There are those who insist that there can be one and only one possible Maximally Greatest Being (i.e. – God for all practical purposes). Others, like myself, insist that if there can exist one God, there can exist many gods. It’s the old monotheism vs. polytheism argument. While I personally opt for the sum total of zero gods, if there is indeed a philosophical requirement for there to be one deity, then that opens up the can of worms of why there can’t be two or more deities, all Maximally Greatest Beings. What follows are my arguments – basically my side of the story – in a debate I had with a true monotheistic believer who I shall identify as “John Smith” – not his real name.
Note: For sake of text minimization, I’ll usually reduce the oft used phrase “Maximally Greatest Being” to MGB and “Maximally Greatest Beings” to MGBs.
Regarding the Number of Possible Maximally Greatest Beings
John Smith insists that two (or more) Maximally Greatest Beings couldn’t exist because they couldn’t co-exist. I fail to see why not since by the by, it doesn’t follow that two such not-quite-so-all-omni beings couldn’t co-exist. Zeus, Hades and Poseidon did. Why couldn’t one, for sake of argument, have a god ruling over just one galaxy? Since there are billions of galaxies, there could be billions of gods! Think about it. God would be subject to the very same laws of physics that He created, like obtaining information at the restrictive speed of light. How could just one God keep tabs on all those galaxies millions upon millions of light years away?
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There are hundreds of traits or properties that one could have that are the greatest in that category, but some of those greatest categories are equal and opposite. Could the greatest possible baseball pitcher ever strike out the greatest possible baseball batter? If God entails being greatest in all possible traits, then God is the greatest evil being possible. In any event, greatest is in the eye of the beholder since greatness is a mental concept not a something that can be absolutely measured to the agreement of all.
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There have been, there are, and there will be many, many, many Maximally Greatest Beings (MGBs), each one of those many being maximally greatest at this or that or the next thing. There has been or will be a maximally greatest politician or golfer or jazz artist or dictator or poster on this, that or the next website forum. John Smith is the MGB at being John Smith. Now if by one MGB John Smith means being ‘Greatest’ in all things possible to be greatest in, then his one MGB is greatest at being sexist, racist, boring, evil, nasty, dictatorial, self-centred, egotistical, crude, rude and tattooed.
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If you (Royal You) pick and choose what traits your Maximally Greatest Being (MGB) has, then others (like me) can pick and choose what traits they think the MGB has or should have – that’s only fair. And guess what? Others have and thus others have come up with MGB alternatives! My alternative is called Mother Nature. She’s certainly omnipresent and is surely all-powerful, and if you subscribe to the doctrine of Panpsychism, Mother Nature is collectively all-knowing as well.
If the logic that a MGB points to God pussy888 https://pussy888.org/ and only to God, then the entire world would collective be as one with that logic and acknowledge the one and only one possible MGB as being God. Clearly the entire world doesn’t agree with John Smith’s logic. Within human cultures, there have been and are numerous MGBs, even no such thing as any MGB.
My bottom line is that just because something or someone is possible does NOT, repeat does NOT make that something or someone actual. That statement applies to generalities as well as to any specific, unique case. To argue that possible equals actual suggests to me that a crash course in Logic 101 is in order as a matter of some high degree of priority.
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Why can’t the Maximally Greatest Being (MGB) in question be a pussy cat instead of a person? Well actually that MGB has to be an extraterrestrial since that being isn’t native to this planet, assuming that being has physical reality and isn’t just an all-in-the-human-mind conception of MGB ‘reality’. So perhaps John Smith’s MGB is just an extraterrestrial pussy cat! In the absence of any actual sighting of John Smith’s MGB, who knows what this being is, or looks like! Of course if John Smith’s MGB is non-physical, then any description is nonsense including defining this entity as a “person”.
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There would either have to be none, or way more than one Maximally Greatest Being (MGB) on the grounds of ‘different strokes for different folks’. Not everyone is going to agree on, or come up with, the exact same MGB. That I’m sure applies to theologians, metaphysics buffs, philosophers, as well as the everyday ordinary great unwashed. Then toss in extrater