Good God
Definition
And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, ‘I am the Lord thy God, and I am the source of all that is good. Why does thy secular moral philosophy ignore me?’ And the philosopher spake unto the Lord, ‘To answer I must first ask you some questions. You command us to do what is good. But is it good because you command it, or do you command it because it is good?’ ‘Ur,’ said the Lord. ‘It’s good because I command it?’ ‘The wrong answer, surely, your mightiness! If the good is only good because you say it is so, then you could, if you wished, make it so that torturing infants was good. But that would be absurd, wouldn’t it?’ ‘Of course!’ replieth the Lord. ‘I tested thee and thou hast made me pleased. What was the other choice again?’ ‘You choose what is good because it is good. But that shows quite clearly that goodness does not depend on you at all. So we don’t need to study God to study the good.’ ‘Even so,’ spake the Lord, ‘you’ve got to admit I’ve written some pretty good textbooks on the subject …’
Source
Motivation & Background
When I was at school, we used to sing a hymn in which God was equated with virtually every positive attribute. We sang that God is love, God is good, God is truth, and God is beauty. No wonder the chorus ended ‘praise him!’. The idea that God is good, however, is ambiguous. It could mean that God is good in the same way that cake is good, or Jo is good. In these cases, ‘is’ functions to attribute a quality or property to something, such as goodness or blueness. Equally, however, ‘God is good’ could be a sentence like ‘Water is H2O’ or ‘Plato is the author of The Republic’. Here, ‘is’ indicates an identity between the two terms: the one thing is identical to the other. In the hymn, the ‘is’ seemed to be one of identity, not attribution. God is not loving but love; not beautiful but beauty. God doesn’t just have these fine qualities, he is them. Hence ‘God is good’ implies that the notions of God and goodness are inextricably linked, that the essence of the good is God. If this is so, then it is no wonder that many believe that there can be no morality without God. If goodness and Godness cannot be separated, secular morality is a contradiction in terms. However, our imaginary conversation seems to demonstrate very clearly and simply that this cannot be so. If God is good, it is because God is and chooses to do what is already good. God doesn’t make something good by choosing it; he chooses it because it is good. Some might protest that this argument works only because it separates what cannot be separated. If God really is good, then it doesn’t make sense to pose a dilemma in which the good and God are distinguished. But since it seems to make perfect sense to ask whether the good is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is good, this objection simply begs the question. Even if God and the good really were one, it would still be reasonable to ask what makes this identity true. The answer would surely be that we know what good is and it is this which would enable us to say truly that God is good. If God advocated pointless torture, we would know that he was not good. This shows that we can understand the nature of goodness independently of God. And that shows that a godless morality is not an oxymoron.
