> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
(You'll need to go through the series of weblog posts (they're not that long) to get the full logic of the argument.)
See also perhaps Aquinas, "Whether God is perfect?":
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...
If understood in a very mystic transcending meaning of "creation" maybe, otherwise it reads still like dogma to me.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
His argument from contingency is probably a better one:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/avicenna-aquinas-an...
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
It is formally proven that an entity that encompass all qualities of a God must exist.
If I'm reading that article correctly, the criticism to Gödel is the same criticism I had for Leibniz:
> A proof does not necessitate that the conclusion be correct, but rather that by accepting the axioms, the conclusion follows logically.
> Many philosophers have called the axioms into question.