For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about Perfect Being Theology.
Sometimes the best way to discover whether or not a familiar concept really makes sense is to try to explain it to a student. That was the situation that Notre Dame philosopher Jeff Speaks faced a few years ago when he was preparing to teach a large lecture class on philosophical theology. To lay a solid philosophical foundation for a journey through the claims of the Christian church’s Nicene Creed, Speaks wanted to begin with an idea articulated and defended by St. Anselm, an early-12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, who described God as “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
Anselm’s statement provided the central claim for what is now known as “Perfect Being Theology,” which holds that we can discover the properties of God by determining the attributes the greatest possible being would have — characteristics such as omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect moral goodness. Since Anselm’s day, Perfect Being Theology has been used countless theologians both within and outside of Christianity to provide a philosophical complement to descriptions of God found in scripture and religious tradition. But as Speaks sat down to write his lecture on God as a perfect being, he realized he had a problem, which he recounts in the introduction to his forthcoming book on the subject, The Greatest Possible Being: