[breuleux]

It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours. Presumably God created what It considers to be the perfect world and therefore everything that happens in it is good according to God's own definition of goodness, including torturing babies (if and when it happens -- and when it doesn't happen, then it is good that it doesn't). Perhaps God never had any intention of telling any of Its creatures about the true nature of good and evil (what would be the point of that), so we're just completely off base, with no way of knowing besides the evidence that evil can't be what we think it is, because if it was, it wouldn't exist.

[pmoriarty]

"It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours."

If God's conception of morality is not equivalent to the human conception of morality, then what does it mean to claim that God is good?

The fact is that a lot of people worship God in great part because they do think that God is good in the ordinary human sense: that he loves humanity, cares for them, wants only the best for them, and -- crucially -- wants to ease their suffering.

The vast majority of believers pray to God to ease them of their pain and suffering.

Many of them would be completely outraged if they thought that, far from easing their suffering, God was actually the cause of their suffering (though some religions do believe that God is the cause of not only all good but also all evil).

So that's where the problem lies, and why so many theists are so concerned with theodicy (ie. the defense of the concept of a perfectly good god against charges like these).

Saying that God is good in some unknowable and incomprehensible way that would allow for human suffering to exist just isn't a very satisfactory answer for a lot of believers, who continue to believe in a benevolent God who's good in a very human way.

[breuleux]

> If God's conception of morality is not equivalent to the human conception of morality, then what does it mean to claim that God is good?

Nothing I would describe as meaningful, but from what I recall of what (admittedly little) I've read of it, theological philosophy that's concerned about proving that God must be good comes disturbingly close to unironically destroying the concept of goodness. Because when you try to derive it from first principles like "something is good if it fills its intended purpose" or "something is good if it brings something closer to its ideal essence" you end up making it vague enough that the black plague might actually be good, you know.

> Saying that God is good in some unknowable and incomprehensible way that would allow for human suffering to exist just isn't a very satisfactory answer for a lot of believers, who continue to believe in a benevolent God who's good in a very human way.

You're absolutely right, this is a non-starter for believers, because their faith is marred with self-interest.

On the other hand, from a purely intellectual standpoint, it has to be a consideration. If the only options are atheism or belief in a conventionally moral supreme deity, that sort of suggests that the only reason to believe that God exists is if God rewards us, which is suspect, because reality doesn't care about our self-interest. This kind of blind spot can corrupt our reasoning.

For instance, a lot of theistic arguments, like fine tuning, the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, regardless of their intrinsic merits, basically say nothing about God's character. They couldn't. They don't operate at that level. But if you work under the assumption that a morally indifferent God is not an option, these arguments appear to imply far more than they actually do.

[AnimalMuppet]

The Christian position is that humans are morally flawed. "Flawed" is too weak - they are morally twisted.

Having twisted people judge whether God is morally straight is... problematic. Instead, humans insist that we are straight, and therefore that God must be twisted.

Have you ever heard an amoral or immoral person insist that everyone else is just as dishonest (e.g.) as they are? That's what humans do with God.

(I am aware that Christianity is not the only monotheistic belief system. I don't know enough about the others to speak to them.)

[tovej]

If we limit god to any god worth worshiping, i.e. one that prescribes a set of morals on their followers and answers the prayers of those who follow the god's morals, you would expect that the god has the same set of morals as their followers.

Unless the god is playing games with their creation, maybe studying them to see how they would respond. But even then, this would tell us something about the nature of a god. That they are not worth worshiping from a moral standpoint, since they aren't benevolent.

[breuleux]

Right. And considering the existence of natural disasters and horrible diseases, which conventionally moral humans would prevent if they could, the problem of evil is really about arguing the possibility or plausibility that if you were omniscient and omnipotent, you would see that there are in fact good reasons to allow natural disasters and horrible diseases. And if there are, well, maybe there are good reasons to torture babies as well. Who's to say, except God?

Plus, there is no real evidence that God rewards followers. A conventionally moral human, perhaps, would do so. But if you were omniscient, isn't it possible that you wouldn't? Instead, perhaps you would see that it is in fact best to reward sufferers and punish those who lived happy lives, regardless of their moral character. Or perhaps you would see that afterlives are entirely pointless. But it is difficult to take these considerations seriously without degrading one's motivation to worship, so they generally aren't.

[Animats]

If we limit god to any god worth worshiping

Which is the underlying problem here. That article is about the Abrahamic model of a god, even though it doesn't say so. Omnipotent and perfect - that's the Abrahamic model, underlying Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions.

The Graeco-Roman pantheon was a better fit with reality - a group of morally mediocre gods with their own agendas, mostly indifferent to what the mortals were up to. The transition to the Abrahamic religions resulted in a lot of cruft - devils, angels, prophets, etc. A legacy code problem, in other words.

[pmoriarty]

"The Graeco-Roman pantheon was a better fit with reality - a group of morally mediocre gods with their own agendas, mostly indifferent to what the mortals were up to."

It is a better fit in terms of The Problem of Evil, but it raises a different problem: What happened to them?

They seem to have been conquered by the other major religions and pretty much disappeared.

So the world's not really a good fit for them either.

[tovej]

Yeah, a sort of bargaining form of religion does impose fewer moral conditions on the gods. Things like the Graeco-Roman gods, old folk religion, Norse mythology, Egyptian mythology, etc. seem more like rationalizations of nature and the struggles of the human condition.

Much better model. Gods don't care about your mortal life, gods are just selfish powers that you can cajole into helping you.

[nine_k]

> maybe studying them to see how they would respond

Have you ever looked at the Book Of Job [1]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job#Contents

[tovej]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm talking about. I would argue that whether or not the set of morals that god expects Job to follow are the ones that god considers good and correct makes a difference here.

If they aren't, god is not worth worshiping. If they are, at least god is consistent, and may be worth worshiping if he exists.

[tablespoon]

> It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God's conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours. Presumably God created what It considers to be the perfect world and therefore everything that happens in it is good according to God's own definition of goodness, including torturing babies (if and when it happens -- and when it doesn't happen, then it is good that it doesn't).

Or, to be a little pantheist about it, the world is literally God pondering a possible world (but, being God, pondering something makes it real in a sense); and that God literally experiences all the suffering present in it.

[exo-pla-net]

Sure, a deity could believe that children dying from painful diseases is righteous and good: perhaps it finds it entertaining, and it believes the greatest good is its own amusement.

That's a good argument for atheism. Because if such a god is real, we're in a waking nightmare we'd best bury our collective heads about, for our psychological wellbeing.

[breuleux]

I don't think it's necessarily as sinister as that. Perhaps God is simply an engineer who loves designing systems that straddle the line between order and chaos and believes that the laws of physics are supremely perfect and anything that proceeds from these laws is good. Perhaps they find the process of evolution breathtaking beautiful, and the cruelty of natural selection is lost on them. Perhaps they can't understand or relate to our experience any better than we can understand the experience of an ant.

It is entirely pointless to worship such a God, but I wouldn't say it's a nightmare that it exists.

[pmoriarty]

Another attempt to let God off the hook is to say that God is omniscient in the sense that God knows everything that happens in the universe at the present time, but not what will happen in the future because God has created the universe such that there is non-determinancy in it.. God winds up the universe as it were (ie. creates the "laws" of physics, starts up the Big Bang, etc) and lets it run, without knowledge of the ultimate outcome or even everything in the next moment.

Then, in some theologies, God withdraws.

One could question what kind of God is one that would let the universe run like this and not interfere to, say, save the innocent from harm? Or what kind of God would withdraw from the world? There's a lot of theological hand-wrining about such questions.

Another attempt is that of the Gnostics, who thought that the ultimate, perfect God did not create the world. Instead there were a great number of intermediate beings or gods that emanated from the ultimate God, each lesser and more imperfect than the last, and it was the lowest and most imperfect of these (the demiurge) which created the world, in ignorance, madness, or stupidity. Thus the blame for suffering is shifted on to this ignorant/mad/stupid god instead of the ultimate, perfect God.

Despite such efforts, of course, there remains the question why any imperfection would or even could come from the ultimate, perfect God in the first place.

[exo-pla-net]

You'd have to impose a lot of conditions on such a god to make it not nightmarish.

Without a god, we control our own destiny. A lot of things are currently awful, but with enough human ingenuity, we can overcome them.

On the other hand, if our fate is determined by a god driven by its own motives, we have lost control of our destinies to something that evidently doesn't care about us.

We would be ants on the back of a whale that might decide to dive at any moment, doomed perhaps to see our loved ones swirl away screaming into the watery void, on whale's whim, pointless.

[breuleux]

I mean, a god might say that any destiny you choose is good, because it would proceed from the laws of physics, but you could still choose what it is.

Personally I don't think it's worth caring about, just like it isn't worth thinking about how our universe might be a bubble in a greater universe that's just about to pop and destroy us all in an instant ;)

[foobiekr]

Funny. Wathammer 40000 actually sort of follows this logic in the atheist 30k era. The problem is the evil gods find a way to make themselves evident.