The Prize

if "good" means "what God wills" then to say "God is good" can mean only "God wills what he wills." Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan. - C.S. Lewis

     The problem of evil is one of the most used arguments by atheist to logically infer that God, the theistic God (an all powerful, all knowing, and all good being), does not exist. When an atheist presents this argument to the theist, the most commonly retort would be throwing the counter question “on which standard do you judge good and evil?” In a recent discussion I have been having, a certain theist even claimed that atheists, when presented with this question “are trapped in their vain reasons”.

     The counter question, however, apparently does not solve the problem of evil. What it aims to accomplish is to point out that since atheist do not have a universal objective standard from which they derived their concept of good or evil, it therefore follows that they have no right to complain about the worldly evil and suffering since they themselves do not even know the extent of what evil is to eliminate. The relativistic morality of the atheist, they say, would yield varying opinions on what evil is to be eliminated. Additionally, they argue that two moral relativist atheist can even have contradictory concept of what evil is, that is, what is evil for one may be good to another and vice versa. How can the atheist then complain of the suffering in the world when they themselves cannot even agree on what evil to vanquish?

     From this they will hastily conclude that an atheist is deriving his concept of good and evil from an objective standard somewhere after all, regardless of how much he denies it. And this standard is no other than the theistic God. How they arrive to this dubious conclusion eludes me.

     I will not delve into the error of reasoning of the “problem-of-evil-counter-question” in this essay. Nor will I attempt to show that atheist do have sound moral standard from which they based their actions. That would be for another writing. The purpose of this essay is to show that the objective standard, which theists like to tout to be God, is actually problematic and poses more questions than it answers.

     What is good? Some theist says that good is whatever God decrees to be good. In short, goodness is dependent on God and outside of God, moral standard does not exist. If what is good is simply what God says is good then theoretically, God can decree that raping babies to be good and we cannot argue otherwise.

     “Theoretically, yes, but God did not decree it to be such”, a theist may argue. But that misses the point. The point is goodness then is whatever God arbitrarily says to be good period. Secondly, the mere fact that the theist “complained” about such act as not being decreed by God anyway implies that he is using some standard to which he is judging this theoretical instance of God decreeing something to be immoral. From whence did the mentioned theist’s standard come? “Of course from the REAL God who did not decree such act to be moral!” But the question is would you believe that raping a child to be morally good if God so set it to be the standard? God once caused parents to eat the flesh of their children (Leviticus 26:13, 29, Jeremiah 19:6-9). Do you accept these as morally good? “Well God did it so it is just and good”. All I can say is I wouldn’t trust people, who believe that eating the flesh of children can be just and good, to be my moral guide.

     But some theists are smarter and simply cannot accept that “good is what God wills”. Rather they argue that the standard of goodness is independent of God. God does not define moral standard of behavior but God simply learned what they are and communicates it to us. This sounds more reasonable but it is not free from problems. The curious question will be, if moral standard of goodness exist independently of God then where did this standard come from? Can it be also acquired and understood through common sense and reason? Furthermore, to say that God “learned” this objective moral standard connotes that there is a point that God did not know what this standard is. There is then a point where God was not all knowing. Another implication of this would be that there is a point then when God was not “good” since God has yet to learn what good is.

     The last is similar to the what-is-good-is-dependent-on-God argument but with slight variations. Some theist believes that goodness is part of God’s nature. God is essentially good, therefore the morality standard God is decreeing to us are all good. Aside from the fact that this is obviously circular reasoning, it is only right to ask how adherents to this argument knew that God’s nature is indeed “good”. From what standard did they judge this to be so? From God? Then we are back to the circle.

     The theists’ objective standard of goodness that they would like to shove on everyone is fraught with problems and poses more questions than answers. This is the problem of good for the theist. They themselves do not have an adequate answer to the question: ”What is good?”