simply to ignore it. Perhaps, then, one can so tweak Anselm's property of greatness as to
make parody difficult.
Here an objection arises. Polytheists worshipped; what they felt, did, and said is enough
like what monotheists feel, do, and say to deserve the label. Some worshipped gods other
gods outranked. So one can worship something surpassed. And so there is room for
worship of almost-Gods. The tweaking move is at best trivial and at worst question-
begging, for it so defines worship that only God can deserve it.
This objection is confused on at least two levels. For one thing, even if polytheists did
worship, nothing follows about what deserved their worship: that something is
worshipped implies nothing about whether it ought to be. And no polytheist god could
deserve what monotheists call worship. In worship, monotheists give all their religious
thanks and praise to God. So deserving worship in the Western-monotheist sense includes
deserving all of one's religious thanks and praise. No polytheist god deserves all religious
thanks and praise, for none is responsible for all of our blessings. So either polytheists
misdirected monotheist worship at their gods or, more charitably, what polytheists did “in
church” does not count as worship in the sense discussed above. Further, worship for
Western monotheists includes the giving of thanks and praise without limit or
qualification. Polytheists, just as such, cannot consistently do this for any single god.
They must limit and qualify their praise for any god in light of what they must say to
other gods: they should not praise Zeus for blessings Hera gave or praise Hera to a degree
only Zeus deserves. In worship, monotheists give God all their religious loyalty.
Polytheists, as such, cannot give all their religious loyalty in any act of worship.
Polytheists' religious loyalties compete: time spent in Venus's temple is not spent in
Mars's. Monotheists have only one temple to attend. If polytheists worship, then, their
worship differs from monotheists'. There is a kind of worship only monotheists can give,
for there are attitudes one can have only to a sole object of worship.
Next epicycle: perhaps one can define the almost-greatness of almost-Gods in terms of
deserving almost-worship (or almost-sole-worship, etc.), and say that almost-Gods would
be almost-greater if actual. What then? Well, the problem for
end p.94
a Pros. 2 parody comes in applying the parallel to (2a). There is no maximal degree of
deserving almost-worship (as vs. worship). There is no state than which there is no
almost-greater. So for every state an almost-God might be in, there is an almost-greater
state something could be in, and so the parody-argument will fail. I now argue the no-
maximal-degree claim.
God deserves worship. Maximal likeness to God would be duplication, and so would
yield something deserving worship, not almost-worship. If likeness to God is graded on a
dense or continuous scale, then there is no maximum likeness to God short of
duplication: for every nonduplicate of God, something can be more like God than it is. If
God deserves worship, becoming more like God is coming closer to deserving worship.
So plausibly, becoming more like God is also coming closer to deserving almost-worship,
or (once over the threshold for this) deserving ever more almost-worship. If likeness to
God has no maximum short of deserving worship (by duplication), there is no maximum