The Perfection Problem For Theism

A single best being??

Theists generally think there is one God who creates, sustains, and holds together all things and is uniquely worthy of worship. Pretty cool! Maybe that being creates some other pretty awesome beings, but those beings’ greatness is surpassed to an infinite degree by God’s. God is not just one of a range of equally good things but the single best way a thing can be.

The problem is this requires really weird metaphysics. There can only be a single omnipotent being—otherwise, what would happen if the two omnipotent beings disagreed? But surely God could create a second omnibenevolent being. This is especially so if you, like Swinburne, think that an omniscient being without any psychological inhibitions would be omnibenevolent for they’d understand the reasons to be the best things in any cases. If God could make any of us omnibenevolent by giving us omniscience, then it’s hard to see why he doesn’t make us omnibenevolent.

I think this is a really difficult problem. It’s actually two different problems, what I’ll call the omnibenevolence problem and the worthiness of worship problem. The worthiness of worship problem is that of justifying why God is uniquely worthy of relationship and worship, why he is the unique best thing, better even than the best thing he could create. The omnibenevolence problem is that of why God doesn’t just make all of us perfect by making us omnibenevolence and giving us no psychological inhibitions. I think these related problems together comprise one of the best arguments for atheism. That said, I think there’s some stuff that can be said in response.