Could There Be Two Gods (Or Two Maximally Great Beings)?

             Could there be two Gods? This question should be addressed from a metaphysical standpoint. From the perspective of comparative religions, the term ‘God’ refers to the God of Judaism or Brahman of Hinduism or Allah of Islam or YHWH of Historic Christianity (with respect to Historic Christianity the scope of this subject does not extend to address the tri-personhood of the monotheistic God).

            God is ontologically defined as the ‘Maximally Great Being.’ A maximally great being, as Alvin Plantinga defines, should be a maximally excellent being, wherein God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect in a world, and this being would be maximally great in a world if and only if HE is maximally excellent in every possible world.¹ The maximally great being is also a necessary being (not contingent), uncaused, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, changeless, personal creator of the universe.

            One question that could be asked while engaging in religious conversations with brothers/sisters of other worldviews or even within one’s own faith is whether there is a metaphysical possibility of an existence of two Gods i.e. two maximally great beings. Or is it metaphysically impossible for two maximally great beings to exist.

            First, consider a rather elementary philosophical thought process. Is it plausible to conceptualize a metaphysical or an ontic impossibility of two maximally great beings? From an ontic sense, a maximally great being can only be singular.

            There cannot be two maximally great beings because, for any given attribute or for the cumulative set of all innate attributes, only one being could be maximally great whereas all the other beings would be inferior to this maximally great being. 

            Second, philosophers have wrestled with this question and have come up with sophisticated philosophical arguments to prove God’s unicity. Unicity of God is “The attribute of God by which He is one and unique, and thus set off from the multiplicity of His creatures.”²

            If you are interested in comprehending the various arguments affirming God’s unicity, then do deep dive into the article entitled “Monotheism” in the website of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.³ 

            So to conclude, God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29). It is metaphysically impossible for the existence of two maximally great beings. So, there cannot be two Gods.

Endnotes:

¹https://iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/

²https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/unicity-god

³https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monotheism/

Websites last accessed on 19^th January 2022.