On Hell and Forgiveness

[polymath257]

As pointed out previously, the term "greatest possible being" doesn't have any objective definition, so arguing that God possesses moral perfection on that account is simply an incoherent claim.  If you want to claim that God is morally perfect just because you say so, well, fine.  I'll simply laugh in rebuttal.

And I'm sure I have pointed out to you that it is not necessary for us to be able to know what it means to be the "greatest possible being". I don't need a definition for that conception of God to be true just as I don't need to know all the natural numbers to understand the concept of infinity.

You do, however, need a partial order that has a largest element. The problem is that 'greater' isn't well defined. Even if it were, there is no reason to think there is a greatest element.

So, at the very least, you need a consistent definition of 'greater'. Since there is more than one variable on which you want to measure (power, goodness, knowledge, etc), you have to find a consistent way to guarantee a maximum on each variable at the same time. This is usually impossible, even when each individual variable has a largest element.