I'm sorry if you don't like the question. You can ignore it of course, but it is serious. Your claim is a common one from creationists, but I've never been able to get a straight answer to it.[AM:] God must be greater and more perfect than we are, in order for us to be what we are. What he cannot be is something less than we are.
[JP:] So, "perfection" is a substance, that can be divided up & distributed among people, but cannot be created or grown from lesser amounts of perfection? Is there like a Law of Conservation of Perfection?
[AM:] Your questions are not honest, respectful, or sincere. If you are SERIOUS about understanding scholastic ontology, there are loads of good textbooks around.
Why do you think that the entity that created us must be "greater and more perfect than we are"? What do you mean (precisely!) by "greater", and what precisely do you mean by "more perfect"? How do you measure these things? "Greater", after all, implies measurement of some kind. What exactly are you measuring?
I see that people give birth to other people who sometimes turn out to be more intelligent, stronger, healthier, etc. than their parents. This happens all the time. When this happens, the smarter children aren't necessarily less healthy or physically weaker than their less-intelligent siblings or their parents. Where's the conservation of total "perfection" here? Where's the automatic tradeoff that keeps the "perfection" or "greatness" of the offspring <= the perfection or greatness of the creators?
If I have one child, and then I have another, haven't I created twice the "perfection" or "greatness" than was there before? What if I produce 10 intelligent, well-behaved, happy children instead of just one? Are you really saying that these 10 children, taken together, cannot equal the perfection & greatness of their 2 parents? Is the Law of Conservation of Greatness at work here?
Humans, who can run at most 25 mph (or whatever), regularly design & construct devices that move much faster than that. We design & construct devices that solve problems that we can't even visualize well, let alone solve ourselves in any length of time. But there's no obvious tradeoff of the form "the more powerful a computer, the more energy it must use", or "the more powerful a computer, the less reliable it will be", or "the more powerful a computer, the uglier it will be".
There seems to be no Law of Conservation of Perfection (or "Greatness") anywhere. I think it's just an emotional or aesthetic judgement on your part. Which would be fine, but that's something completely different than any kind of rigorous philosophical/logical/scientific/mathematical statement about the world.