Board index ‹ God

[Artful Ed]

Christians who claim God is good, on what standard are you judging God?

The christian claims God is good. Meaning God is the standard of good. The issue is, how does the christian know God is good? By what standard are they comparing God to? If God is good, and the Christian knows this because God is good, we have a tautology. Essentially, the Christian is saying, "God is God."

Christians who claim God is good, on what standard are you judging God?

[jimwalton]

I think it's fair to say that the standard we are using to evaluate God is good is the consensus of humans (dictionary, philosophy, real life) as to what goodness is: moral excellence, kindness, beneficial beneficence, integrity, and morality.

We can evaluate God's goodness by looking at his attitudes, motives, and actions as we understand and define goodness.

[Artful Ed]

> We can evaluate God's goodness by looking at his attitudes, motives, and actions as we understand and define goodness.

Humans define "good" subjectively. If God's goodness rest on the evaluation of humans, then God's "goodness" is arbitrary.

[jimwalton]

I disagree. Subjectivity doesn't necessarily means it's arbitrary. First of all, we receive all truth through the filter of our humanity. Truth is something we both perceive and appropriate. Does this "subjectivity" (in our appropriation of truth) means there is no such thing as objective truth? Not in the least. It’s quite literally the beginning of it. Our understandings and definitions of goodness are based on millennia of scholarship, morality, philosophy, and real life, across language, culture, history, and even moral interpretations. Through the millennia we have sorted out the trivial, the temporary, and the cultural variations to arrive at a consensus. Our understanding of goodness is no more subjective than our conclusions in science that we arrive at by observation, investigation, and consensus. It's just as objective to speak of God's goodness (or anyone's goodness) as it is to speak of the objectivity of time or the reality of air. Within a certain bandwidth of definition and some variations, we all know what we mean by goodness in a very objective sense. There's nothing arbitrary about it. If it were arbitrary, "goodness" would have no more meaning than "govuhenso." But that's not the case. Language matters, and we have worked hard through the ages to know what we mean by our linguistic symbolism. "Goodness" cannot mean "yellow," "math," "piano," or even "mediocrity" or "evil." Goodness has an objective meaning, and we understand that.