bewareofdogmas said:
PERFECTION/CREATION INCOHERENCE ARGUMENT
1.) God, by definition, is a perfect being.
2.) God, by definition, deliberately created the universe.
3.) So, if God were to exist, then he would be a perfect being who deliberately created something.
4.) To be perfect, one cannot have any needs or wants.
5.) To deliberately create something, one must have at least one need or want.
6.) Thus, it is impossible for a perfect being to deliberately create anything.
7.) Therefore, God cannot exist. - Ted Drange
(Comments: P4 could be denied, however once we look at what the definition of what perfection is the argument holds: Perfection: 'The quality or state of being perfect or complete, so that nothing requisite is wanting.. entire development, consummate culture, skill, or moral excellence...' - Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.)
The difficulty with (4) goes a little deeper, I think, than Drange admits: "To be perfect, one cannot have any needs or wants." I agree that this is obvious to the extent that one understands "want" in a sense synonymous with "need": that is, a deficiency of some necessary or desirable quality, or a condition requiring some extraneous aid or addition. It is not altogether clear why the statement is true if one construes "want" in the sense of "desire", which comes close to one of the definitions of a capacity we would normally expect a perfect being
topossess: "to will" ("to wish, desire; sometimes with implication of intention"). At the very least, it must be said that it seems less intuitively incorrect to speculate that a perfect being might be capable of willing something than to speculate that such a being is capable of needing it.
This difficulty carries over into (5) and (6): "It is impossible for a perfect being to deliberately create anything." Is it impossible for a perfect being to effect
any act of will? Presumably it is impossible for a perfect being
accidentally to create anything (which is why I refrained from objecting to (2)), so if (6) is correct, then arguably it is impossible for a perfect being to create under any circumstances at all. This proposition sounds dubious.
Interestingly, Professor Drange, in an article, defends one attack on the validity of (4) above by arguing that "There is a certain unclarity, and perhaps subjectivity, in the idea of 'perfection' which poses an obstacle to any sort of rigorous reasoning about the concept." However, Drange's idea of "perfection", upon examination, appears susceptible to the same criticism; the same could be said of his construction of "want". I find the "perfection vs. creation" argument to be every bit as unconvincing as I do
a priori proofs of God’s existence, and in fact between them it’s a bit easier to pinpoint the problems with Drange's proof.
(Bibliographical credit to OED.)
