| "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. |
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.