Austin McCoy

Yujin Nagasawa has argued that treating absolute perfection as a necessary condition of worship-worthiness generates a vagueness problem. If worship-worthiness requires omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, then it appears to hinge on God’s knowledge of a single proposition p: without knowledge of p, God would not be omniscient and therefore not worship-worthy. Yet such a small difference seems too trivial to ground the evaluative difference between worship-worthy and not worship-worthy. I argue that this problem arises only if absolute perfection is the single minimally sufficient threshold of greatness for worship-worthiness. I develop instead a gradable, dual-threshold account. On this account, a sufficient inequality in value establishes the lower threshold for worship-worthiness, while absolute perfection marks the intrinsic maximum of worship-worthiness. Distinguishing mere worship-worthiness from supreme or maximal worship-worthiness separates vagueness at the lower threshold from God’s status as supremely worship-worthy. I then defend the account against objections concerning the relational character and possible range of worship-worthiness. Finally, I argue that the account creates a difficulty for Nagasawa’s maximal God approach to perfect-being theism.