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

[Neo-Scholastic]

Either you do consider God to embrace only desirable perfections (as seems implicit from the definition of perfect), or that God personifies both desirable and undesirable attributes.  I don't agree with the notion that evil is the privation of good, but that is irrelevant as that is just a species of a class of objectors.  Either God's attributes consist of all possible attributes, including the undesirable, or they do not.  So long as God is biased towards the maximal of certain things, not others, my objections hold.

We continue to talk past one another. Good and evil have an inverse relationship. To be evil is by definition not-good. The greater the evil, the lesser the good. Evil as the privation of good is really the only coherent position. I cannot think of an example of an undesirable attribute that does not is some way undermine the utility of a functional object, the thwart a purpose, or fail to manifest an ideal.

Your objection only makes sense if there does exist a standard external to his by which one judges said glass marbles to be more perfect.

There is an external and objective standard for the perfection of spheres of which a marbles are good examples and popcorn balls are poor ones. To argue otherwise means taking the stance that the physical universe is unintelligible. I was not promoting the idea of an external standard for a glass marbles simply because those are artifacts whose value depends on the use for which they were created. Nevertheless, a chipped and/or misshapen marble is not a good one for playing a game.

Since, I assume, that you are not suggesting that God is perfect only insofar as he adheres to an external standard of … the situation you describe is not at all analogous to the one described.

Just as the concept of slavery necessarily entails the concept of mastery, particular objects have a dialectical relationship to the universal they manifest. Thus if there is such a thing as imperfection it entails the reciprocal concept of perfection. I do not see anything problematic about a highest standard on a continuum extending from most perfect to minimally so.

What point you meant to make by claiming that God is not a post-modernist is only something that I expect you can unpack more fully...

It’s a poke at post-modern theorists for whom, like the Cheshire cat, words mean whatever they want them to be. This seems to be the strategy of your proposed dilemma. You continue to refer to ‘standards’ but you are using the word in such a way that it has no meaning – anything could be a standard or nothing at all.

Despite your attempt to counter my observation that God's values are circularly defined you have so far failed to do so.  I don't think you ultimately can defuse the vacuity charge as applied to your God's values… one still cannot find such a classically defined highest good even in the purely abstract concept of a non-contingent God.

And my observation is otherwise. A continuum does not wrap around and bite its tail. It extends from one extreme to the other, like the infinite and the infinitesimal.