Abstract
One historically significant model of God holds that God is a perfect being. Analytic philosophers of religion have typically understood this to mean that God is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom. Recently, however, several philosophers have argued that this is inconsistent with another common theistic position: the view that for any world that God can create, there is a better world that God could have created instead. The argument runs (roughly) as follows: if, no matter which world God creates, there’s a better creatable one, then God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable. And if God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable, then God is necessarily surpassable. If this argument is sound, it reveals a serious flaw in an important model of God. In what follows, I set out this argument, and I then distinguish and evaluate four replies. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.
Highlights
One historically-significant model of God holds that God is a perfect being
Analytic philosophers of religion have typically understood this to mean that God is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom
Several philosophers have argued that this is inconsistent with another common theistic position: the view that for any world that God can create, there is a better world that God could have created instead
Summary
With Leibniz, that there is exactly one best of all creatable worlds. Philip Quinn (1982), Stephen Grover (1988), William Rowe (1993, 2004), and Jordan Howard Sobel (2004) have argued that this latter view precludes EDUtheism. Their central intuition is this: if, no matter which world God creates, there’s a better creatable one, no matter what God does, God’s action in creating a world is surpassable. If God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable, God is necessarily surpassable.1 This intuition can be formalized with reference to the following set of propositions: NBW For every world w that is within God’s power to actualize, there is a better world, x, that God has the power to actualize instead.. This amounts to an a priori argument for the impossibility of EDU-theism, given NBW.
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