Mark C. Murphy's God's Own Ethics is an exercise in what has come to be called Anselmian perfect-being theology, the attempt to determine the nature of God understood as an absolutely perfect being. The book is bold, original, and carefully argued, and it takes on several tasks. The first is an examination of what norms would govern the actions of an absolutely perfect being, an agent generally referred to in the work as “the Anselmian being.” (Using this description allows the question as to whether the God of the Abrahamic faiths is identical to the Anselmian being to be a meaningful question, and it has other uses as well, as will be seen.) The arguments given here are purely philosophical in nature.
After having established (to his satisfaction) the nature of “God's own ethics,” Murphy then tackles the second task of the book, which is to look at the implications...
