Board index ‹ God

[Joker]

Assuming God is real, could he do or say anything to make you reject him? Usually in response to somebody pointing out the fact that God condones and commits actions that are seemingly immoral, the argument will eventually come around to "His ways are above ours, and he can do whatever he wants because he's God, we have no right to judge him."

So, Christians, assuming God is real, is there anything he could possibly do or say to make you come to the conclusion that God does not deserve to be worshiped? For most of you, I'm assuming the answer is going to be "No." (If your answer is yes, post it. I'm curious.) In that case, how do you know that you're not blindly following an evil deity?

If we're unable to judge God's actions as immoral, by extension we are also unable to judge his actions as moral. The only argument one can really make here without using a double standard is "Might makes right, and God is mightier than you." Obviously, this doesn't prove that God is a moral being. So how do you determine whether or not he's moral? If it's by his standard, how do you know he's not deceiving you and guiding you towards immorality?

[jimwalton]

I think you're sincere in asking, but this is a false question. You've taken some misunderstandings about God (he condones and commits actions that are seemingly immoral), given an incorrect Christian response to it (God may have done wrong, but we have no right to judge him), and used those to form your premise. Where can an honest person go with a conversation like that, similar to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If I say no, it implies that I used to be abusive; if I say yes, it affirms I'm still abusive. But what if I never did beat my wife? The question is false and doesn't allow for an honest answer.

God is righteous. Accusations of immorality or impropriety against God are the results of misunderstandings of biblical revelation and a distortion of reason. Christians don't live by blind faith, but by faith informed by evidence. We don't blindly follow anything or anybody. "Evil deity" is an oxymoron.

"If we're unable to judge God's actions as immoral, by extension we are also unable to judge his actions as moral" is a travesty of logic. Reason and revelation can allow us to discern and distinguish; we fall into the category of absurdity if logic requires us to accept mutually contradictory statements. Your statement betrays the law of non-contradiction and is therefore absurd. "The only argument one can really make here without using a double standard is 'Might makes right, and God is mightier than you.' " This is patently false.

So how do I determine whether God is moral or not? Philosophy, theology, logic, and reason. How else would one reasonably approach it? As I've said, blind faith is never a reasonable (nor an expected) option.

How do I know God is not deceiving me and guiding me towards immorality? Because "evil deity" is an oxymoron, and "Deceitful God" is a self-contradiction.

[Nervous in Love]

> Because "evil deity" is an oxymoron

circular reasoning. why is evil deity an oxymoron? how can you prove that?

[jimwalton]

It's not circular reasoning at all. We only know about any deity as he/she/they reveals himself to us. We cannot (usually) perceive God with our senses or with scientific experiments. The knowledge of God is not that kind of knowledge, just as the determination of true guilt in a court of law is neither a sensory nor a scientific pursuit. As we observe evidences for God in nature, by His revelation in the Bible, and by our experiences it becomes reasonable to conclude that "evil deity" is an oxymoron. There's nothing circular about it, nor does science have the last word on it.

[Steve the Horse]

I think you're missing the point of the question. Ignore everything else in the question and just answer this one thing: You believe God is moral. Can you think of anything which you could see him do with your own eyes that you would accept to change your mind about that belief? The question isn't whether you think he actually would do whatever the thing is, just whether you could identify something that, hypothetically, were God to do it, you would revise your position on God's morality.

[jimwalton]

Thanks, but I don't think I missed the point. Let me try again. God is moral (as you said, as I say). Therefore everything I could see him do with my own eyes is also moral, since God cannot act outside of his nature. Any disconnect or disequilibrium would be in my own perceptions and in my own reasoning, and since I know that I would be remiss to revise my position on God's morality based on my own flawed thinking.

[Nervous in Love]

I disagree. In my experience, the more evidence I gather the less likely it seems a deity even exists, let alone lead me to any conclusions about any specific deity's nature "evil vs good etc". To make a claim about a deity, you must have evidence, and if that deity hasn't revealed any verifiable evidence, only your personal claims from nature, the bible, and personal experiences ... than it seems circular, as your claims are not verifiable or convincing.
It's like saying I think God can not be a square, because he is round, because I really like round things, and round things seem to be everywhere. Just look at the sun and the Moon. God has revealed himself to be round in shape, therefore it is reasonable to conclude that God cannot be square...pretty circular unless you can verify/substantiate your claims of any specific God's nature....but first you'd have to be able to verify 1) there ever was a God 2) there still IS a GOD

[jimwalton]

You certainly know that God can't be verified, but only reasoned and evidenced. We infer the most reasonable conclusion. Have you seen "Zero Dark Thirty"? When the official asks for hard evidence, she says, "We don't deal in certainty; we deal in probability." So also here. It's not hard science (and has very little to do with the science lab; different disciplines and knowledge structures).

The arguments for the existence of God are numerous: cosmological, ontological, teleological, axiological, from other minds, from consciousness, from language, and more. They are far stronger and more reasonable than the arguments against the existence of God. But they aren't science. Such things are outside of the purview of science.

To make a claim about deity, I must have revelation, evidence, and experience. It's not just a matter of evidence. I watched Moana over the holiday. The movie had some dead-on theological perceptions. These things happened to her, but none of them were provable by science, but they were real nonetheless. I can hear you protest, "Duh. It's a CGI cartoon." Sure, but there were things in it that are exactly like the way God works. If you only count as knowledge that which has verifiable evidence, then your knowledge base is quite small. What about literature, philosophy, abstract math, music, art, jurisprudence, economics, sociology, psychology, and even history?

Your analogy of round and square is reductionistic and not an authentic representation of what I believe or biblical theology (and hopefully those two spheres conform to each other!). In my talk there was no "I think God..." or "I really like..."

> first you'd have to be able to verify 1) there ever was a God 2) there still IS a GOD

God is not subject to that kind of verification, but only inferring the most reasonable conclusion based on logic, reason, evidence, revelation, and experience. In those categories theism is a far stronger conclusion than atheism.

[Card Potato]

It's easy to dismiss this question as a "bad" question if you're starting off with a particular set of presuppositions. If someone believes god defines what is good/moral/righteous then of course they would view all of god's actions as such. The point is not to entertain an oxymoron, but to challenge the presuppositions.

> Where can an honest person go with a conversation like that, similar to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If I say no, it implies that I used to be abusive; if I say yes, it affirms I'm still abusive. But what if I never did beat my wife? The question is false and doesn't allow for an honest answer.

From an atheist point of view, the analogy looks more like "Do you abuse your wife?" - "Of course not! I define all my actions as non-abusive so it's impossible for me to abuse my wife. Calling my actions as such is self-contradictory."

I'm sure you can see why a response like that would be problematic.

> So how do I determine whether God is moral or not? Philosophy, theology, logic, and reason. How else would one reasonably approach it?

Can you show that god is indeed moral using those methods without axiomatically defining god as such? Plenty of atheists do approach this exact problem with philosophy, logic, and reason and determine that if god exists, his morality is either inconclusive or immoral.

[jimwalton]

Christianity is both presuppositional and evidentiary. Everyone is presuppositional to some extent. We can't even have a conversation if there aren't some first principles we assume. Everyone is also evidentiary to some extent, though people have different definitions of and various standards of what they consider to be evidence. The fact that we have at least some presuppositional foundations in common, as well as some common ground of what constitutes evidence allows us to have this conversation.

As far as morality is concerned, a discussion of definition (so we are working off the same foundation) is warranted. Morality is always culturally relative notions of goodness and value, though there seem to be some necessary objective standards to make subjective moral notions meaningful. The Bible never gives us treatise on morality as a system, but it does give us basics by which we can understand morality and build a basis by which to live in goodness. I believe that God's nature is the foundational objective on which our notions of morality are based, but the Bible doesn't give us enough to go by to generate a thorough philosophy or theology of morality. We only have pieces and must extrapolate from those.

Philosophically speaking it is counterproductive and contradictory to define God as non-God. Our definitions of God include such things as the highest ideal being imaginable, and therefore we must presuppositionally define God as moral. But it's not circular reasoning, because then we get to observe God in action (evidence) to determine whether the ideal is accurate. It's the evidence and our experience that keep the argument from being purely circular, though we must accept axiomatic definitions as first principles, subject to verification.

Just because, however, I don't experience everything life as goodness doesn't mean God is not good. It's no secret that God's goodness doesn't always feel like goodness to us, and that what we experience doesn't feel like goodness. Hence the quote in "Fiddler on the Roof": "I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?" We are left with some difficult interpretive issues. But since the Bible is not a text given to use to determine a system of morality, we must read the text with decoder glasses to make sense out of what we see. The Bible unequivocally teaches that God is good: his plans and purposes are always good. We have to discern his definition of goodness and participate in his goodness, even though we don't experience everything in life nor all of his actions as goodness. To evaluate his goodness and morality we need to have all the information, but we never have all the information. God's revelation has shown us his plan and his purposes sufficiently so that we can get on board.