Is God "Perfect"?

Most people would say God is “perfect,” but what do they mean? In the Old Testament, God loses his temper periodically, conveys a very human sense of jealousy, and allows innocent people to die needlessly. Recall the plagues that God heaped on Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from bondage. Each time, the Pharaoh appeared to be persuaded but he changed his mind. Finally, God sent an angel of death that killed the firstborn child of every Egyptian, from the firstborn of the Pharaoh himself to the firstborn of the “captive that was in the dungeon.” Exodus 12:29.

Why wouldn’t a perfect, omnipotent God simply change the Pharaoh’s mind? Why cause the series of plagues, which imposed suffering throughout Egypt and prolonged the captivity of the Jews? Even more puzzling, why kill the first born of even lowly Egyptians who had nothing to do with the Pharaoh’s decision? No modern reader, trying to be objective, could conclude that God was “perfect” in this story, at least by modern standards of morality. God is “perfect” in the Exodus story only in the sense that he reflects the image that the ancient Jews had of a perfect God: one that would impose massive suffering on the Egyptians in return for the massive suffering that the Egyptians had imposed on them.

We see a similar example of a less advanced culture creating its own standard of perfection in the eleventh century when St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, published the ontological argument for the existence of a “perfect being.” In The Uncertain Believer, I explain the weaknesses in the ontological argument, but for now focus on the fact that St. Anselm was Archbishop during the First Crusade when innocent persons in the Middle East were slaughtered by European zealots intent on seizing the Holy Land in the name of Christianity. St. Anselm no doubt felt the perfect God sanctioned the Crusades. Today, we would say that the church tried to justify this violence in the name of God, but no “perfect” God could possibly have sanctioned it.

Three lessons emerge from these examples. The first is that humans have always decided how to conceive of God and what God stands for. That means our conception of God can change over time as we grow morally and intellectually. The second is that the essential characteristics of God reflect each society’s understanding of perfection. The ancient Jews conceived of the essential characteristics of God as including the power to impose suffering on the Egyptians. As modern humans, we can see that the essential characteristics of God have nothing to do with the power to control nature and destroy enemies. They have to do with the power to inspire us to be perfect humans beings, or as come as close to it as we can. Finally, we can see that the most sensible way to think of God is that God is the inspiration for our own perfection. In other words, it is our perfection, not God’s, that matters and it is our perfection that should be the focus of our efforts.