modal shootout on the greatest possible being – Part 2

Mike, reloaded – before the smoke has even cleared.

More from Mike Almeida about a premise in an anti-social-trinitarian-argument argument I’ve been exploring. Also, (sorry Mike – actually, sorry everyone) I continue my cheesy cowboy theme. (But as a native Texan, it’s my sacred right, Pardn’r. 🙂 )

Here’s a summary in (attempted) ordinary English of his thoughtful post on infinitely increasing properties @ his PhilRel Blog, followed by my response, which I posted to his comments section.

• My premise he’s commenting on: 6. If some great-making properties are infinitely increasable, then the concept of a Greatest Possible Being is the concept of an impossible being. (compare: highest possible integer)
• But what in tarnation, he asks, is an “infinitely increasable property”?
  • Definition 1: For any degree to which that property may be had, it’s possible that there’s something which has it to that degree. (If you like, there’s a “possible world” in which something has that property to that degree.)
    • Definition 1 allows there to be an upper limit to how much a property
      may be had. Compare: starting with the number 1, one may infinitely
      increase the number without ever reaching 2, which a limit to the
      series. (1.5, 1.75, 1.875, 1.9375, 1.96875, 1.984375, 1.9921875…)
  • Definition 2: For any degree n to which that property may be had, it’s possible that there’s something which has it to degree n AND it’s also possible for something (either that same thing, or something else) to have that property to a degree n+1.
    • On this definition, there can be no finite number which is the upper limit of the degree to which a property may be had. (e.g. You may have rustled n cattle, but there’s some cattle-rustler in some possible world who has out-rustled you.)
• If we assume Definition 1 of “infinitely increasable property”, then my premise 6 is more false than a Yankee’s confession of love for extra hot salsa. For all we know, says Mike, there’s an actual being that has all the infinitely increasable perfections to the highest degree (suppose it was 2). This being might be the Greatest Possible Being, in the sense I sketched in my last post.
• What if Definition 2 is the better one? Still, Mike argues, 6 is false. For all we know he urges, for any such infinitely increasable properties, some being has them all to an infinite degree. But then, this being would also have them to any finite degree as well. e.g. If you know an infinite number of truths, then you know of million, a billion, and so on.

In response, I agree with Mike up till this last point. Suppose that creating happy creatures is a great-making property. It is certainly infinitely increasable in our second, Definition 2 sense (the one I’ve been assuming all along). Suppose that necessarily, the Creation has a beginning in time (doesn’t have an infinite history), and that necessarily, at any given moment in time, it has features only finite creatures. If this is so, then necessarily, so long as there is a Creation, in can always be supplemented, and thus God can always be to higher degree the creator of happy creatures. God will never, so to speak, run out of possible happy creatures to add to his Creation. So, God is never as great as he can be. No possible being could be, so long as we make the two assumptions above, plus the plausible assumption that there’s an infinity of possible happy creatures.

Notice that I need to find only one infinitely increasable property such that it’s not possible that something has it to an infinite degree for my premise 6 to be true. It could turn out that all the other infinitely increasable properties can be had to an infinite degree.

Again, suppose these are necessary truths: God exists. God is essentially free. God is essentially all-powerful. If so, it is possible that God makes an everlasting, but at any time finite universe (finite in time, in spatial extent, and in number of creatures). Now given this, IF making happy creatures is a great-making property (if this is so, it’ll be necessarily so), then it is possible that God could be getting ever greater, while never being as great as a being could be. (We may have to add an assumption that possibly, God is “in time”, so that he can satisfy predicates like “is great to extent n at time t”.)

In sum, I am assuming all those things in the previous paragraph. (Also – that there’s at most one possible world which is actual.) I don’t claim to be certain about any of these, and I don’t denounce all deniers or doubters of them as unreasonable. I think we must all follow our modal intuitions (or lack thereof) wherever they may lead. I agree with Mike that if one is agnostic about these alleged necessary truths, then perhaps we should be agnostic about my premise 6 as well. But in arguing against social trinitarian arguments, I’m assuming a backdrop of Christian theism. He’s helped me to see that I am making other assumptions in asserting 6 – it does not, as he shows, follow merely from there being infinitely increasable properties, that a Greatest Possible Being is impossible.

Thanks, Hombre.

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