โ Scribed by Thomas V. Morris
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The most powerful and profound philosophical conception of God is given to us by perfect being theology, that method for conceiving of deity which has as its primary and controlling consideration the idea of a greatest possible or maximally perfect being. Although it is only one of indefinitely many possible methods for constructing a conception of deity, perfect being theology has, I think, for good reasons come to play an increasingly important role over the last few years in discussions of philosophical theology. 1 As is well known, it is the intent of perfect being theology to ascribe to God an unsurpassable array of greatmaking properties, properties that, roughly, it is intrinsically better to have than to lack. Most often, practitioners of this method seem to be in a great deal of basic agreement concerning what these properties are. It seems, for example, that nearly with one voice they characterize God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, ontologically independent, and necessarily existent. All agree that God is not temporally finite. But among those drawn to perfect being theology, at least in recent days, there is deep disagreement over God's precise relation to time. Some characterize God as timelessly eternal; others describe him rather as temporally everlasting. Those who favor timelessness most often go on to endorse the additional, more sweeping doctrine of divine simplicity as well, the general thesis that within deity there is absolutely no composition or ontological complexity such as is to be found in created objects. According to the idea of divine simplicity, as it has been defended in recent years, God is without spatial parts, temporal parts, and the sort of metaphysical
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