The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

32 The Idea of God
(it would certainly be controverted by one or two of my departmental
colleagues at Notre Dame); my only purpose is to make it clear what my
controversial reply to the charge of anachronism is. It would be beyond
the scope of these lectures to defend it.
I now turn to two questions I promised an answer to at the beginning of
this lecture. The first is this: Is there some principle or general idea that
binds together the attributes in the list I have given? (Note, by the way,
that it is, as I promised it would be, a very rich list.) Is the list—I asked
rhetorically—just a ‘‘laundry list’’? Is it anything more than a jumble
of historical accidents? The answer is that it is not a mere jumble. It
represents an attempt by many thinkers—not, I would suppose, for the
most part a conscious attempt—to provide some specific content to
the Anselmian notion of a greatest possible being, a something a greater
than which cannot be conceived, aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.
Ifanargumentforthisthesisiswanted,Iaskyousimplytoseewhether
you can think of some attribute that could be added to the list that
would make a being who possessed the attributes in the expanded list
greater than a being who possessed only the attributes in the original
list. And I ask you to consider whether there is some attribute in the
list that could be removed without diminishing the degree of greatness
represented by the list. It seems obvious that a greatest possible being
must be omnipotent—at least supposing omnipotence to be a possible
property. A being who is capable of, say, creation ex nihilo is—all other
things being equal—greater than a being whose powers do not extend
to creation ex nihilo. A necessarily existent being, a being who would
exist in every possible circumstance, is greater—all other things being
equal—than a contingent being, a being who could fail to exist. And
so on, it seems to me, for each of the attributes in the list. And what
could be added to the list that would make for ‘‘greater greatness’’?
Nothing that I can see. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that our
list contains all the properties of God that are relevant to the degree
of greatness he enjoys. No doubt there are ‘‘great-making’’ properties
ofGodthatnohumanbeing—perhapsnoangel,perhapsnopossible
created being—could form the dimmest conception of. I do claim that
the list can plausibly be said to contain all the great-making properties
that human beings can form a conception of. My definition of ‘God’,
like any definition, does not claim to be a list of all the important
properties, even all the important essential properties, of a thing that
falls under the concept whose content it exhibits. If I define a ‘cat’ as a