The second task for an advocate of the argument from...

The second task for an advocate of the argument from imperfection is to establish that the world is not perfect. This claim, of course, is highly plausible; there are many ways in which it might be thought that the world might have been better. The world might, for example, have contained less wars, or less unpleasant diseases, or less destructive volcanic eruptions.

The world, the advocate of the argument from imperfection will maintain, contains multiple defects, each of which establishes the non-existence of God. If it is accepted both that if God existed then the world would be perfect, and that the world is not perfect, then it must also be accepted that God does not exist. The argument from imperfection can therefore be summarised as follows: (1) If God exists then he is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent.

(2) If God were omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent then the world would not contain imperfections. (3) The world contains imperfections. Therefore: (4) It is not the case that God exists. Is There a Best Possible World? The argument from imperfection is the argument that if God existed then the world would be perfect, that the world isn’t perfect, and so that God doesn’t exist.

The claim that if God existed then the world would be perfect rests on the fact that God is conceived of by theists as being a perfect Creator. A perfect Creator, the argument from imperfection suggests, is one that creates a perfect world. One that creates an imperfect world is therefore an imperfect Creator. This imperfect world, therefore, even if it was made by some Creator, was not made by God as he is conceived of by theists. The God of theism, therefore, does not exist.

One response to the argument from imperfection is to deny that there is such a thing as a best possible world. If there is no best possible world, then even a perfect Creator would not create the best possible world, in which case it would not follow from the fact that a given world is imperfect that that world was not created by a perfect Creator. Specifically, it would not follow from the fact that this world is imperfect that it was not created by God.

The argument from imperfection would have been defeated. The claim that there is no best possible world, that the idea of a perfect world is incoherent, is at least plausible. Although there are better and worse possible worlds, for any world that we can imagine we can imagine a way of making it better.