The Method of Perfect Being Theology

Abstract

How might this formula help us to decide questions about the divine attributes? A plausible answer to this question, which is employed in many discussions of the divine attributes, is that we can decide between rival incompatible hypotheses about God by asking which hypothesis would make God greater. Given that God is the greatest possible being, it seems, we can at least rule out the hypothesis which would accord God the lower level of greatness. One finds this line of thought, in various guises, all over contemporary philosophical theology. Murray and Rea, I think, state the orthodox view when they say that the Anselmian formula “provide[s] us with a rule or recipe for developing a more specific conception of God.”1 The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about the argumentative strategy informally sketched above, and hence about the idea that perfect being theology provides anything like a satisfactory recipe for answering questions about the divine attributes. In doing so I won’t challenge the truth of [GPB] — I think that it is true — but only the idea that it can play the envisaged role in philosophical theology. The paper has three parts. In the first, I examine the version of this argumentative strategy which has recently been defended at length by Brian Leftow.2 Leftow, I think, succeeds in making explicit the method which has been implicit in many recent discussions of the divine attributes. I’ll argue that this method fails. In the second section, I’ll ask whether Leftow’s method can be fixed if we rely, not on the claim that God is the greatest possible being, but on the claim that God is the greatest conceivable being. I’ll argue that it cannot. In the last section, I turn to the question of how Leftow’s