Strider wrote:

I just put up a new post on my blog on "theistic personalism": http://tinyurl.com/h2blhm9.

In the article I give a long quote from Barry Miller's A Most Unlikely God:

In challenging the controlling notion of God employed by perfect-being theologians, I have no wish to deny that he is indeed the absolutely perfect being. What I shall be denying, however, is their particular understanding of that notion. Aquinas, for example, understands a perfect being as Actus Purus, a being devoid of all potentiality; Maimonides conceives of it as One, a being 'without any composition of plurality of elements'; but Anselmians understand it as a being having the maximally consistent set of great-making properties or perfections. Whether the Anselmians' view is acceptable, however, depends on what they mean by a perfection. As explained by Morris, it is a property that fulfils the following conditions:

1.01.  It is better to have than not to have.
1.02.  It may vary in degree.
1.03.  It is 'constituted by the logical maximum of an upwardly bounded, degreed great-making property.' Omnipotence and omnipotence are offered as examples.

The procedure for determining which great-making properties belong to God could hardly be simpler, namely, if having property contributes to the excellence of a thing that does have P, then an absolutely perfect being has, otherwise the being does have not have. Among those that pass the test are omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omniscience, and indeed all the perfections.

The Anselmians' notion of a perfection has immediate implications for their understanding of God's transcendence over his creatures. They succeed in setting him well apart from his creatures, many of which may perhaps have great-making properties but no one of which would have even one of them to the maximum degree possible. On this view, the gulf between God and creatures would therefore be wide, and perhaps unimaginably so, though it would not constitute an absolute divide. It is difficult to see how it could be more than a difference of degree, since the terms indicating his properties---'powerful,' 'knowing,' 'loving,' 'merciful,' 'generous' and so on---seem to be univocally of God and creatures. True, when applied to God, those terms are often qualified as 'maximally powerful,' 'all knowing,' 'infinitely merciful,' unsurpassably generous,' but the qualifiers do nothing to change the sense of the terms they qualify. Hence, the role of 'maximally,' 'all,' 'infinitely,' and 'unsurpassably' cannot be that of alienans adjectives like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck,' or 'negative' in 'negative growth,' each of which does serve to change the sense of the term it qualifies. Rather, they are merely superlatives, which of course leave quite intact the sense of the terms they qualify. Thus understood, God's properties are merely human ones, albeit extended to the maximum degree possible.

As conceived of by perfect-being theologians, therefore, God turns out to be simply the greatest thing around, some kind of super-being that would be quite capable of evoking admiration and wonder, but who could scarcely be described as being absolutely transcendent, or as being worthy of worship. The point is that the terms that perfect-being theology predicates of God are being used in precisely the sense that ipso facto precludes their being predicated of a God who is absolutely transcendent, since it is a sense in which they could equally be predicated of creatures. The difference between creatures and any God of whom they really could be predicated would therefore be simply one of degree. Although this may seem to be a hard saying, it follows straightforwardly from the fact that absolute transcendence cannot be attained merely by extending human attributes to whatever degree is deemed to be 'maximal.' The Anselmians' God is therefore anything but ineffable, for not only can we talk about him, we can do so in precisely the same terms as those we use in talking about humans. Such a view succeeds in presenting God in terms that are comfortingly familiar, but only at the price of being discomfitingly anthropomorphic. (pp. 1-3)

Do you agree with Miller?

Emphatically not. One of my pet hates is the way Neo-Thomism, armed with a criticism that is either trivial or defies interpretation, managed to prejudice so many people against the Ontological Argument in any form (not to mention other approaches to Natural Theology): Miller's passage, though more technically sophisticated, is just another example of its sad fruit. Now for some reasons:

1. Perfect Being Theology has been a mainstay of Western Natural Theology arguably since Plato. In its negative form it helps add meaning to Negative Theology (when one says 'God is not this' what one means is 'no, God is more than this').

EDIT: Even Plantinga when challanged about the alleged anthromorphism of his understanding of God answered that when he spoke of God as a person what he really meant was that 'God is not less than personal'.

2. Miller confutes three separate issues, namely the specifically Thomist notion of the Analogy of Predication with Divine Simplicity and Perfect Being Theology. Although the Analogical Theory was partly motivated by a desire to answer certain tensions with DS (Claim 2) there have been plenty of philosophers e.g. Scotus, Leibniz et cetera who have rejected it in favor of Univocal predication and still endorsed Simplicity.

3. While many Perfect Being theologians are Theistic Personalists due to the influence of Plantinga there is no reason why they need be. Amongst modern philosophers of religion we have Alexander Pruss (Thomist), Katherin Rogers, William Vallicella (endorses Miller's Being itself claim) and Brian Leftow who support or have supported Simplicity in the past.

Finally that last paragraph of Miller's against Univocity is almost pure rhetoric and easily reversed. One can claim that creatures sharing some properties albeit in a limited, derived fashion, with the Deity is precisely what one would expect given Creation's status as a finite mirror of the that beings infinite perfection. Likewise one can just deny that God is 'absolutely transcendent' if that term means having no connection with the world - on the contrary the things of the world reflect divine immanence. Even a Thomist can accept this and claim that the 'limited and derived' nature of property sharing is just what their theory of Analogy seeks to convey.

Alexander wrote:

I would agree with Miller in so far as he targets modern "Anselmians" (e.g. Thomas Morris, who explicitly denies divine simplicity and presumably has no problem with the notion that God's properties are merely human ones extended to the maximum degree), but his criticisms seem unlikely to touch Anselm himself. Anselm does not understand God as "a being having the maximally consistent set of great-making properties or perfections", while Morris definitely does.

Anselm of course takes the simplicity of a being as directly related to how perfect it is (from which it easily follows that the perfect being must be as simple as is possible).
 

Last edited by DanielCC (6/01/2016 3:14 pm)