God and Perfection

God, at least from the perspective of the world's major monotheistic religions, is considered to be perfect. Actually others would agree with this it seems, since Aristotle is the one who came up with the idea of God being the Unmoved Mover. This Unmoved Mover is conceived as "being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating." (Check out wikipedia for a bit more) This Unmoved Mover is the beginning of all movement and action in the universe, and yet never moved it-/him-/her-self. In other words, nothing and no one ever moved the Prime (Unmoved) Mover. Probably not hard to see where some could have then concluded that the Christian God is the Prime Mover, first cause of everything.

One reason for imaging a Prime Mover as Unmoved is because everything in motion needs something to have set it in motion. Eventually something needs to never have moved, or else it is just turtles all the way down, and western-type thinkers go nuts. But also wrapped up in this are concepts of perfection. A perfect being never changes, because a perfect being has no need to change into anything. After all, things only change in order to improve, right? And what improvement can a perfect being have? And if one is to never change, one cannot move, because movement involves change of posture, shift in space and time, and other seemingly inconsequential and yet very real changes.

A bit of a problem here, I think, when it comes to God. Because if God is not moving at all, then it raises some questions as to how God is involved in our lives. There are some ways to answer this, but it seems to get very abstract and complicated very fast. And there's a much simpler solution: prefection does not require immobility. If the Trinity tells us that God has been loving and giving from before all time, then we know that even in perfection, God is doing things other than contemplating God's self contemplating (leave it to Aristotle to come up with that anyways). So then, God is ever-loving and ever-giving, not ever-not-moving. In fact it seems that if God is anything, it's ever-moving. Of course if God is everywhere at once then God doesn't really need to move in a human sort of way or by passing through space, but at least God is certainly active. And if God isn't active, God isn't much use, in my opinion. Great, we have something that started us, but that's not love, because love involves interaction and caring, at the very least.

So instead of perfection and unchanging meaning unmoving, what if perfection and unchanging means "not changing in essence?" God can move around, and make things move, but God's essence and character is never changed. God doesn't need to grow or mature or learn new things: That's perfection, I think. But that doesn't mean God isn't involved. And if our human emotions are some reflection upon God, perhaps God can respond to humans. In a sense, we can move God. But only in a certain sense, for God has to have set it up in advance that we can do that. God didn't make us and then say "Well crap, now I can be moved. Boy that sure messes up my vacation." Instead, I think God might have said "If I make people, I want them to be like me so they can know true love and be able to truly worship me. Wellt hat means they have to be able to feel the relationship... and if it's only one sided, it doesn't really count. So, I'll let them spark my emotions." And then God dug hands into the dirt, and molded out Adam. And next thing you know there's messy emotions flying about all over the place, and sure enough, Abraham is working on God's emotions to get him (at least at the moment he was dressed up as a guy) to relent from burning Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes. And while God did still burn the place down, it wasn't because he was unmoved by Abraham's plea, but instead because Abraham didn't get the number low enough (or Lot didn't evangelize enough people, however you want to look at it).

God is not emotionless. I'm not quite sure how God could be love and good without emotions. I know those aren't emotions, but it's hard for me to figure how they can be known and measured and expressed without emotions, and if they aren't known and measured and expressed then are they really there at all? So, if God has emotions, or at least is capable of expressing reactions to people, then Unmoved Mover God isn't. God seems to be some other kind of perfect.

These ideas are not purely my own as much as my own ramblings on other people's ideas. Rodney Clapp I think is the first author where I bumped into this, but I could be wrong about that. I'm sure you could find other philosophers who are actually using footnotes writing about this. But hey, it's a blog, so I can just ramble, right?