfections become simply those things which God himself considers to be desirable to be perfect in. We end up with a curious construction in which God's supposed greatness rests upon what he himself considers great. In addition to the fact that this paints God as little more than yet another rationally self-interested being, interested in his own good, it undermines claims that God is great, rather than simply being arbitrarily what he is. Arguments that justify God on the basis of what the composition of 'goodness' is are undermined by the fact that God is the arbiter of what good is, as well as the example. God's particularity seems to be justified in a circular fashion. God becomes great, not because he is truly great, but simply because he thinks himself great.

…second thing to note is that if there is such a circularity involved, it essentially returns us to the starting line with the issue of the enhanced Euthyphro and your solution that God by necessity is morally perfect.

I’m not exactly understanding the objection since I do not see a logical argument being made in the first place. To my mind it is more like a dictionary entry. “The Good” and “God” are synonyms united by Aristotle’s observation in the Nichomochean Ethics that what men should most desire derives from a common source. For Christians, Scripture tells us that we are to "Love the Lord your God above all else." That sounds to me like the highest good.

I would say the true circularity enters when people try to develop ethical theories in the absence of some notion of a single highest good from which all other goods are derived. It has been my position all along that people choose whether or not to recognize that there is a highest Good, something most to be desired, that serves as an arbiter when deciding among various apparent goods, such as between temporary pleasure or loyalty to principle. It is only by choosing to believe there is some kind of highest good that allows people to debate about the relative value of some moral principle versus some other. Otherwise there can be no shoulds.

I think you're tilting at windmills here. It isn't so much that you decry the lack of a foundation in alternate moral theories. They have their own suppositions about the ultimate good -- nature, our species, society, well-being, the planet -- you simply disagree on what the highest good actually is, and whether there is any foundation for considering the specific highest good to be rationally justified. If I'm at all familiar with your arguments, it is that you believe these 'highest goods' are not ultimately justified, whereas God as the highest good supposedly is justified. For the reasons stated above and others, I think that your highest good is no better justified than any of the alternatives. You simply believe it is. And when I asked for your reasons in the Euthyphro response, I believe you said, "[It] just is." How you think that any less arbitrary than any of these other highest goods is a mystery to me. It only becomes worse when I observe that the existence of your highest good is based essentially upon bare assertions made by mortal men scattered throughout the dark recesses of history.