Perfect Being Theology and Modal Truth

Abstract

In "The Method of Perfect Being Theology," I argued that the attempt to derive the divine attributes from the principle that God is the greatest possible being faces substantial challenges.Here I clarify and defend the argument of that paper in response to the objections of Brian Leftow in "Perfection and Possibility," and consider the question of whether we might use perfect being reasoning to establish the possibility of certain hypotheses about God.Perfect being theology is the attempt to use the principle that God is the greatest possible being to derive claims about the divine attributes.Roughly, the idea is that, for some property F, if God would be greater if F than if not F, then, given that God is the greatest possible being, God must be F.This method is very widely deployed in contemporary philosophical theology.One prominent instance can be found in BrianLeftow's God and Necessity, in which this method is used to argue for, among other things, the following principle: NEC.(P)(☐ P is true → God is, contains, has, has attributes that have (etc.)or produces all its truth-explainers) 1

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