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

[WinterHold]

You are a liar and a deceiver. That is not how Arabic works.

MK; I'm Arabic and native.

The Shiite and Sunni religious institutions played a very dirty game, just like the Christian institution and the Jewish institution. Blood filled regions because of their filth, and their number 1 tactic was forging and twisting religious text -and sometimes even inventing ones- to suit their needs.

Even the Quran say it:

Sura 9, The Quran:
( 34 )   O you who have believed, indeed many of the scholars and the monks devour the wealth of people unjustly and avert [them] from the way of Allah. And those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah - give them tidings of a painful punishment.

Don't put text just because it was written by beards. Usually; beards and Turbans are used to hide something, they wear white or black to dodge criticism.
Trust your self only. Listen to your mind and listen to your heart.
Don't trust them. It's my advice.

[Drich]

because for you perfection is married to "man's pop morality" which at best is a coffee maker to God's microwave.

Gods microwave is stuck on defrost, evolved morality or pop morality as you call it IS the standard. Oh Ffs

For who? the 1%ers who live in modern first world countries? not even them as a collective. As "pop morality" is divided even amoung us. Example Euro 'morality' has run away from American pop morality.

The point? How can you have a "STANDARD" if said standard is not "standard/universal or ever changing?

[Neo-Scholastic]

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.”

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.

That is two contradictory concepts in one sentence. The notion that God is “all things to all men” is the exact opposite of the notion that God embodies all perfections.
The first allows someone to posit things like ‘perfectly evil’ or ‘completely ugly’. Personally, I have no idea what kind of theory of value would allow someone to contrast perfect good with perfect evil without contradiction. Perhaps you have something in mind.

In the Scholastic tradition, evil is considered a deficiency, a “lack of the good that ought to be there,” to paraphrase Augustine. A basketball is definitely more of a perfect sphere than say a loosely packed snowball. The pieces of a tangram puzzle are more perfect triangles than either a yield sign or a spanakopita.

Similarly, human morality consists of more perfectly manifesting the virtues of humanity. An insane person lacks the rationality that is natural to being human. A sociopath lacks the empathy that is natural to a human. A thief lacks conscience, etc. The difficulty of flushing our virtue ethics is determining what exactly the natural and normative virtues of humanity are. That doesn’t bother me too much. The debate about what those virtues are only makes sense after mutual agreement that there actually are such virtues.

As noted previously, theists assert that our values cannot and do not come from the universe itself.

If the existence and nature of the physical universe is contingent then any values or principles derived from observation of the physical universe ultimately trace back to some non-contingent. This belief is not mere assertion; but rather, a logical consequence of an Unchanged Changer, First Cause, and Necessary Being.

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.

That’s like someone saying that the standard for a perfect sphere is whatever he considers it to be like. If he thinks popcorn balls are the standard by which all spheres should be judged, that leads to the bizarre conclusion that popcorn balls make better spheres than a glass marbles. God is not a post-modernist.

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.

As I feared, we appear to be talking past one another yet again. Values based only on contingent things do not satisfy the criteria for a highest good, i.e. that of resting on absolutes, and as such any source of value other than one tracing back to an absolute is arbitrary. This has been the reasoned opinion of thoughtful mortal men since the dark recesses of history and on through modern thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre. It is a contemporary conceit that people who lived in by-gone eras are any less wise or rational than today.

[The Grand Nudger]

How can you have a "STANDARD" if said standard is not "standard/universal or ever changing?

If you check the standards for home construction, for example..you'll find that they've been changing.  Your question seems confused.

[Angrboda]

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.  

That is two contradictory concepts in one sentence. The notion that God is “all things to all men” is the exact opposite of the notion that God embodies all perfections.
The first allows someone to posit things like ‘perfectly evil’ or ‘completely ugly’. Personally, I have no idea what kind of theory of value would allow someone to contrast perfect good with perfect evil without contradiction. Perhaps you have something in mind.

In the Scholastic tradition, evil is considered a deficiency, a “lack of the good that ought to be there,” to paraphrase Augustine. A basketball is definitely more of a perfect sphere than say a loosely packed snowball. The pieces of a tangram puzzle are more perfect triangles than either a yield sign or a spanakopita.

Similarly, human morality consists of more perfectly manifesting the virtues of humanity. An insane person lacks the rationality that is natural to being human. A sociopath lacks the empathy that is natural to a human. A thief lacks conscience, etc. The difficulty of flushing our virtue ethics is determining what exactly the natural and normative virtues of humanity are. That doesn’t bother me too much. The debate about what those virtues are only makes sense after mutual agreement that there actually are such virtues.

You didn't actually answer the question, so I'm forced to read between the lines. 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.

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.

That’s like someone saying that the standard for a perfect sphere is whatever he considers it to be like. If he thinks popcorn balls are the standard by which all spheres should be judged, that leads to the bizarre conclusion that popcorn balls make better spheres than a glass marbles. God is not a post-modernist.

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. Since, I assume, that you are not suggesting that God is perfect only insofar as he adheres to an external standard of goodness or sphericity, the situation you describe is not at all analogous to the one described. You've made a false and irrelevant analogy. 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, rather than simply being an example of a rather shoddy attempt at appeal to ridicule.

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.

As I feared, we appear to be talking past one another yet again. Values based only on contingent things do not satisfy the criteria for a highest good, i.e. that of resting on absolutes, and as such any source of value other than one tracing back to an absolute is arbitrary. This has been the reasoned opinion of thoughtful mortal men since the dark recesses of history and on through modern thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre. It is a contemporary conceit that people who lived in by-gone eras are any less wise or rational than today.

In line with Munchausen's trilemma, things can fail to be meaningful both if they fail to terminate in a meaningful foundation, and if they depend upon their meaning of being defined in terms of themselves. A circular definition is as vacuous as one that has no ultimate meaning. Despite your attempt to counter my observation that God's values are circularly defined (above), 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. Which would leave us with a situation in which, even given the most generous assumptions possible, one still cannot find such a classically defined highest good even in the purely abstract concept of a non-contingent God. I think in that case, it makes perfect sense to question traditional reasoning about such things.

[Drich]

How can you have a "STANDARD" if said standard is not "standard/universal or ever changing?

If you check the standards for home construction, for example..you'll find that they've been changing.  Your question seems confused.

All of them have changed?

We have gone from aligning ourselves with God to the literal polar opposite. Could construction standards do this and still have a sound structure?

Or if you rather do construction standard change in the light of political correctness? IS the thickness of a foundation determined by LGBTUVWXYZ community? if the xyz community could change a construction practice because of the nature of it's P/C would that change even be a construction standard? Look at what I originally said. How can you have a standard if it is not universal or is ever changing?

Maybe you do not understand how the word is being used here:

4 :something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality

[The Grand Nudger]

If you check the standards for home construction, for example..you'll find that they've been changing.  Your question seems confused.

All of them have changed?

Depends on the timeframe.  Yeah, though..and..significantly, there was a time where we had no standards at all.  

We have gone from aligning ourselves with God to the literal polar opposite.

Which is a marked improvement.

Could construction standards do this and still have a sound structure?

They did, once upon a time we relied upon "god" to prevent a house from burning down when lightning struck.  Now we ground them.  

Or if you rather do construction standard change in the light of political correctness?

Sure, since you use the term "political correctness" to refer to people not exploiting the living shit out of their serfs and slaves as your god intended...some construction standards do contain provisions regarding materials produced as the fruit of the poisoned tree....but more commonly wage and employment laws are leveraged to that effect.

IS the thickness of a foundation determined by LGBTUVWXYZ community? if the xyz community could change a construction practice because of the nature of it's P/C would that change even be a construction standard? Look at what I originally said. How can you have a standard if it is not universal or is ever changing?

Your god with reference to moral standards, in your own analogy, would be the equivalent of the "lgbtuvwxyz" community with reference to structural engineering.  Both are irrelevant to their respectively proposed subjects.  

So GJ on that one.....?

Maybe you do not understand how the word is being used here:

4 :something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality

Those things change.  What's the problem? Would you prefer that we slavishly commit ourselves to substandard standards in perpetuity? -Rhetorical.

[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.

[Angrboda]

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.

What on earth are you talking about? In this context, what you are saying is that there is a standard external to God whereby his perfections are defined by whether or not he meets this standard. Either you meant this, which simply points up the possibility that God does not represent the highest good, that standard does. Or you did not mean to say this, in which case your analogy fails, because there is no external standard to God.

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.

Again you're referring to "universals" as if such exists independent of God. Everything that I have heard from theists denies that such universals exist apart from God, so I really don't know where you're pulling this from.

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.

I have been perfectly clear about this. I am referring to the standards or whatever by which you judge God to possess this or that perfection. These standards, the values which determine what is and is not a perfection, either come from God himself, or they come from outside of God. If they come from outside of God, then we don't get our definition of the good from what God is, but rather from those external values. If God himself is the source of these values, then God is only perfect insofar as God considers himself perfect based upon his own preferences. In the latter case, the claim that God's values are meaningful is vacuous.

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.

My observation is that you haven't got the first clue what we are even talking about. In the context of God and perfection, what 'continuum' are you referring to here.

[Neo-Scholastic]

What on earth are you talking about?  In this context, what you are saying is that there is a standard external to God whereby his perfections are defined by whether or not he meets this standard.

Despite the mutual frustration, I want you to know that I value this conversation. Also please know that I am truly seeking clarity on the sticking points that divide us.

Your insistence that a reformed version of the Euthyphro dilemma applies to monotheism continued to puzzle me. It seems very similar to the following “dilemma”:

Are natural laws determined by the way the universe is or is the universe as it is because of natural laws?

I’m curious as to how you would differentiate the above from your reformed Euthyphro dilemma.

It seems to me that my problem with your reformed dilemma is two-fold. First, it does not include a place for human choice. Subsequently, it confuses the arbitrary acceptance of an objective standard for goodness with the unchanging, complete nature of God that serves as an objective standard of goodness. As such I would revise you dilemma as follows

Do people esteem the Lord’s commandments because He is God or do people esteem the Lord’s commands because they are good?

In short, it is a dilemma for us, not a dilemma for God. Does a moral system founded on God’s nature adequately serve as an objective standard for our notions of what constitutes the highest good? I would say there are good reasons to suppose that any objective standard would meet, at minimum, the following criteria:

The standard itself would not change.
The standard would not depend on external conditions.
The standard exists independently of any particular moral agent.
The standard must apply universally to all moral agents in all circumstances.


The only question remaining in my mind is why any individual would chose to accept or reject that which satisfies the above criteria as the foundation for his or her morality. One consideration for acceptance of the standard as one for goodness is to ask as Aristotle does, “What is the good that all men desire?” The next question is could the proposed standard serve as a guide to achieve such a universal desire. When I look at the above and compare it to the God of Classical Theism, whose existence I maintain has been adequately demonstrated by Aquinas, Leibnitz, Platinga, etc. (though their details vary) I see complete overlap. So as far as I’m concerned, the only thing remaining is for people to recognize the standard and choose it as their own.