Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #53 – The Philosopher’s Corner: Quandary I

Quandary I:

If God is perfect and complete, how can we possibly increase His pleasure? And if we can’t, is there any purpose to our devotion?

Response:

God wouldn’t be God if He wasn’t perfect and complete. But He also wouldn’t be God if His pleasure couldn’t increase. Thus, our devotion can increase God’s pleasure.

Explanation:

We find these types of quandaries puzzling only because of a basic philosophical fallacy. We tend to confine the possibilities of what God can do to reasoning based on our experience of universal natural laws. God, by definition, however, is not subject to natural laws. He’s governed only by His will.

Space and time, for example, do not rule God. All His activities and experiences are therefore not temporal. Thus, both His ontological nature and the expansion of His pleasure are perfect and complete and can co-exist at the same time. This phenomenon is described in the Śrī Īśopaniṣad:

“The Personality of Godhead is perfect and complete, and because He is completely perfect, all emanations from Him, such as this phenomenal world, are perfectly equipped as complete wholes. Whatever is produced of the Complete Whole is also complete in itself. Because He is the Complete Whole, even though so many complete units emanate from Him, He remains the complete balance.” Śrī Īśopaniṣad, Invocation

Further confirmation comes from śāstra:

“‘The highest degree’ indicates greatness that has reached its ultimate peak. But in fact, that endless happiness has no limit.” Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta 2.2.192

Commentary:

“The glories of devotional service are difficult to describe without straining the capacity of words. The phrase parā kāṣṭhā (‘highest degree’) implies that no higher degree exists. But the happiness of pure devotional service never reaches a final peak. It keeps on increasing forever. Calling it the parā kāṣṭhā of happiness is only a poetic attempt to do it justice with words available in human language.”

Śrīla Prabhupāda illustrates this principle:

Śrīla Prabhupāda was asked if God can do anything, can he create a rock that he can’t lift. His answer, “Yes, and then he would lift it!” In other words, not being confined by time, both events can co-exist eternally.

In other words, it is reasonable that in the realm of God, contradictory events can exist simultaneously by His inconceivable potency.

Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura affirms this principle:

Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura wrote about this in an essay, “The Potency that Removes All Contradictions.”

“Sri Krishna, the embodiment of eternality, absolute knowledge, and unlimited bliss, possesses an inconceivable potency called virodha-bhanjika-śakti (removing all contradictions). By the influence of this potency, all contradictory principles and natures are unified and eternally present.”[1]

Final Challenge:

If God is above reason and anything is possible by His acintya śakti (inconceivable potency), then what mechanism does one have to dispute any claim about God or use reason to affirm his existence?

When we say that God has inconceivable potency that transcends the natural laws that are the basis of reasoning, it doesn’t mean that reasoning or logical inference (anumāna) is not an important method of knowing, even knowing many aspects of God’s existence. It means that when it comes to knowing God’s special nature and the realm of His internal potency, we cannot limit our understanding of God by logical reasoning alone. We must rely on scripture aided by the guidance of guru and the realizations born of prayer and meditation.

Simply put, the fact that God is above reason, doesn’t mean he is below reason.

Resolution to Quandary I:

Our humble devotion, if done without motive, can increase the happiness of God.

How wonderful is Krishna!

[1] I have written about this and have provided Śrīla Bhaktivinoda’s full essay https://wavesofdevotion.com/2025/07/07/the-potency-that-removes-all-contradictions/