Rethinking God's Greatness

Perfect being theology is an important research area in the philosophy of religion. The goal of people working in this field is to formulate a description of God's nature in an a priori way by starting from the idea that God is a perfect being. From this idea, perfect being theologians infer certain attributes that God must have, such as omnipotence (perfect power), omniscience (perfect knowledge) and omnibenevolence (perfect goodness). Stemming from this approach is the view that what it is to be a perfect being is simply to possess these attributes to a greater extent than other beings (e.g., being omniscience, God has more knowledge than anything else). The goal of this talk is to argue that such an idea is fundamentally wrong and to propose an alternative view of the divine by drawing insights from the Indian Pratyabhinjñā tradition.

Davide Andrea Zappulli is a first-year PhD student at UBC. His main areas of interest are metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, which he addresses from a cross-cultural perspective. Before coming to UBC, he studied at the University of Milan and the University of Oslo.