Gregor said:
Well, simply electing a subject and then claiming that it has an arbitrarily defined, finite upper boundary doesn't provide much traction. I can move the boundary.
I'm not sure you can move the boundary indefinitely.
Most philosophers of religion (and Anselm, at any rate), whether or not theists, conceive of the perfection of a perfect being (as opposed to a perfect island) in terms of the "summary properties" of knowledge, power and - usually - moral virtue, and even many critics of ontological proofs (myself included) concur that these summary properties are ones for which there are formal, if speculative, limits.
But these are hardly arbitrary boundaries - they're logical ones. The possible perfection of a batting average is limited, but not arbitrarily: once you've had a hit every time at bat, it is logically impossible to improve your average further. Similarly, as I suggested earlier by way of example, the possible perfection of divine knowledge is limited, but it's a logical limit (once you know all the facts, it is logically impossible to increase your knowledgeability further).
Your examples of multiple degrees of divine greatness raise a number of interesting points:
Gregor said:
I can imagine a god (the judeo-Xian God) that has a physical existence and a singular location. He can control the universe, but the universe exists outside of him.
Now, I can imagine a greater god. The super-god IS the entire universe. Ever atom is simply a component of the single god-entity. We are all simply part of the super-god, who is synonymous with the Universe.
As a background remark (not really needed by you, Gregor, but for the potential benefit of some other readers), ontological arguments for the existence of God, even when advanced by adherents of a particular religion, refer to a philosophical rather than a theological conception of God. The God of the ontological argument is not the God of religion so much as the God of
philosophy of religion, generally defined by the summary properties I mentioned earlier.
It's not clear why the first hypothetical God you've proposed corresponds to the Judeo-Christian God, who is usually not conceived of as having a physical existence and a singular location - but since we're dealing with philosophy rather than theology here, it doesn’t matter. At any rate, omnipresence (again, in philosophy of religion) is ordinarily not considered a summary property of God
per se - and certainly not one that need entail a physical presence - but rather a way of describing the combined effect of perfect
knowledge (omniscience) and perfect
power (omnipotence). A being cannot qualify as a perfect one by traditional philosophical standards if it cannot both know what is happening everywhere at once and intervene directly anywhere. Thus, the omnipresence of a hypothetical deity is sometimes described in philosophy as fundamentally an agential (via omnipotence) and epistemological (via omniscience) relationship to the universe, rather than a spatio-temporal one.
That said, it's not immediately apparent why the second God you've imagined is necessarily greater (in terms of the summary properties of the defined concept God) than the first one. I can control my fingers directly because they are physically part of my body, but a perfect being presumably does not require the universe to be physically part of his body in order to control it. Query, therefore, whether the divine properties are actually enhanced at all by God's having a physical being into which the material universe is incorporated. In fact, a hypothetical God who has an inherently material, spatio-temporal relationship to the universe (as in your second example) is arguably inferior to one who does not because, as we know, matter is contingent (even if one's material nature is coextensive with the entire universe).
Gregor said:
I can then imagine an even greater god, the super-duper-god that is not only composed of every single atom in our Universe, but is composed of every single possible location of every single atom in every conceivable universe.
And on, and on. . .
I'm not sure what - if anything - it means for a being to be composed of "possible locations" in "conceivable universes"; I strongly suspect that there are philosophical contradictions involved. In any event, the earlier comments also apply here: which of the summary properties of God is enhanced under this scenario?
Let's assume for a moment that you're right - that the hypothetical super-duper-God not only remains a coherent concept but also is (for whatever obscure reason) more powerful, more knowledgeable and/or better all around than either of the first two. Query, still, whether you really can go on and on. Don't you get the sense that even the track you're following here in pursuit of ever-more-grandiose magnitudes of potential divine greatness will eventually run up against limits of logic and meaning (if it hasn't already)? I would be hard-pressed to conceive of the fourth hypothetical God in this series in coherent and meaningful terms, much less the fifth God.
Of course, with our limited imaginations, we can't fully grasp the substance of things like omnipotence. However, we can grasp that it has a formal, non-arbitrary maximum. Questions about the intrinsic maximum of God's summary properties have objective and legitimate answers, which is one reason why Gaunilo's objection, in my reading experience, doesn't enjoy widespread favor.
