{"id":281,"date":"2008-03-19T09:32:44","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T09:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/281"},"modified":"2008-03-21T13:09:12","modified_gmt":"2008-03-21T13:09:12","slug":"modal-shootout-on-greatest-possible-beings-part-1-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/modal-shootout-on-greatest-possible-beings-part-1-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"modal shootout on greatest possible beings &#8211; Part 1 (Dale)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/texas.jpg\" \/><br \/>\n<small><em>&#8220;Don&#8217;t mess with Texan metaphysicans, pardner.&#8221;<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n<p>In a recent series of posts (<a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/249\" target=\"_blank\">uno<\/a>, <a href=\"60http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/254\">dos<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/252\" target=\"_blank\">tres<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/269\" target=\"_blank\">quatro<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/267\" target=\"_blank\">cinco<\/a>),<strong> I&#8217;ve been chewing on some philosophical arguments that &#8220;social&#8221; trinitarians have used<\/strong> for their doctrine. Been finding more gristle than meat.<\/p>\n<p>In my latest installment, I was privileged to get <strong>some penetrating critical feedback<\/strong> from fellow philosophy of religion bloggers located in my home state of Texas &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/alexanderpruss.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Alexander Pruss<\/a> of Baylor and <a href=\"http:\/\/mike-philrel.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mike Almeida<\/a> of UT San Antonio (<a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/267\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, comments #2, 7-9) These guys are extremely sharp and are doing a lot of creative work in the field, by the way. About perfect beings &#8211; I&#8217;ve come to find out that <strong>Mike has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Metaphysics-Perfect-Beings-Michael-Almeida\/dp\/0415962935\/ref=sr_1_1\/104-9585356-2374346?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1184864765&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\">thought a <em>lot<\/em> about this<\/a><\/strong>!<\/p>\n<p>This post is my attempt to process Mike&#8217;s feedback<!--more-->, continuing the conversation, and trying to make it intelligible to less technically inclined readers. (For those not familiar with &#8220;possible worlds&#8221; discourse &#8211; a few introductory sources are <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/holton\/www\/courses\/freewill\/modlog.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apaonline.org\/apa\/archive\/newsletters\/v97n2\/teaching\/logic.asp\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.) Next time, I&#8217;ll work through Alexander&#8217;s helpful comments.<\/p>\n<p>Mike focuses his fire on <strong>a crucial premise<\/strong> of an argument I came up with against Anselmian social trinitarians (i.e. ones who argue for their position using perfect-being arguments), namely:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Mike&#8217;s first shot<\/strong>: no way Jos\u00e9 &#8211; if &#8220;Greatest Possible Being&#8221; means <strong>a being which is the greatest being in every possible world<\/strong>, this being still might be greater in some worlds than in others. There&#8217;d be no possible world in which God is surpassed by a greater being, yet in some of those worlds, God is greater than he is in others.\n<ul>\n<li>Dale [dodges the bullet]: sure, that&#8217;s a coherent concept, but that&#8217;s not what Anselmian theologians have in mind. They want to say that God is greater than any being in any possible world &#8211; no being in any possible world &#8211; and this includes God too &#8211; is greater than God is in this, the actual world. Put differently: they think God is as great as a being could possibly be &#8211; and this rules out that God could be greater than he is in this world. They don&#8217;t want God&#8217;s greatness to vary across all the possible world&#8217;s he&#8217;s in, which, of course, is <em>all<\/em> of them.<\/li>\n<li>Mike: Okay. [reloads]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mike&#8217;s second shot<\/strong>: Still, your premise is false. Here&#8217;s why:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>You say suppose that greatness supervenes . . . on some infinitely increasable property e.g. having made X number of happy creatures.. Good enough. For each infinite set of creatable happy beings there is some world w in which they are created. Let w0 be the world containing aleph-0 happy beings, let w1 be the world aleph-1 happy beings . . .and so on upward. Let God actualize every world in that sequence. In this case we have every world wn corresponding to a spatiotemporally isolated universe (i.e. an island universe) Un in a single cosmoi or multiverse M. <strong>Every createable happy creature has been created.<\/strong> And since we have stipulated that God\u2019s greatness supervenes on the infinitely increasable property of having made X number of happy creatures, God is GPB by the principle (G) above. (from <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/267#more-267\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, #7, emphases added) [blows smoke from barrel of his six-shooter, returns it to holster]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>I <em>think<\/em> his second shot boils down to this: it is possible that God should create all possible creatures.<\/strong> And if this is so, there could be a greatest possible being, even if such a being&#8217;s greatness supervenes (in part) on having freely made happy creatures.<\/p>\n<p><strong>While Mike reloads ;-), I&#8217;ll jump out from behind my boulder and lob a couple of rocks<\/strong> in his general direction. (I seem to have left my gun at home.)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>[wimpy sounding grunt, throw] <strong>I don&#8217;t grant that it&#8217;s possible that God creates all createable creatures<\/strong>, because not all of them are compossible &#8211; that is, it isn&#8217;t consistent to suppose that some pairs of them are both created.  Just to pull one sort out of thin air (there may be much better examples): There could be a sort of being which would be happy only if their world contained no beings of some other kind &#8211; call them essentially bigoted creatures.\n<ul>\n<li>Mike, of course, is aware of this problem. Thus,<strong> he invokes multiple actual worlds<\/strong> &#8211; multiple total spacetimes, all of which are actual, as real as this possible world we&#8217;re all in, and none temporally or spatially related to any other. God could just actualize multiple possible worlds &#8211; however many it takes to create all the happy creatures there could be.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>[uuuughaah&#8230; a pebble sails] Don&#8217;t have much argument for this, but <strong>I assume that necessarily, any portion time is temporally related to all others<\/strong>, and any region of space is spatially related to all others. (Let me put it that way &#8211; though I may not want to commit to such entities as times and spaces, or portions or regions thereof.) I can form <em>mental images of<\/em> a &#8220;multiverse&#8221; containing several &#8220;island universes&#8221;, but I don&#8217;t think these amount to any intuitions that such are possible. To the contrary, they seem impossible to me.<\/li>\n<li>[can&#8217;t find rock, throws handful of sand] I&#8217;d be happy to make a social trinitarian retreat to this. If an argument for social trinitarianism depends on such dubious modal claims, it&#8217;s a pretty weak argument. Let my argument just run on the assumption that there can be at most one actual world. (It may sound perverse out of context, but because of my views on time I actually doubt whether we&#8217;re even in an actual world, as normally defined &#8211; see my &#8220;Three Roads&#8221; paper in <em>Faith and Philosophy<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>OK, time to drop the gunfight metaphor<\/strong>, before it starts using me (rather than vice-versa).<\/p>\n<p>Next time I&#8217;ll respond to some further thoughts from Mike on <a href=\"http:\/\/mike-philrel.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/infinitely-increasing-properties.html\" title=\"Infinitely Increasing Properties\" target=\"_blank\">infinitely increasing properties<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Mike%20Almeida\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">Mike Almeida<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/possible%20worlds\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">possible worlds<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Anselm\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">Anselm<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/social%20trinitarian\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">social trinitarian<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/greatest%20possible%20being\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">greatest possible being<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/social%20trinity\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">social trinity<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/ontological%20argument\" class=\"performancingtags\" rel=\"tag\">ontological argument<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t mess with Texan metaphysicans, pardner.&#8221; In a recent series of posts (uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco), I&#8217;ve been chewing on some philosophical arguments that &#8220;social&#8221; trinitarians have used for their doctrine. Been finding more gristle than meat. In my latest installment, I was privileged to get some penetrating critical feedback from fellow philosophy of&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/modal-shootout-on-greatest-possible-beings-part-1-dale\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">modal shootout on greatest possible beings &#8211; Part 1 (Dale)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}