Me vs. The Theologians: Degrees of Perfection
Here’s Peter Williams’s tidily formatted version of Aquinas’s “Degrees of Perfection” argument for the existence of god:
1. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like
2. But ‘more’ and ‘less’ are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum
3. so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being
4. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus
5. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God
Firstly, (2) is wrong. It is perfectly possible to express “more” and “less” relations without reference to any maximum. Mathematics provides a precise abstract statement of this fact: an ordered set need not contain any maximum element. One example of such a set is the real numbers; another is the set {1 - (1/2)^n} for all integers n>0.
As for (4), Aquinas explains, “Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things.”. Of course, we have since learned that there is no upper limit to a either a system’s temperature or thermal energy. But at least Aquinas’s claim makes sense in the case of fire, since fire is hot and it causes other things to become hotter. In general, however, the idea that “the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus” is strange if not downright illucid. Attempting to apply this principle to “genuses” other than the specific ones Aquinas mentions yields bizarre results. Does the thing which is smallest cause all smallness? Is the thing that is heaviest the cause all mass? (To think we scientists spend millions of dollars building particle accelerators to search for the Higgs Boson when we could have just asked Aquinas for the answer.)
Williams was right about one thing: Dawkins was very dismissive of the Degrees of Perfection argument. I can hardly blame him.
And, as studying partial orderings show us, you can have mathematically precise definitions of more or less without everything even being comparable.
I hate to put it this way, but - you didn’t even *understand* the logic, let alone refute it. Indeed, you missed the entire point in the same manner as Dawkins. Indeed, the very article I linked to quotes Mascall as he points out the error in the *very argument* you make here!
“Goodness, so the argument claims, demands as its cause a God who is good; while heat, though it necessarily demands a God whose knowledge of possible being includes an idea of heat, does not demand a God who is hot as its cause, but only a God who can create.”
i.e.,; ‘we aren’t talking about heat and stank, we are talking about metaphysical attributes that are great-making and have an inherent maximum called ‘perfection”.Indeed, since the objection you raise is *specifically* mentioned as invalid, I must wonder if you fully read Williams’ piece!
Do me a favor - re-read the whole argument as Williams puts it and try again. You refuted a straw man, so please try again.
My mistake. I had meant to address the more recent defenders of this argument, and then absent-mindedly posted after I had only discussed Aquinas’s original argument. (Yeah, I suppose it does look like I didn’t read the Williams piece. oops.)
Anyway, I think it’s pretty clear that Aquinas is trying to argue that (4) is true as a general principle, and thereby deduce that in particular, good things are caused by some maximally good thing. Of course, modern theologians are perfectly free to reject (4) as a general principle (which is a quite sensible thing to do) and instead claim that this is true just for good things (”great-making” properties). By doing so, however, they have abandoned Aquinas’s attempt to make a deductive argument for this claim. As far as I can tell, the rest of the Williams piece is nothing but unsupported assertions.
Why do goodness and other “great-making properties” have an intrinsic logical maximum?
Even if there is an upper bound to goodness, why should the existence of a partially good thing imply the existence of something which is maximally good?
Why can’t an effect exceed the greatness of its cause?
wow. I am impressed - you just leapt from Aquinas to, effectively, the Enlightenment and didn’t even know it. Well, I am guessing, but the Enlightenment (IMHO) did spring from the question of “what is the maximum of ‘good’?”
More in the morning - too tired!
I must admit - this is really a weak form of the Ontological Argument - can we just skip to that one?