Fluctuating maximal God

Abstract

This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa's maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a "static" view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties (omnipotence, omniscience etc.) as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all times strengthens the original maximal God thesis. Furthermore, we show that "temporalising" Nagasawa's maximal God and adopting what we call the fluctuating maximal God thesis provides more effective ways of responding to objections to perfect being theism, in particular, the argument from evil and some conceptual problems pertaining to the Incarnation. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal is compatible with Christian Scriptures and coheres with numerous biblical passages better than Nagasawa's original proposal does.

Fluctuating maximal God, the problem of inconsistent evil, and spacetime changes

“…Critics may contend that this is a god whose great-making properties are, potentially, so diminished that God is no longer an entity with any significant power, knowledge, and goodness, lacking the required levels to become great once more. Jeffrey et al (2020) address this concern by postulating a threshold under which God's power cannot fall: God's power never dwindles to so low a degree that God loses the power to change the degree of the divine attributes at the next moment in time. Suppose each unit of God's power corresponds to a power to perform a particular action.…”

“…What Jeffrey et al (2020) call the static maximal God thesis was proposed by Yujin Nagasawa (2017). Among other aims, the thesis attempts to establish compatibility between God's existence and evil by removing the necessity of God's omni-properties.…”

“…If God's power to limit those evils remains the same throughout time, why does God appear to intervene and prevent some evils and not others, when it looks like prevention would require roughly the same degree of power in those cases? (Jeffrey et al (2020), 243)…”

“…Anne Jeffrey, Matyáš Moravec, and I (Jeffrey et al (2020)) recently built on Yujin Nagasawa's (2017) maximal God thesis to construct a concept of God that has potential advantages over alternative contenders. We postulated a ‘fluctuating maximal God’, unrestrained by the quality of immutability and, consequently, able to vary the degrees of its great-making properties.…”

“…Next, I explore a version of the evidential problem of evil that the SMG thesis cannot easily overcome: the problem of inconsistent evil. I consider two recent formulations of the problem of evil – the problem of geography and the problem of natural inequality – alongside the version of the problem of evil on which Jeffrey et al (2020) concentrate to distinguish between different types of uneven evil distribution: temporally inconsistent evil, spatially inconsistent evil, and interpersonally inconsistent evil. Then I demonstrate how the fluctuating maximal God (FMG) thesis can effectively avoid the problem of temporally inconsistent evil, giving it leverage over the static maximal God thesis.…”