Apologetics Faith Philosophy
R. L. Solberg  

God & the Nature of Goodness

This is the fourth in a series of five articles addressing Irish writer Michael Nugent’s twenty reasons why God seems implausible, as he explained them in a debate with Dr. William Lane Craig in March of this year. During Nugent’s opening remarks he listed twenty or so reasons in rapid-fire succession, each leading into the next, and cumulatively, they built a pretty strong case for his position. This article addresses the points from that list that dealt with the problem of God and the nature of Goodness.

Watch the full debate.

Reason 12: The Euthyphro dilemma still remains: does the god command things to be good for arbitrary reasons or does it identify things as being good because they correspond to independent standards of goodness?

The Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma because the two alternatives it posits—that a standard of goodness must either be arbitrary or it must be independent of God—are not the only logically coherent possibilities available. There is at least one more valid alternative, which is that God is, Himself, the standard of goodness. This is the view to which Christianity subscribes (Mark 10:17-18).

Reason 13: If you respond that God’s nature is to be good and that gets you off, it doesn’t. The dilemma still remains: is the god’s nature good for arbitrary reasons, or is it good because it corresponds to independent standards of goodness?

This is a re-statement of the dilemma mentioned in Reason #12, moved one step further down the road. And here, again, it’s an equally false dilemma. God’s nature is good because God, Himself, is the standard of goodness.

Reason 14: All of the arguments for an all-good god can just as easily be used to support the idea of an all-evil god who gives us free will because it wants us to do evil voluntarily rather than force us to do evil.

Here I believe Nugent may be operating under a misunderstanding of the natures of good and evil, as well as the relationship between the two. Scientifically speaking, cold does not exist. Cold a relative term that indicates that one object has lower thermal energy relative to another object.  (e.g. Snow is hotter than liquid nitrogen, though both still have thermal energy relative to absolute zero.) Similarly, there is no such thing as darkness; there is only light or absence of light.  The same relationship exists between good and evil. Christians believe that God is the ultimate standard of good. Evil, rather than being a force equal and opposite to that of good, is an absence of good. When one does an act of evil, they are committing an act that is absent of good.

Christianity teaches that the highest moral value is love because God is love.

“Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us.” —1 John 4:7-12 (Accent mine)

As discussed in the previous article in this series, The Problem of Perfection, love, by necessity, must be a voluntary expression made by a free moral agent. I think this is why we all recognize the “creepy” factor in life-like robots like Erica:

In the video above, inventor Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro says, “Our intention is to install intention and desire into this robot.” So let’s let our imaginations run wild and assume Professor Ishiguro is able to program Erica with such a level of realism and emotion that you believe she’s a human being.  And then suppose Erica professes her undying love for you. Would that be real love?

Real love cannot be programmed. Real evil, on the other hand, can. Whereas love requires volition expressed by free agents as a necessary component, evil does not. Evil can be voluntarily expressed by free agents, but it is not required. Indeed, an all-evil god who wanted us to do evil voluntarily rather than forcing us to do evil would not be all-evil. Why? Because it would be even more evil to force humans to do evil to each other against their will than it would be to allow them the freedom to do it on their own.

Because God is the standard of goodness and the concept of an all-evil god is logically untenable, Nugent’s arguments regarding the nature of goodness fail to support his general premise that the existence of God is implausible.

Next in the Series—Part 5: The Problem of Omniscience

What do you think?

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