Divine imperfection (was Genesis 9:8-11)

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21

As you point out, a perfect square is still limited because it’s a square; it’s perfect qua square but not perfect simpliciter. But a source of all things would have nothing to limit it in this way, so it would be perfect simpliciter, having all perfections in an unlimited way.

I’m not speaking of a source of all things in the sense of a temporal source, e.g. the singularity that preceded the Big Bang giving rise to everything after it, but a metaphysical source, that which is more fundamental than everything else. A temporal source would only have to be powerful (and maybe not even that, because in what sense is a singularity “powerful”?), but that which is foundational of everything else would have nothing to limit it and would be perfect.

As for the other other problem, that’s not a problem because that’s one of the options I gave, that there is no source of all things. There could just be a few powerful things, a few gods or quantum fields or physical laws, with no explanation of their existence. That seems irrational to me, but I guess there’s nothing logically impossible about it.

This would imply that moral evil is not an imperfection, in which case it’s not “sin” (missing the mark) to commit evil. But I wouldn’t want to be in the position of arguing that there’s nothing wrong or imperfect about, e.g., torturing people for fun.

I suspect there’s some deeper disagreement here between us that explains the disconnect. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but maybe it’s that you disagree that morality is in any way objective? (In which case, if there’s a “source of all things”, it would be neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ but would transcend those human-subjective categories altogether, as I suggested earlier.)

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The early heresiologists really liked to trace opposing views back to a single ‘heresiarch’ but I don’t take that seriously at all. Some of them were really absurd, e.g., attributing the heresy of modalism to the followers of Heraclitus the Greek philosopher (LOL). The gnostics and Christians had a shared background including the New Testament, they just interpreted it differently, according to different “hypotheses” (as Irenaeus puts it).

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How do we know that there even is such a thing?

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Why would a source of all things necessarily be unlimited? And it seems that some perfections would be in conflict with other perfections, so it would be impossible to have them all in an unlimited way.

A problem: I have no idea what that would mean.

And, possibly for the prior reason, I have no idea how that would follow.

How is it any less rational than there being an unexplained source of all things? And why can’t there be a dual source of all things rather than a unitary one?

I reject the necessary connection among all these words, “imperfection”, “sin”, and “missing the mark”.

Nor would I. I just argue that there is no necessary connection between “wrong” (in the moral sense) and “imperfect”.

Probably, depending on what “objective” means. Morality arises from human social interactions and instincts.

Again, that doesn’t follow. It could be good or evil in human terms, the only terms there are. And it still seems unclear what “a source of all things” means. Is that source a thing, and if so is it the source of itself? Or is it the Spanish barber?

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I don’t really see what is irrational about that. While the terms foundationalism and coherentism usually apply to epistemology, it seems to me they could apply equally well to ontology. That is to say, just as IMHO coherentism provides a better description of how we know things about the world, it may also provide a better description of how the world is.

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I think the problem here is that if you frame the issue in terms of Abrahamic-God-shaped preconceptions, then you will inevitably reach an Abrahamic-God-shaped answer – and an answer that is not Abrahamic-God-shaped will seem “irrational”.

You appear to conceive of the limitless as being perfect. For myself, I conceive of it as encompassing both perfection and imperfection, order and chaos. Those, along with morality versus immorality, would appear to be matters of perspective and context – and taking the ‘view from everywhere’, simply don’t exist. They are labels limited to our particular context. In Taoism (which, although I no longer consider myself a Taoist, still influences my perspective):

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

&

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

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27

“I think the problem here is that if you frame the issue in terms of Abrahamic-God-shaped preconceptions, then you will inevitably reach an Abrahamic-God-shaped answer – and an answer that is not Abrahamic-God-shaped will seem ‘irrational.’”

You make a great point. The problem is escaping that preconception. At least for us Catholic-educated boomers; the nuns were masterful at indoctrination and the doses we were fed of eternal damnation, blood-soaked crucifixes, an aloof and untouchable hierarchy, etc., no matter how childish and absurd they may seem to a thinking adult, left life-long, lingering impediments to jettisoning Christianity, at a psychological level no matter how logical that solution appears. A quote (which is disputed) from Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit founder, captures the dilemma perfectly: “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.”

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I had a less intrusive, and thus less effective, indoctrination. Seven years of Sunday School being taught the more uplifting and morally-unambiguous Bible stories, a couple of years of Youth Group under a fairly young and enthusiastic leadership (the last time I can remember feeling any strong positive belief), followed by several years of half-hearted and ineffectual leadership, meaning that I could be categorised as largely “lapsed”, by the time I went to university.

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After contemplating this for a while, I can’t find anything very objectionable about this. In the Eastern traditions of Christianity (following Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite), but also to an extent in the West, there’s a strong tendency to view God in a primarily apophatic way – none of our predications properly apply to him. Seen in this way, God is beyond “perfection and imperfection”, beyond “order and chaos”, not because God is somehow imperfect or chaotic but because he transcends those distinctions altogether. So this view isn’t entirely incompatible with Christianity (at least, certain schools of thought within Christianity).

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Still, in such a tradition it becomes impossible to say “God is good” or “God loves us” or in fact to make any true statement about God. Is God even one? Or three, if you prefer?

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Ps.-Dionysius does describe God as “the beyond-goodness” (to hyperagathon) multiple times throughout his Divine Names, but I don’t think he would want to say that “God is good” is false, given his extensive discussion of what it means to say that God is the Good (DN 4). I suppose that for him “Good” is a way for us to describe God in his relation to us, but not what God is in himself.

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Does that make any sense? What does “God in his relation to us” mean if you try to parse it? And what does “beyond-goodness” mean, for that matter?

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That feels problematical in two ways:

  1. It appears to contradict your earlier statement (which itself seems reasonably emblematic of the Christian viewpoint):
  1. Because it again seems to be an attempt to disassociate God from the imperfection and chaos that is an integral part of his creation.

Yes, you can take the view that the ‘view from everywhere’ is that such things don’t exist, and that God is therefore “beyond” them – but that viewpoint would also necessitate that God is “beyond” good and evil, and “beyond” morality and immorality. So then why is God so darn obsessed with who you have sex with (and even, given a certain Gospel verse, Matthew 5:27-28 I believe, even who you merely think about having sex with) – a point made all the more obvious when the Council of Jerusalem included “sexual immorality”[1] in their improbably short list of carry-overs from the ‘Old Covenant’ to the ‘New’.

This oddly-specific obsession is all the more stark, given an apparent unconcern about who you enslave or slaughter.

  1. This also raises the question of whether “sexual immorality” includes the Levitican prohibition on having sex with a menstruating woman. ↩︎

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34

I described two different Christian ways of viewing God, a more Western way and a more Eastern way. My own sympathies lie more with the Western way of seeing things, but I’m just saying that the Eastern way is also compatible with Christianity.

I don’t understand. I thought you were suggesting that God is beyond perfection and imperfection, not that God is both perfect and imperfect – which either is a contradiction or implies that the source of all things is somehow composed of more fundamental parts.

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No. “Beyond” was your word, not mine – nor was I explicitly talking about God. What I said was:

I am parochial to my own social milieu, species, etc, etc – and so see certain things as perfect, imperfect, good, bad, ordered, chaotic, moral and immoral – based upon these perspectives.

This is why A Tale of Two Cities can start with the memorable phrase:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …

Because whether it was good or bad depends on your perspective.

Yes, in a ‘view from everywhere’ all that would wash out – but it would wash out all of those perspectives equally.

Take a broad enough view, and nothing is unambiguously perfect, imperfect, good, bad, ordered, chaotic, moral or immoral. And this is the viewpoint that Taoism attempts to foster.

However it is not a viewpoint that would seem to be particularly compatible with Abrahamic religions – even attempting to take an “Apophatic” view of them.

Again, your Abrahamic-God-shaped preconceptions are showing. There is nothing contradictory about this, at least from a genuinely-Eastern (as opposed to Eastern-Christian) perspective. This why the Yin-Yang symbol has the light containing an element of the dark, and the dark containing an element of the light:

Yin_and_Yang_symbol.svg
Yin_and_Yang_symbol.svg300×300 15.9 KB

That chaos contains within it an element of order is why we have the field of statistics.

That order contains within it an element of chaos is why we have entropy and quantum physics.

It is simply a matter of looking at reality from the Eastern perspective of complementary duality, not from the Western perspective of oppositional duality.

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36

Classical mechanics is what you are looking for. That’s where the study of chaos is usually situated, if we are sticking to physics. The mathematical theory of chaos has only to do with statistics insofar as both are rooted in calculus, ultimately.

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Another great post. Creative to fit Dickens and the Tao into the same post for the same concept. Was it F. Scott Fitzgerald who said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time? I think Dickens clearly qualifies on that front.
IMHO, no one can ever really know the nature of God. I think that is where Eastern and Western religions show the starkest contrast. Western theology book shelves overflow with the bones of those convinced that they have succeeded. However, the more Western theologians try to pin it down, the more elusive it becomes. I think part of it is the West’s compulsive need to label, describe and categorize everything to death. Put a name on it and you own it. However, every Christian theologian of note, from Aquinas to Plantinga has ultimately eschewed systematics and grounded their belief in what can only be described as a “personal encounter” with God, i.e., faith. And, apropos your original point, Abrahamic-God-shaped preconceptions always seem to bleed through and define this faith…

38

Maybe this is just my Western logical mindset, but I can’t parse the claim that something is both A and not-A in a way that doesn’t imply either contradiction or composition. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

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39

That is probably because you are treating “A” and “not A” as fixed, inherent, objective qualities, rather than as subjective viewpoints based upon our parochial perspective as social apes raised in a largely Western European cultural tradition.

Whether yesterday was a “perfect” day or a highly “imperfect” one would probably depend on whether you spent it watching the sun rise, listening to bird calls in a forested area, watching the interaction of sun and wind on a sheltered harbor, etc, etc – or battling rush hour traffic and putting up with an unreasonable boss.

That’s a matter of perspective, not of contradiction or composition. And taking a wide enough view of it, all the birds, bosses, etc, etc wash out, and we’re merely tiny dots of matter in the cosmic void.

But we cannot live in that latter perspective – to quote John Maynard Keynes: “in the long run we are all dead” (and in a thousand years, none of this will matter).

But I think you’re avoiding a bigger point – if in this wider view, our petty sufferings don’t matter, then exactly who we choose to have sex with, and thus find some fleeting pleasure, companionship and connection with, matters even less (assuming that it is consensual, and nobody else is hurt in the process). There seems, to me at least, to be the “contradiction” between Christian morality and Christian theodicy.

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Even if A is a matter of subjective assignment, rather than an object’s inherent property, it is still the case that from a single perspective and at a single time, both it and its negation cannot be assigned. A\wedge\neg A is a contradiction. It is the contradiction, the very definition of logical falseness.

And this is correctly avoided in your own explanation, perfectly in line with “Western” classical logic: By saying that A and \neg A are subjective viewpoints, rather than inherent objective qualities, what we are allowing is not that both can be said of the same thing at all. If anything, this is an insistence that that the thing in question is simply not what actually carries the property. It is still the case that A\wedge\neg A is false, except now instead of this being a statement about the object, it is one about the subject, or even the relationship between the subject and the object. “The sky is both blue and not-blue” is a statement about the sky, whereas “Jim both does and does not find that the sky is blue” is a statement about Jim, but I struggle to see what is fundamentally different about their respective underlying structure. “The sky is blue from Jim’s perspective, but non-blue from Paul’s”, on the other hand, is an altogether different statement and does nothing to salvage A\wedge\neg A, anyway.

As to the suggestion that this may be a mere artifact of cultural circumstance, I find this, with respect, absurd, in its implications, if not its meaning. If matters of first-order logic were fully or partially social, then we should expect more than one kind to adequately serve as the backbone for scientific descriptions of nature.

It is one thing to question some higher order mathematical axiom, and find that some theorem or other may happen to follow in one system but not another, but if we are to treat the law of non-contradiction as just as arbitrary and circumstantial, then I for one would rather like seeing an alternative to the entirety of mathematics and all of the natural sciences that can predict the outcome of experiments with anywhere near comparable accuracy.

I’m not saying it cannot be done, but I find it peculiar that no attempts at doing it have ever gotten off the ground. The most we have in this regard as it stands, is a handful of philosophers playing around with symbols for a couple dozen pages, trying to portray their suggestion that logic is a mere matter of taste as some flavour of respectable, whilst achieving absolutely nothing practically useful in the attempt, and having of course zero impact on either maths or the sciences – the departments where logic is an actual tool of objective utility, rather than a mere toy with a subjective fun factor.

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