Is God Perfect?

[ThisYouWillDo]

I’ve done a little more reading around the subject (yep: I wiki’d it). But don’t imagine that what follows is at all scholarly, correct, or even sustainable. It simply reflects my current, limited understanding

First: Paradise Lost. Milton used the Garden of Eden allegory as a metaphor for England’s fall from grace after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Crown. That’s what I’m told. Maybe this means that God in the poem was King Charles in reality. And while appearing to be perfect, i.e., good, He in fact was evil and trapped Eve into taking the Forbidden Fruit. Thus eating the Forbidden Fruit is participating in an evil regime - the monarchy - and the expulsion from Eden is the demise of the Commonwealth. Although in reality, the Restoration happened after the Commonwealth crumbled, not the other way round.

Second: As to perfection, the ancients did not understand the concept in the way we do today. For them, perfection was “endless” or “great”. Later Parmenides regarded perfection as complete, or entire, and finite. Plato considered the world to be perfect because it was spherical and moved in a perfect circle. It was also in a state of harmony because it had been created by a good demiurge (a creator god who is not necessarily supreme). Thus “perfection” has limits: the creator does not. Aristotle appears to have held the same view – the world was perfect, but the creator was not.

Not even when the Christianity came along was God held to be perfect. He could not be, because He was not finite. Only a finite being lacks nothing and is therefore perfect (I don’t follow that idea at all! Aquinas put it this way, "That is perfect, which lacks nothing of the perfection proper to it" which is a little easier to understand, I think). Also, the divine is beyond human comprehension and is beyond anything we can imagine, including perfection.

It was Descartes who attributed perfection to God. Descartes was a contemporary of Milton, and I think it is likely that the latter was aware of his ideas. I do not know if he was influenced by them, though. According to Descartes, God possessed “perfections” which implies that He was greater then any one perfection and probably greater than all of them together.

Thus, the apparent paradox in Paradise Lost may be resolved if you allow that God is above perfection (we have already considered this in earlier posts), and that Milton did not even consider it necessary to consider perfection. It still leaves open the question whether God was good or evil to “test” Adam and Eve, knowing that they could not possibly pass that test, and then to cast them out of Eden for failing.

TYWD

[TomOfSweden]

Also, the divine is beyond human comprehension and is beyond anything we can imagine, including perfection.

This is also known as Christian mysticism and can only work once the paradigm of thought is been shifted to only include "the unmoved mover". The reason for this is of course that it is "argument from ignorance". When in doubt insert God, since it's the default faith. This was just as much a logical fallacy in Aquinas day as it is now. Today we say "God of gaps" and smirk a bit when ever it's brought up.

We can't say anything about something beyond our imagination. It effectively prevents us from having faith in it. We can't take a leap of faith if we don't know to where were leaping. It also makes it impossible for us to deduce God's perfection.

That's the thing I love about Aquinas. He spent his whole life dedicated to proving Gods existence and all he did was to prove that it rests on circular argumentation from the lack of evidence.

I love religion.

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Thus, the apparent paradox in Paradise Lost may be resolved if you allow that God is above perfection (we have already considered this in earlier posts), and that Milton did not even consider it necessary to consider perfection. It still leaves open the question whether God was good or evil to “test” Adam and Eve, knowing that they could not possibly pass that test, and then to cast them out of Eden for failing.

TYWD

Ok well you may also add on that since God is all knowing is aware of how everything will unfold before it happens, then he was testing them knowing they would fail. Then he laid the smack down on the descendants of man, not just the offending parties and singled out the woman for the extra bit of punishment. God would have been aware of the presence of the serpent that will be Eve's tempter and seducer into disobedience. Sort of makes the whole thing seem like a cruel game.

[TomOfSweden]

Ok well you may also add on that since God is all knowing is aware of how everything will unfold before it happens, then he was testing them knowing they would fail. Then he laid the smack down on the descendants of man, not just the offending parties and singled out the woman for the extra bit of punishment. God would have been aware of the presence of the serpent that will be Eve's tempter and seducer into disobedience. Sort of makes the whole thing seem like a cruel game.

It's one of the reasons I'm not Christian. Not because evil exists. I don't believe in evil. Christianity itself creates a universe where it's good vs evil struggle, but the creator is good. So Christianity has set itself up as its own logical inconsistency. But this can all be solved by reading the Bible liberally. I read it so liberally that it becomes irrelevant. It also helps if you assume god is free from the shackles of logic that constrains humanity.