The Dept of Don’t Get Me Started: In What Sense Is God Perfect?
The question:
“In What Sense Is God Perfect?
God Has An Absolutely Perfect Nature
Jesus said.
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).
His Ways Are Always Perfect
God’s ways are also perfect.
As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the LORD is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him (Psalm 18:30).
There Is Nothing Lacking In Him
God is absolute perfection in His character and in His ways – there is nothing lacking in Him. Human beings, on the other hand, are imperfect in their makeup and behavior.
Because God is perfect in everything there is nothing lacking in his character – there is no attribute that he needs. He has everything necessary.
Summary
The perfection of God speaks of his character and his ways. God is perfect in both of these realms. This being the case there is nothing lacking in his character – there are no missing attributes.”
https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_1294.cfm
In What Sense Is God Perfect?
My answer:
THE NONSENSE
10/07/2019 @ 8:16 am
Arguing for God’s absolute perfection is difficult if you start from the premise that Man is imperfect and Man is a Divine creation, unless there is a reason a perfect being would deliberately create an imperfect creation. There’s also the contention in there somewhere that God knows every moment, past, present, and future, and controls every moment. That makes less sense. Man comes off as too experimental, and what’s the point of an experiment if you already know the results? If you look at the Flood story, God gets rid of almost all of mankind and starts over.
The only way this can work on its own terms is if we assume that if God is omniscient and perfect, He chooses to limit that omniscience and perfection to see if He can get an imperfect creation to perfect itself, to take the role of parent rather than designer/manufacturer. Set the example, teach, guide, and let the children learn from their mistakes. If we look at Christianity, it is easy to posit that the point of Jesus being sent to us was to give us an example of what God wants from us. If that were Jesus’ role, if that’s what the Messiah was supposed to do, I could probably be converted to Christianity, but there’s too much else in Christianity I can’t accept.
There is a story in the Talmud. A rabbinic court is rendering judgment on a case. God appears before them and says that the judgment should go the other way. One of the rabbis contradicts God and says that this decision does not fall under God’s jurisdiction but under the jurisdiction of the court, so the court’s judgment should stand. God is completely delighted by this and kvells: “My children have defeated Me!.” (The Yiddish verb “to kvell” means to have pride in – it’s what a parent does when their child achieves something notable.)
This approaches my take on religion. The point of being a parent is not ultimately to produce an obedient automaton, it’s to produce someone who can exercise their own moral judgment in a moral way. In a global sense, if God produces a world full of automatons, none of them can be good because none of them has the capacity to choose good. Morality comes from making the choice. But that entails the freedom of choice, and the freedom of choice entails the capacity to choose evil.
My role as a Jew is to encourage people to choose compassion. In an imperfect world, that often entails attempted persuasion that compassion is more profitable than its alternative. If getting people to be more compassionate on the grounds that it is more compassionate is sometimes out of reach, I’ll use other motivations to get people to harm less and help more. I have no objection to selfishness aligning with compassion. This addresses the old argument that unselfishness is impossible. Pure unselfishness may very well be, but so what? If compassion is intrinsically moral then aligning selfishness with compassion is a sensible and intelligent strategem, not an immoral one. If I regard compassion as in my own interest, I haven’t sullied myself, I’ve allied myself in the right direction.
10/07/2019 @ 2:50 pm
The prerequisite to believing that God is perfect is the belief that God exists.
If you believe that God exists, everything else is superfluous and irrelevant, including definitions of various terminologies.
Whether God is perfect is irrelevant if we can’t agree on whether God exists in the first instance.
If you believe that God exists, you have no choice but to believe that the deity is perfect.
Arguing that God is perfect is just another form of arguing that God exists…
10/07/2019 @ 3:27 pm
See comment above as response, not in the right place on the thread, starting with “That’s completely fallacious.”
10/07/2019 @ 8:45 am
“But that entails the freedom of choice, and the freedom of choice entails the capacity to choose evil.”
If there were a “perfect creator”, mankind would be incapable of “evil”. In fact, there would be no evil to choose in the exercise of ‘free will’.
In fact one could argue that the existence or presence of a ‘perfect god’ precludes the existence of free will…There would be no evil to choose…
10/07/2019 @ 8:49 am
That would lead to the conclusion that God isn’t perfect. I don’t think Divine perfection is a necessary belief to religion.
10/07/2019 @ 9:38 am
Not if you can’t escape the inevitable conclusion that even if there is a. ‘God’ he/she/it is not and cannot be ‘perfect’…
The problem here is that a principal tenet of Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is that “God is perfect, hence Christ is perfect”…
You can’t tell most Christians that God isn’t perfect…They accept and fight for that notion as an article of ‘faith’…
Their ‘faith is their ‘proof’…
Faith v Reason is never a good matchup.
Too often, faith is deaf, dumb, and blind…
10/07/2019 @ 10:32 am
Then you get into definitions of Perfect.
If I were Catholic and had to defend that position, I’d have to get pretty convoluted, along the lines of:
There is too much unknown here. We cannot know what alternatives to any actions on God’s part would eventually lead to. We may be living in the best possible result. Panglossian, maybe with a twist. We assume that perfection entails the ability to intervene at any point in any way, but we don’t know how the universe works, even if we assume God created and controls it.
Following this line of reasoning can allow you to conclude anything.
Defining God as perfect in the sense I think you mean doesn’t work if you read the Old Testament. Why would God create a murderer? Why would God create people who would disobey his orders in the Garden of Eden? Why would God create a people who would enslave His people? Why would God create a humanity that he chose to kill most of in a flood? Why would God need ten plagues to get Israelites out of Egypt?
I don’t approach God that way. Neither, really, does the Bible. The Old Testament basically treats the flood as a Divine learning experience – the first humanity didn’t work, Take Two. Adopting a doctrine in the face of Scripture can lead to rather odd problems.
10/07/2019 @ 10:11 am
I think the title of the post is a good place to let the discussion end.
10/07/2019 @ 10:47 am
You may be on to something…Discussions of this nature are generally over before they get started because, as I said, Faith v Reason is never a good match up…
This is especially true when one of the parties insists the his/her faith entitles him, or her, to be unreasonable.
10/07/2019 @ 3:25 pm
That’s completely fallacious. I exist and I am not perfect.
Don’t assert your consequent. If you have to believe in
God in order to believe that God is perfect, it does not follow that you have to believe that God is perfect in order to believe in God.
Syllogisms:
Given: If A, than B
Converse, not necessarily true: If B, than A
Inverse, not necessarily true: If not A, than not B
Contrapositive, always true if Given is true: If not B, than Not A.
10/07/2019 @ 4:00 pm
“I exist and I am not perfect.”
But, you’re not God…
False equivalency…
If God isn’t ‘perfect’, he/she/it is not God.
According to most belief systems God is the iteration, embodiment, or manifestation of perfection….
“If you have to believe in
God in order to believe that God is perfect, it does not follow that you have to believe that God is perfect in order to believe in God…”
And why not, if God and perfection are conceptually unitized as they are by the faith of those who believe in a deity.
If you believe that your deity, or God, is not perfect how then can you accept the notions of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence as the unitzed components of a deity which cannot be, according to the various faiths, anything but perfect…
You simply cannot have it both ways.
If God exists, it is in a state of perfection.
Most religious belief systems begin with this as an overriding assumption….
BTW
Your treatment of syllogistic reasoning is nicely done. However, it’s not relevant because the case for the unitization of perfection and the deity isn’t mine. See the link in the post.
Frankly, I would tend to debunk any effort to make a case for the existence, or nonexistence, of God within the strictures of syllogistic logic and reasoning…
Way too much subjectivity involved for that to be effective…
Try using such reasoning with the evangelical Christians who support Trump…Good luck with that!
Use syllogistic reasoning in the context of biblical scripture and you may well conclude that people believe in something, but it isn’t God…or even that God exists…
06/15/2021 @ 5:25 pm
Rather like re-reading Paradise Lost at the base of Mt. Calvary; maybe ear-budding Hendrix’s version of Dylan’s Watchtower (fade) roll credits sound over The Seekers Another You — perhaps Benjamin Franklin would not have flown his kite albeit I am pleased he did what’s AI by grace the volts distant on a string. Agreed God ought be capitalized — thunder a clap — lightning a bolt — V as in victory — sacred as the VOTE. Even Ayn Rand signed out. Sign of the cross here and now: that’s all she wrote. Having had omitted Barabbas and the ultimatum of such wrong throng. No kingdom of course — a plausible Yeats’ trajectory of being as propulsion safe and sudden beyond known orbit toward that dark tranquil night with voice we hear: sunlight.