The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 35
agree on?—is an attempt to say what a greatest possible being would
be like. This list is explained by thefactthatJewish,Christian,and
Muslim theologians and philosophers agree that the concept of God
is the concept of a greatest possible being (though not all of them
will have had this thought explicitly), and represents an attempt to
provide as much specific content as is humanly possible to the very
abstract and general idea ‘‘greatest possible being’’. Alternative lists of
the attributes that would belong to a greatest conceivable being (or
different understandings of various of the attributes in the list from
those I have provided) are possible and do not signal an attempt to
attach a different sense to the word ‘God’ from its traditional (that is to
say, its proper) sense—provided that is what they really are: attempts
to provide as much content as possible to the abstract and general idea
of a greatest possible being. If two theologians or philosophers present
significantly different lists of divine attributes, this should be because,
and only because, they have different ideas about what is metaphysically
possible, and thus different ideas about what the properties of the
greatest metaphysically possible being would be. (Thus Descartes can
properly accuse me of having made a mistake about metaphysics when I
say that omnipotence in his sense is metaphysically impossible and that I
am, for that reason, not going to include it in my list of divine attributes.
He can accuse me of having made a mistake about the properties of
God. He cannot accuse me of having attached the wrong concept to
the word ‘God’. And I am in a formally identical position vis-à-vis
the philosopher who contends that I should replace the attribute of
necessity in my list with aseity.) Or you could put my position this way:
if a list of attributes is to provide an absolutely incontrovertible list of
the properties that belong to the concept of God, it should contain the
single item ‘‘is the greatest possible being’’; long, traditional lists like the
one I have provided represent attempts, defeasible attempts, to provide
a more or less complete specification of those properties accessible to
human reason that are entailed by ‘‘is the greatest possible being’’.
I say ‘‘defeasible’’, but, as things stand, I see little in the way of
serious possibility of defeat. With one small exception, which I shall
mention in a moment, I think there can be no serious objection to
the contention that the attributes in my list are entailed by ‘‘is the
greatest possible being’’. The exception is this: in the fifth lecture, I
am going to contend that the ‘‘standard’’ definition of omniscience,
the definition I gave earlier in the present lecture, needs to be revised,
owing to the fact that, by the terms of that definition, omniscience is