The Perfect Being...

When we talk about God a lot of people will refer to him as the perfect being. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent etc.

He also is benevolent.

What I struggle with here, and I wonder what you think, is how can God be all-good and perfect at the same time. I always thought something perfect (at least in the logical sense) implied that it could have no opposite. The opposite to good is evil.

That leaves the possibility of an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent and all-evil God. Not just the single possibility of the all-powerful and all-good God. Hence it cannot be perfect.

An option here of course is to call god neutral or he somehow encompasses all aspects of good and evil.

Is this point valid? Or am I missing something important that does make good perfect compared to evil or neutral?

“Perfect” is something we invented and declared, as a concept, as a condition, to specify and differenciate between degrees of this and that.

If power is good, then all-powerful is all-good.
If power is evil, then all-powerful is all-evil.

Likewise with any measure of anything else.

It’s a bit premature for us to say what God is and is not, as we do not even know what we ourselves are and are not, yet. So once humanity fully understands itself and the earth, then it will be almost ready to do a few guesses about ‘God’-like levels of concepts and being.

Whatever descriptions of god that humans come up with will necessarily be based on dualism…it’s the nature of the beast. Look at it this way: it would be impossible for you to conceptualize ‘perfect’ without the counter ‘imperfect’ to define it.

The way I tend to think of it is that ‘God’ if he exists to traditional Judeo-Christian description (which to be fair most educated religious people these days don’t genuinely take as correct), then he would have to be everything.

If ‘God’ created everything, all that exists, good, evil, white, black, etc… etc… must be taken from something God had experience of. I cannot create a completely new object, its component parts will resemble images and ideas I have come across in my experiences. Similarly ‘God’ could not logically create something of which he had no experience.

And if ‘God’ created everything, the only thing he could have experienced before that, was himself.

Hence ‘God’ must be both good and evil.

Evil is the absence of good just as dark is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat. Take it from there.

“He is benevolent” is in-and-of itself a controversial term. Due to Protestants, perhaps of the same tradition you share, the Chinese concept of “ren” is normally translated as “benevolence”. But since “ren” entails two people, the notion of a divinity can’t apply to it. Quite complicated, quite confusing.

Current thread “Moral Relativism” on the main board might shed some light here.

There’s no way to define good or evil precisely. So what does benevolent even mean? Well intentioned? This still leaves room for f*ck ups, in which case you are still left with an ‘imperfect’ god.

The opposite of perfect is imperfect.

What you are thinking of is the word, infinitude, or possibly void.