And the lack of Biblical evidence for it:
Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the
belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include
being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly
simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something
like this view is common among lay people as well.There
are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it
appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems
unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if
the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible
injustice. Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite
power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out
immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came
from.The second problem is that
while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the
God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and
scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God
in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as
immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he
regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly
surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a
cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot
control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.
As those of you who have read TIA know, I do not subscribe to the concept of God as a “perfect” being, or even think that it is meaningful to describe Him as “good”, but rather, a tautology. And given our intrinsically limited perspective, I think it is stupid to claim we have any means of distinguishing between omniscience and superhuman tantiscience or voliscience. But it is fascinating to see that the Aprevistan view appears to finally have penetrated mainstream thinking.