What we can’t know
About the theist four-step again – I’ve been pondering the fact that 2) and 4) are a tricky combination. What would it even mean to have reliable knowledge that ‘God’ is ‘good’? It’s not really even possible to know that. It’s possible to believe it in a sense, but not to know it.
It’s possible to imagine having reliable knowledge that God exists – and that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and that it wants us to do certain things and not others. But that it is good? No. Because that’s not knowable in principle.
Imagine it. There’s been some global mass revelation that puts it all beyond question. Included in that is God’s own declaration that God is good. And – it tells us to torture animals for fun, to torture small children, to bully women, to exploit people in proportion to the darkness (or lightness) of their skin; to lie, to cheat, to destroy, to cause pain and harm in every way we can. Would we ‘know’ all that was good? No. We only know God is good if the way God is good – even if God declares its own goodness itself – is what we ourselves think is good; we can’t know it if God’s idea of good turns out to be our idea of horrible wickedness. So all we can know about that is what we already know. (This is just ‘Euthyphro’ again.) If it turned out not to be what we already know, but something that pulled in the opposite direction – we wouldn’t know that; we would know we had awakened into a nightmare.
And even if God told us ‘good’ rules, we still wouldn’t know, because the principle itself is dubious – because it’s external and hierarchical and authoritarian, and thus not good enough.
We could be robots – and have a set of instructions, which produce the least harm possible in any given situation. That wouldn’t make us ‘good.’ It would just be an algorithm. Good isn’t a meaningful concept unless it’s internal to us, unless it belongs to us rather than being an externally imposed command, like ‘turn right at the next stoplight.’
It has to be internal, and also emotional* to mean anything – to match what we mean by the word. The word refers to human motivations and intentions and feelings. An external recipe or blueprint just doesn’t do that.
From that point of view, the whole idea that morality is linked to God is really very fundamentally mistaken, so fundamentally that believers probably agree, whether they know it or not. It’s ‘good’ that they really believe in, not ‘God.’ (If God turned out to be real and also self-evidently cruel and wicked, they would [perforce] believe in God’s reality but not its goodness; they would no longer ‘believe in’ God in the sense that mingles loyalty with cognitive acceptance. That’s a very flat assertion – but I think it’s fair. I pay believers the compliment of thinking they do pretty much universally associate God with goodness.)
Imagine a reliably knowable God whose rules are not incidentally or incompletely cruel but thoroughly and systematically so – the usual ‘God’ in every other way, but sadistic and merciless. Would anyone love that God? No – not even Pat Robertson would. (Fred Phelps might.)
It’s not God that believers love – it’s ‘good.’ It’s Good, and they just conflate that with God.
What a better happier more peaceful world it would be if we all actually understood this. Not perfect, but better.
*Hume’s ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’
I’d go further and just say that “good” is not a property that can be permanently ascribed to an entity with free will.
Am I “good?” Well, I haven’t done anything particularly bad. I don’t want to do anything particularly bad. I’ve even done some things we could probably all agree were “good,” maybe even notably “good.” But am I PERSONALLY “good?”
I mean, tomorrow, I could decide to do something bad. So maybe I’m good *right now*? Is that all people mean when they say that person X, or god X, is “good?” I think they mean more than that.
I just don’t think that “good,” in the objective and permanent sense, can be an intrinsic property of someone with free will.
Its worth noting that some theologians agree with me, though they don’t seem to know it. One of the common answers to the theodicy is “the potential to do evil is necessary for the existance of free will.” Presumably they believe that god has free will. He can therefore choose to do evil.
If god has never chosen to do evil, then that just means he’s good… so far. It doesn’t make “good” one of his permanently affixed attributes. He could go bad tomorrow like all the rest of us.
I’m not making a ton of sense, but hopefully I’ve conveyed the basic point. Good is a description of behavior. As long as you’re alive, you can cease deserving that label any time you choose. Religious people tend to believe that’s impossible for god, and I think that as a result they end up with an incomprehensible definition of both “god” and “good.”
What about the story of the flood and Noah’s ark? How do god believers square a good god with killing off nearly everything on earth that couldn’t breathe underwater, including all but a handful of human beings? Wasn’t that a case of god admitting it made a big mistake and had to basically start over? So god makes mistakes and it commits mass slaughter of innocents. Of course the majority of theists know that it’s just a story, but doesn’t it still characterize god as non-good?
‘Religious people tend to believe that’s impossible for god, and I think that as a result they end up with an incomprehensible definition of both “god” and “good.”‘
Ya…Probably an inevitable result of believing in ‘good’ and thinking that’s ‘God.’ Inevitable but not altogether helpful.
Hm. I think its a bol assumption that people at heart prefer Good to God.
As a non-christian man associating with christian girls, I engaged in a coffee-shop debate once where I put the normal viewpoint that what mattered was how a person lived, if s/he acted for the good of others and lived a life of respect.
This was absolutely NOT accepted. Goodness in a person was irrelevant; what mattered was belief in God.
To a christian, goodness in a PERSON is symbolically only God showing through in them. Highly respected, of course!
Fer once, I have to agree with ChrisPer!
;-)
If ye don’t accept “Geezzuss” as yer “personal saviour”, then they ain’t impressed.
You could be the nicest, best, loveliest person in the world, but if you don’t bite the big irrational faith bullet, then it doesn’t matter in the slightest.
And just as Doug said, if the bad book’s correct, then God’s an arbitrary, capricious, murderous entity with a callous disregard for pretty much anything…who mostly behaves like a very poorly-brought up toddler.
Well, an omnipotent one, anyway…
:-)
The idea that god is good and loving is scarcely universal. The Greek and Roman pantheons were more or less flawed humans on a giant scale, many animist beliefs seem to focus on placating or controlling an indifferent or capricious entity. As for the god of Abraham…
Once you tie yourself to the idea of a just, loving and good deity you run smack into the observable evidence. The scholarly hobby of theodicy has been around for quite some time now; results have been unimpressive. So if you want to believe in god, go right ahead. But don’t kid yourselves, the basis of the relationship is fear.
I just keep getting an image of a woman’s bruised and battered face dully insisting ‘But deep down he loves me.’
Jews generally concede that God can be a real jerk at times; it’s perfectly acceptable to tell Him (Her, It) to stop acting like such a twit. Obviously, this poses an entirely different set of theological problems, since it is assumed that God is not, in fact, always going to be “good.” David Frank has a brief overview of “arguing with God” in both the O.T. and rabbinical tradition (PDF).
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
But then God changes His mind and tells Abraham that it is now not good to kill his son.
This is why ethics is not possible under theism. And also why it isn’t theists who should be mistrustful of atheists because of the foundations of their ethics.
Even if god claims to be good that is not actually evidence that god is good. There’s the old dilemma- if something is good because god says it is- creates and defines goodness- then god isn’t necessarily good. on the other hand, if god is good it is because there is a measure of goodness that exists independently of god.
Doug, known in certain circles as simply “His Bobness”. Quite right too.
Oh, yeah. Dylan. Formerly voice of a generation, currently just another fluffer in the great corporate gang bang.
Still, I suppose you gotta serve somebody…
“currently just another fluffer in the great corporate gang bang”. Harsh, Don – Modern Times is his best album in decades !
Nick S: “Modern Times is his best album in decades !”
I’d throw in _Time out of Mind_ (’97) and _Love and Theft_ (’01) as being among his best recent work. Both excellent albums.
Harsh? Nah.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgUWTquztGY
Don, sure, Hicks was great, but if one wanted to be truly critical and honest about Dylan’s relationship with his ‘market’, one could do worse than read the excellent Mansion the Hill and read about Albert Grossman’s accutely cynical but brilliantly succesful manipulation of the very generation to which Dylan was ascribed ‘the voice’ in the mid 60s. Without Grossman, very probably not the same impact for Bob. Please don’t tell me commercial accumen is mereley something tacky that descends on artists after their talent has gone ? Like, naive in the utmost man!
Don, you may have read it but also a great read – American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story by Cynthia true
I gave up on the strict art vs. commerce distinction when I saw a Japanese commercial for sake featuring David Byrne about 20 years ago.
Hard to lose the distiction when some simpering twerp is handing out fizzy pop while warbling ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free’
Or Mercedes Benz playing Janis over their ad …
Bill Hicks addressing any marketing execs in the audience. “Kill yourselves. Now. I mean it. Suck a tailpipe. Rid the planet of your evil presence. Y’know, there’s probably a couple of marketing guys here tonight thinking “Oh cool, see what he’s doing – he’s going for the anti-marketing dollar”.
A righteous rage no doubt Don
;-)
Or maybe just a grumpy old git.
Bah.