Evil and Morality: Can God be Perfectly Good?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Evil and Free Will
On the face of it, an omnipotent perfectly good God cannot produce evil because in so doing he is not being good. The world of the good God ought therefore to be free of evil. Now Christians argue against this that God has deliberately made people with a freedom of choice. They can choose to do good or evil. God has therefore voluntarily given up his perfect goodness and omnipotence so that people can have a free will. If this is so, then they should recognize that God is no longer what they claim He is—omnipotent and perfectly good! He is not perfectly good because he has sacrificed His perfect goodness in creating evil so that humanity can, as they do, choose it.
Being omnipotent, He could have created a form of evil that is less evil than it is, if He wanted to give people a choice, but He chose the level of evil we have. There is no reason, by definition, why an omnipotent God could not make any world He Himself chose, and so such a world with a lesser but still exemplary level of evil must, in the Christian view, exist.
And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible.Mark 10:27
Christians counter argue that the purpose of life is to know God and His salvation. Evil necessarily exists to allow mankind to know God better. It has a greater good as a consequence. It admits immediately that God is not omnipotent at all, but has to allow evil to exist even if the excuse is that it is to allow humanity the greater good of knowing God better. It does indeed. It allows us to know that Christians must be lying when they say God is perfectly good and also omnipotent. On their own arguments, He is neither, but Christians willingly endure the obvious evil that they cannot reason their way out of a paper bag. Their own beliefs, the beliefs they must hold to, are utterly incoherent. Moreover, it cannot be a valid argument to claim some unstated good is the consequence of known evils. It is the pig-in-a-poke argument that Christianity always ultimately depends upon. “Sorry! It is just a mystery of God.” That really will not do!
Concerning morality, God has granted us free will, Christians tell us, but God has to order us what we have to do to gain His ultimate respect and enjoy the grace of His salvation. Morality then is not a question of free will in human beings, but, despite free will, is commanded by God. For that reason, Christians claim they have the moral absolutes, but there is no incentive for humanity, in this argument, to seek morality by exercising their free will. Christianity does not encourage a personal morality. It prevents it by shifting personal moral choices to God—in practice some other people who claim to know what God wants. Morality is what God says it is, and people must obey it as a divine wish, because they must obey God’s will to have any chance of salvation.
Prophets hear the voice of God commanding them to do certain things, but then so do people who are clinically insane. The prophets ought to be obeyed but not the madmen. Humans therefore cannot avoid devising their own moral codes even if they are told to obey God at all costs. They have to decide when God is actually speaking, and be sure even when they think He is, that He will not “repent” of His command. Thus, the ultimate human morality has to be devised by humanity, not by God, and the best way of explaining even “God’s divine morality”, since it comes to us via human beings, is that it too is a human construct, that god had nothing to do with.
There is no such thing as a moral absolute. All morals are for the welfare of a particular species—human beings—in a particular time and place. Moreover, God has ordained, even in the bible, morally repugnant things, by the standards of human morality. He is, in fact, a mass murderer Himself. He also ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, an innocent child, but repented, accepting a lamb instead. Can this original command have been absolutely moral? It is excused as a test of Abraham’s faith, but it is still an abhorrent command, inviting Abraham to do something morally disgusting, to murder His own son as a human sacrifice to the supposedly perfectly moral God.
This God, in another form, Christians believe, would not even permit wicked thoughts, yet God thought one here Himself. The Christian might again come up with the non-argument that it is a mystery of God that confers some unknown higher benefit, but it looks too much like special pleading to be a valid argument. Another argument would be that an omnipotent God must sometimes do repugnant things to prove he really is omnipotent, but it then proves he is not perfectly moral.
