I’ve seen a few times on this board the idea that
something is good if it is what God wishes.
I’ll point this at polycarp simply because he’s the best theist I know.
Say in a good many years time you find yourself up in heaven, having gained the angelic blessings of bliss, immortality, and omniscience. Now if you find that hell does exist, and in it are dead people much like yourself, except instead of bliss they are in never ending torment.
Now if you also find out that everyone who was ever actively Homosexual, and never married, was in Hell, even if they during life did nothing else that you see as wrong. Would you still believe God defines goodness?
I understand that peoples faith is such that they believe God could not be like that, but what if when reaching Heaven you find out he is. Would you be right to redefine your own views of good and bad to match God’s or would you instead believe your views are in fact superior to the God who hates Homosexuals?
This is leading me to the belief that God being Omniscient, All Powerful, creator of the Universe, does not lead to God defining good and evil.
Oh well. I doubt I said what I meant to say/ asked what I meant to ask, very well. But I think I have put enough in this OP to launch the discussion I am after.
Cheers, Bippy ( who refuses to worship anything that seems evil to me )
Probably not all bad. The difficulty I have is with the notion I have seen expressed that he is all good, and good does not exist without him. I don’t see that follows simply from him being all powerful, all knowing, and the creator of all things.
(using him just because I am lazy, and ‘male’ is the Xian standard sex for God)
I guess another way of asking the OP is
If God told you to kill your child, would you?
Or would your belief that killing your child is wrong, be such that you would say God’s request of you was wrong and lead you to defy God.
Or would you trust to the O.T. stories and go through with the act trusting that God would save the day in the end, and your child would not die.
If you trust to the O.T. story, what would you feel if you ended up killing your child without God saving the day?
Well, to be quite blunt, I wouldn’t be in that situation. Because that God is, so I’m told, very wrathful with sinners, and I’m certainly one of them – and the only way out is to worship Him and give your life to Him – and the God whom I worship and have given my life to doesn’t meet that description. So I’d be down there in the sulfuretted sauna with the rest of the Dopers.
Hmm…maybe God!=Good so much as God=Right? If He’s calling the shots, it doesn’t matter if humans ascribe him values of ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Just a thought…
Unfortunately, Bippy, if God is the creator of the universe, omniscient and perfect then the things that he determine are morally good and morally evil are morally good and morally evil. The only way that this could not be so would be if God was not perfect, omniscient, etc.
So in order for God to not be the ultimate arbiter of good and evil you would have to change the definition of what God is.
Can you you imagine trying to attract converts otherwise? “Hey, come join our church! God is unfair, lies, kills for fun, and doesn’t care about you!” Sure, I suppose you’d get some takers, but I’m not surprised that in this day and age, God is defined as ‘good’. (They haven’t always been.)
But surely the god of the OT cannot really be described as good? Bloodthirsty like most ancient gods, and vengeful, definitely vengeful. Sounds like good? Not to me. Sudden switch in the NT though, as if the authors had completely different marketing ideas
Thanks all, especailly Polly,
So I think we are saying that if God is nasty, then we are toast
Which leads me to the belief that Man may be capable of a higher moral position than a ‘nasty’ God. Should we as Humans just do what God says, no matter whether it seems moral to us or not? Or shouldn’t we oppose what seems to us immoral even if we are persuaded that it is what God wants?
I see this as analagous to living in a dictatorship, if the dictator is benign and caring, then all is good. But if the dictator seems not to be, should we do what this (Hitler/Caeser/Henry VIII/Elizabeth 1st…) asks of us in order to win his favours, or should we oppose his excesses?
Cheers, Bippy
as for begbert2 I’m sure Bachus (sp?) and Set had pleanty of followers without being good
Here is the problem, though, Bippy. If God is truly the creator, omniscient, etc., then there can be no higher morality than God. Thus if God determines something to be immoral, it is. We can oppose what seems immoral to us all we want, but in the end only God can make the final determination of morality given the definition of God that you are using - even if that God seems “nasty.” For humans to be able to have a higher moral position than God, then that means God is not the pinnacle of the universe, nor the creator of everything and you have changed the definition you are using.
Nice premise Bippy And a particularly interesting one for us atheists!
Yes we ought to - on moral grounds. If say, we are faced with the OT god - you know, the one who kills children and ‘nukes’ cities and civilisations, then we have a moral imperative to oppose him/her/it.
But, further to that, I would suggest that even if said god were benevolent we would be justified in opposition. We would not neccesarily have the imperative to oppose, but under any moral system I (personally) could take on board the right to oppose a dictatorship is inherent. With a benevolent one you just do not have to do so.
Ah but we’d only be toast if God were all-powerful.
The Zoroastrians, in my limited knowledge, have a good god who isn’t omniscient - so mortals have to help him fight the forces of evil by being good. This would be a much more persuasive argument for me to behave myself (if I weren’t an atheist).
Man is not capable of a higher moral position than God – that goes with the definition. However, man is certainly capable of a higher moral position than some conceptions of what God is. There were undoubtedly early Israelites who were convinced that He was their private God, Who would gladly smite anybody who stood in opposition to them, because He loved them and not the others. (A variation on that idea is not extinct today, BTW – but that’s a different debate!)
Well, I did say, “in this day and age”, and mention that Gods haven’t always been good. In the bad old days, man didn’t have much in the way of knowledge explaining why things happen. Why did lightning strike my house? The earth is suddenly shaking! My GOD, the sun is being eaten by a black disc!!! With things like that happening, the gods had to be fickle, or there had to be several, some of whom were good, and some of whom were bad, otherwise there was no explanation for ‘why bad things happen’. You’d worship the bad ones to keep them from levying their wrath upon you. (You worship the good ones in hopes of a handout, such as like protection from the bad ones.)
Nowadays, we’ve got decent explanations for most acts of god (Your house was tall; the pressure got too big at the fault-line, it’s an eclipse, dummy), even if a lot of other bad happens unexplained in the world. So, with the world appearing less out of control, and the traditional tools of godly intervention explained somewhat by science, it would seem unlikely that God was out of control and random. More, that there is some overriding design to all things, and that God, having crafted such an intricate system, had to be doing it with good reasons. Not the best of logic, but hey, it’s religion we’re talking about. For what bad still occurs, we still have satan, who can take the blame for random bad stuff that we would normally blame on God. If we ever figure out the whys and wherefores of cancer and bad luck, and talk all the ‘evil’ people out of ‘acting out the devil’s wishes’, we’ll be able to abandon him too.
But everything is relative. Who gets to determine what is greatest? What is greatest to a cockroach is different then what is greatest to a man. What is greatest to a poor man is different to what is greatest to a rich man. An apple to a hungry man is alot different then an apple to a well fed man. If you define “God’s” position on any issue as the “best” moral code possible, then he could be a sadistic, torturing fool, and since he chooses it, it is then good.
I don’t buy it. Tyranny, cruelty, and indifference should be rallied up against as often as it is encountered. Whether it is the guy in the next cave over, the governor, the king, the alien overlords, the galactic federation, or the creator of all things. A god need not recognize the dignity and passion of the human condition for these things to be good and worthy things to defend.
IMHO, if there is a transcendent entity that made all things, then we are not in a position to judge it. This means that we can’t really call God good or bad and mean anything by it. After all, if God made good and bad and love and hate, He can hardly be fundamentally good/bad/loving/etc.
Sorry, dalovindj, but once you accept the definition of God that the OP uses, then he becomes the ultimate arbiter of what is good and evil. To have a moral code higher than God would be to negate that definition.
In order for there to be a higher moral code than God means you have to change the definition of God. Which is fine, but if you set the given as the Christian conception of God then he is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil.
