CC--Christianese: God's Perfection (Part 1)

--When we say God is perfect, what do we mean.

--Well, obviously, this means there’s no defect with Him. But this is an incredibly inadequate way to describe things.

--By perfect, we mean that God is that Being than whom none more perfect can be imagined (to borrow from Anselm.

--We do sometimes think we could imagine a God who would be more perfect in some way than this one, but the problem is that such imaginings always lead to necessary defects in other areas of this imagined God’s nature.

--The resulting being would in fact be very imperfect. And it’s an excellent caution against having such thoughts to simply see how wrong we are on a consistent basis about things far less significant than the total nature of God.

--We look at things in the world and think, “Well, I would have done that differently, therefore God must be capable of doing it better like I would.” But it’s vital to realize that nothing that is done could have been done any better, or God would have done it.

--This view is satirized by Voltaire in Candide with the idea of Dr. Pangloss claiming that this is the best of all possible worlds, which Voltaire presumes a laughable absurdity. But this is indeed what Christians beleive. Any other world would be inferior in some way we can’t necessarily comprehend, which is exactly why we have this one.