Can A Perfect God Have Desires?

(In Response To a Friend)

“Is there a logical problem with a supposedly perfect God having desires?”

When we look at human desire from a humanistic frame, we could certainly see all desire as being an internally motivated deficiency because for a naturalist, all human action is caused by an internal deficiency, and usually, that internal drive determines all external actions whether or not the actor recognizes the fact.

One historical example would be the system of Freud, who I’m sure you’re familiar with.  Do you do something in your family, or community, or culture?  All actions are external manifestations of internal subconscious causes that are the ultimate explanation of any activity.  Thus whatever you think is the reason you are doing this or that, the real reason is unseen forces determining all.  Everything is ultimately guttural drives for sex and domination.  We are less than beasts.  We are confused machines.

Or, as in Christian thought, desire itself is a real and normal manifestation of what conscious personal beings are by nature.  Logic, reason, desire for good, condemnation of evil, loving truth, promoting it and enjoying it, are not accidental illusory effects of biology but aspects of what we most really are.  Instead of the clues to the real impersonality of all things human and Divine they are essential attributes of personality that transcend and give meaning to any thing less than personal.  In other words, impersonality cannot explain persons; it takes persons to explain everything else.  “Forces”, “Matter”, “Motion”, “Cause and Effect”, whatever else you’ve got going, have no meaning in and of themselves and are thus unintelligible non-sense outside of their meaningful environment.  When the Christian allows that wholly backward method of analysis to be pushed upon their thinking they inevitably end up sharing the confusion of the world and that darkness of mind from which they had previously escaped.

For God, and we are speaking of God in relation to Christian theology here and not merely some metaphysical entity X’ for the sake of philosophical discourse, to desire nothing would be to affirm an inert static Parmenidean “thing” of who knows what description, while its opposite, an absolute Heraclitean flux of constant and unidentifiable change would be equally meaningless.

The Christian God being both eternal and unchanging in attributes and fully personal would by necessity desire some things, if even the fellowship and inter-communal loves of the three persons of the Trinity to each other.  To ignore Trinitarian implications is a common flaw in intramural debates about what “god”, some god, this or that god’s, properties and character might be.  God, being personal, desires things, because that is a condition of being good and thinking truth.  A will and an intellect are basic and irreducible prerequisites to personality.

As far as deficiency or need, is there any reason to think that a desire for our own existence for example, is a deficient need?  We can have it, and desire it, and enjoy it, all without any necessary inference of some kind of lack.  We actually have what we desire and still desire it.  It seems that most basic desires are neither externally answerable nor internally motivated by some impoverishment of the soul.  Should God desire His own goodness?  If He is an ultimate and perfect good, He should.  Does it make sense that for us to desire our own existence is a real and faultless desire?  I think so.  At least I can’t see any reason why not.  To say that we don’t desire our own existence seems obviously contrary to fact and to say it is a sign of imperfection seems to be a claim without an intelligible explanation.

Sometimes we call for a measurement of the difference between God’s desire of Himself in all of His eternal goodness, which seems natural to the perfect good of a personal being, and His desire to create other things.  As if the intent to create other things is different and shows some inherent flaw in the happiness or blessedness of the tri-personal God in His own intra-trinitarian relations.  But the question would be why?  Why would God desiring to do anything that pleased Him or something that posed as the stage for the manifestation of His own god-ness imply that doing something is lesser than doing nothing?

What’s so great about doing nothing?

For a self existent being that is perfectly good and exists in and of Himself, there really can be no external critique of the good or bad, lack or sufficiency, of His own action.  They would of course be self definitive and self motivated.  They would neither be ‘needed’ in any regular use of the term nor would they be coordinated with the intent of filling some pre-existing vacuum inherent in the Godhead, but only an expression of a pre-existing fullness.

Shortly, there is no standard or canon external to God by which He can be measured in order to find out what thing He might create or add to Himself that would have a value in itself that we might judge to be super-added in such a way as to increase a previous lack.

The implication of this is that God could have created any world that He chose to create, or, and this is something the Christian mind needs to take into account, any number of worlds in order to achieve whatever He might have in mind to accomplish.  This doesn’t need, by need meaning carry some inherent logical necessity, to be the only one.  Once God is done with everything that He has in mind for this particular manifestation of His eternal will, He might have other things to do.  He is God.  Who will tell Him different?  For His own purposes He has created all things.  This doesn’t mean that He does things contrary to His own moral nature; that would be to fall in to Duns Scotus’ irrationalist Voluntarism.  But it does mean that there is no Platonic kind of ‘Form’ above or distinct from God by which He might be measured in order to find out what He is or is not allowed to be.  There is no apriori ‘good’ that God is subject to.  That is not to say that we do not have an innate knowledge of what the Good is because we are created in the image and likeness of God, but even an innate knowledge of goodness is an expression of the goodness of God and not a standard by which God might be measured.  It is not a Canon of the Sum Bonum but an example of the Sum Bonum.

In any system there is the ultimate point of reference from which everything else derives its meaning.  For some it is nothing, and so there is no meaning.  For some it is some kind of god, and their value is dependent upon such.  In the thought of the Christian as measured by the revelation of God in Holy Scripture, God is the axiom and measure of valuation for everything in the Christian system.  Now, this might sound like I am just saying that no matter what God does or desires that He cannot need anything because all things by necessity gain their value and meaning from their relationship to Him and so He cannot need any of them or be increased by them because they all come from Him and their meaning is defined by Him.  And so I am.  If a self existent being with all perfections, perfections being defined by the kind of being He is, acts, He cannot act by motivation toward an external entity because He must be the source of the external entity.

There is nothing outside of Him to allow Him to be motivated externally in the way described, and if there were, its value would be something He decided, and so could add nothing to Him and provide nothing for Him, but that which He decided it should have.  Nothing can give Him anything, because everything receives that which it is, from Him.  In this sense, any increase from outside is a self imposed increase, and because God is the self arbiter of meaning and significance, cannot ascribe to Him any lack, because it cannot fulfill any need.  But if He should choose to desire it, so be it.  There is no way to judge such a thing from outside of God Himself.

Christopher Neiswonger