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I am specifically a Catholic, so great.
I would recommend reading Brian Davies "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" for a study on this topic. Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."
Satan is not good, his nature is to be an angelic messenger in constant adoration of God and serving humanity. He is not living up to his nature at all. He is a very bad example of an Angel.
Do angels have free will in Catholicism too? If not, I do not understand how come Satan could defy God without that being a part of his nature. And as far as I recall the Serpent tempted Eve before the Fall, so whatever flaw caused the Serpent to introduce sin into the world could not have come from man's original sin - if indeed it was a flaw.
Yes, although they don’t have thought process or senses. They just know things.
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Angles live in an eternal moment. They do not have time and so do not change. They have free will, in which they make one choice - the choice to serve God or reject God.
Every being that can love has free will. God made angels to love, and so they have that choice - love God or not. Everything they do is a consequence of the single choice they made at the moment of their creation.
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I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?
(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)
I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.
When the Bible says "God is good" it is usually in the Psalms, sometimes in the prophets, and refers to God's faithfulness to His covenant with Israel. God is good = God keeps promises. I would argue that His nature doesn't let Him do anything but keep His promises, so it's not a statement that "God is well-behaved."
The other place we see God is good is when Jesus says, "What do you mean by calling me good? No one is good but God alone." Which you have to admit is cryptic and does not necessarily point to God being well-behaved.
God is adorable, but He is definitely beyond human judgement. We can only adore him and praise him by analogy.
You are assuming that malevolence is a presence instead of a lack. A being that is pure act without any potential cannot be destructive, only creative. Destruction is a privation of the good, not an active existence. Your arguments have lots of assumptions that you have not examined.
And then you go on to say that the theology that is routinely mocked for arguing about friction-less thought experiments like "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" isn't set up for friction-less thought experiments. :) There is a lot for you to learn if you want to open up a few philosophy books. Good day to you.
You didn't answer my question. Why should we praise Him, if we cannot actually come to any conclusions of our own about whether he's morally good or not?
I'm assuming no such thing. I am asking you to picture an entity with abilities comparable to those ascribed to Satan, but which never used to be an angel; a being for whom it is instinctive to maim and torture and corrupt in the same way that it is instinctive for a scorpion to sting. If the existence of a creature which instinctively stings frogs is conceivable, so is that of a creature which instinctively flays infants, whether or not God did or would ever create one/allow one to be created. The metaphysical nature of evil doesn't enter into it. I maintain that by your logic, Orcus the Babe-Slayer would have to be deemed "good", to the same extent that a healthy poisonous scorpion is "good"; and that when sermons advise the faithful that "God is good", they are knowingly implying something rather more about God and how you ought to feel about Him than if they were saying "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good" in this narrow technical sense.
I said it wasn't setup for frictionless thought experiments that assume away core tenets of dogma. I wasn't even saying it as a criticism.
Do you praise a sunset for being morally good? Do you praise a cat because purring nicely on your lap is morally good? What does praise have to do with this?
I think something that may be confusing is that Jesus is praiseworthy in a moral way - He actually has a human nature and can be described in the framework of "well-behaved." But God the Creator can be praised for his steadfastness, the largeness of His creation, etc, without being praised for being a moral agent that does the right thing when its hard.
Ok, I think I understand the question better. I thought you were asking if there was no God, but instead the Devil was God. Which confused me obviously.
If the question is then, "Can God create a creature for whom their good involves hurting other creatures?" and the answer is yes. He makes spiders and flies and calls them good, even though to us their value is difficult to identify.
But that is hardly the only thing Satan does. He also tempts people to chose depravity over behaving according to their own nature and God's will for them. Can God create a creature where this behavior is good for their nature? I think not, because it would be a contradiction in God's active will.
I think another confusion comes from the question, is it human nature to be prey, or is that a deprivation caused by the fall? Christianity teaches that it is not human nature to be prey, and that had there been no fall there would be no predation of humans by viruses or organisms. Natural disasters would not harm us somehow. Etc.
So a creature who's own good involves hurting humans, I would say that creating such a nature would be a contradiction to God.
Sure, I don't praise sunsets for being morally good. But if I praise them, I am nevertheless expressing a judgement about them. If I praise a sunset for being beautiful, then I am claiming to have the ability to judge the sunset on aesthetic grounds. It follows that if I am to praise God, I am expressing a judgement about God. Not necessarily a moral judgement, but nevertheless, a judgement.
Giving praise is meaningless if I am not implicitly claiming the power to discern whether it's warranted or not. I could think of few greater backhanded insults. "Hey, man, you're great. And by that I don't mean I actually think you'e great. Maybe you're actually awful, I wouldn't know. I'm totally agnostic about whether you're great or not. I'm just saying 'you're great' because… well, just because, man."
Granted, perhaps you only meant that God is beyond humans' moral judgement, and that the praise owed to God is not moral praise? But if that's your claim… are you sure? A random website is worth what it's worth, but catholic.com claims in so many words that "we give praise first and foremost because it is right to praise God’s goodness". The rest of the paragraph making it clear that goodness is here meant to encompass qualities like God being merciful - which is to say, moral qualities, not just God's "goodness" in the abstract sense of Being The Supreme Being.
It certainly aligns with my limited experience of Catholic worship that God is routinely praised for being merciful and just, not simply for being mighty and impressive and whatever other non-moral qualities might warrant praise. What a strange form of worship that would be, that did not permit making any deeper claims about the supreme deity than can be made about a pretty sunset or a cuddly kitten!
Not really. We've drifted a fair bit, but my original point was that "God is good" in everyday Catholic apologia contextually means something more than "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good (because it fulfills his nature)". It is phrased so as to imply we ought to like, admire, and heed God; that we should intuitively look to Him as a source of morality. If Orcus existed, I maintain that Catholics would not routinely say "Orcus is good", even if the statement could be narrowly defended. Therefore the claim "The phrase 'God's goodness' means no more or less than 'Orcus's goodness', and refers to being a perfect fulfillment of His own nature" is a motte, and everyday discussion of God by Catholics is frolicking in a bailey where God's "goodness" encompasses positive moral qualities.
To be merciful is to exceed justice, to give someone something more than they deserve. To be less merciful would not indicate moral deficiency on God's part. We can be grateful for God's great mercy to us. But if God was less merciful we would not be able to judge God negatively.
Funny you bring mercy up here, I recently heard a priest say, in summary, "God's mercy to us is justice to Himself. Divine simplicity entails that God's mercy and justice are the same thing. It would be just to humanity for humans to never be redeemed, but it would have offended against what God owes to Himself - God's justice due to Himself. He deserves our reconciliation because that is what He created us for. Therefore He offers to us salvation, which is mercy to us but justice to Him."
I still insist, that when Catholics talk about God, we are taking in analogy. There are very few statements we can positively say that are true about God. Most of what we can say about God is what He is Not. This is called Apophatic theology.
It is true that Catholic.com uses unspecific language, because it is a apologetic outreach website and not a university-level publication.
Obviously God's greatness is far greater than a sunset or a kitten! I'm also arguing that His greatness is far greater than human understanding of good behavior. These are all poor analogies to the reality of the full significance of God's goodness.
Ok, here. Dolphins are good. They also rape and murder other sea creatures. Explain to me in your example the significant difference between Orcus and Dolphins so I can understand what you think I would object to.
I think we have different assumptions here. To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues, which a maximally moral individual would all exhibit. They don't trade off against each other or make up for each other - exceeding justice isn't unjust; mercy alone is not justice however plentiful. They're simply different axes.
Now, certainly, where there is justice, mercy is supererogatory in the context of treating morality as a yes-or-no question - a man who acts justly but without mercy is not behaving immorally. But I feel comfortable saying that a man who is both just and merciful is morally superior to one who is only ever just. And I could "judge the merciless man negatively" on moral grounds, though that judgement would not be the same thing as a condemnation.
That being said, my chief point here is that if mercy is indeed moral quality, then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.
I also notice that the latter idea only works with "merciful", not "just". Justice is not supererogatory however you look at it. The absence of justice would be injustice. Therefore, under my model of praise, to praise God for being just ought to imply a counterfactual where you could, in principle, criticize Him for being unjust.
The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about, whereas dolphins - to my knowledge - rarely come up at mass one way or the other.
My claim is that, if Orcus was a thing and came up in scripture, no one wearing a cassock would ever organically, spontaneously talk about Orcus's goodness the way they talk about God's goodness, any more than they'd speak about Satan's goodness, even though they would acknowledge that Orcus technically counts as "good" in the same sense as dolphins and scorpions should they be specifically asked. I believe this demonstrates that God's goodness gets brought up for other, specific reasons than that God satisfies the criteria for this technical sense of "goodness".
So in this prong of our discussion I've not been arguing about theology qua theology so much as accusing the Church of rampant muddling-of-the-waters on this issue, which might be regarded either as doublethink-like epistemological confusion on the apologists' part, or deliberate deception of the common-folk for the "greater good" of fostering naive faith.
(In both cases, I am working under the assumption that people are more inclined to worship God and follow His commandments if they vaguely believe that he's good in the sense of being a good person; and therefore that, if the Catholic God is officially, theologically not "good" in that sense, apologists have an interest in obscuring this point, at least until they've got prospected converts fully "hooked" and can roll out the spikier doctrines. The apologist and convert can literally be different people, or a single man who's wrestling with doubt and winds up engaging in a bit of self-deception by mentally equivocating between the two senses of "good".)
It is, I admit, a somewhat aggressive line of argument, and not a fault of which I'm accusing you personally, which is why I'd sort of left it behind upthread as we got lost in the weeds of the specific Orcus hypothetical.
Justice classically defined is to give someone exactly what they deserve.
Mercy classically defined is to give someone more than they deserve.
They are contradictory, and calling God both Just and Merciful is one of the classic "mysteries of faith."
In God they are all the same virtue, because God is one simple thing. The most simple thing in existence. He is composed of no components. He has no composite parts.
I guess we are judging as in assessing. Like I judge an apple to be an apple when I eat it. I can assess that God is merciful. And by merciful I mean something like, "humans are merciful sometimes, and God is doing something analogous to that when He paved a way for our salvation." But not that God is merciful in the same way a human is merciful. Our version of mercy is a pale comparison. The reality of mercy that has its source in God's nature is beyond our comprehension and our own behavior.
Ok, Dolphins aren't explicitly in there, but Genesis Chapter 1 does come up and I was actually explicitly thinking of it when I called dolphins good:
God saw that it was good. Great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems. God saw that it was good. This is one of those places we see that word. I hear homilies all the time on the significance of this. So is there something else that is different between Orcus and Dolphins?
Don't get me wrong, He is both good and a person. Just our idea of a good person is limited by our overemphasis on our own species and nature.
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Yes, that's the reaction I had to the claims being made as well. But I want to reassure you that the Catholic, and broader Christian, tradition does affirm the benevolence of God, as shown in the person of Jesus Christ, who healed the sick, forgave the penitent, judged the oppressor, and died for the ungodly. Any account of God's goodness that doesn't center on the person of Jesus simply isn't a representation of the Christian approach to the divine nature.
In particular, the unique Christian claim of a divine trinity is often seen by theology as a rebuff to God as pure will and impersonal power, and instead reorients him as pure love: the Father loves the Son, and thus "God is love." (1 John 4:8) God's moral quality is known through his nature, which he enacts in the world with his will; and that nature is perfectly loving, serene, self-giving, and joyful. While it is true that Christian theology is ultimately apophatic and analogical, those analogies are often viewed as evidence of God's goodness and not merely nice things we're comparing to him. The Christian tradition insists that those who know God will be "known by their fruits," and so it is with God himself:
I'm sure you won't find that to be a good enough answer to your questions, and probably creates more questions than answers, about how the wrath of God interacts with or seems often in human perception to counteract the goodness of God. Those are real questions, and they require a real answer. But your questions are good, your intuition about what would be a satisfying answer to them is good, and your ability to perceive mottes and baileys in the severe differences between the God of the philosophers (and theology journals) and the God of the Christian revelation is very, very good.
Christianity does not proclaim a mere abstraction. It proclaims a Father, a Son, and a Spirit who loves, gives, forgives, and indwells. Any Christian view that does not ground everything about God's acts in the world in his steadfast love for humanity is not mine, and it is not the Christianity of the saints, who found God in encounter with love and not in the perfect recitation of scholastic categories. As Teresa of Avila once said, "It is love alone that gives worth to all things."
I, of course, agree that God is love and spend more time rejoicing in His love than getting into philosophical debates. I didn't pick the topic of conversation.
I am 100% correct to contest the word Omnibenevolence as it is not the Theist claim.
To say God is Love is to say God wills the good of all. What is that good? It depends on the nature. The God of philosophy is the Triune God.
As Catherine of Sienna reports God said to her, "I am He who is, and you are she who is not." When she wrote this, was she expressing how far away she was from God or expressing a closeness unfathomable?
I'm not writing about infused prayer over here. I'm picking a fight over a specific word.
You didn't pick the topic -- but you did choose to engage it, and in a particular way. And I believe there is no such thing as "just a philosophy discussion" when we're speaking of God. Every word we say about him either reveals or conceals his love. "Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light."
You say that you're just "picking a fight over a specific word" -- but I think that word actually matters. I do affirm God's omnibenevolence. Not because I misunderstand divine simplicity or want to anthropomorphize God, but because the Christian tradition at its best has always taught that God is not just good by analogy, but that his very being is love -- and that love is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. God anthropomorphized himself, "in a plan of sheer goodness," out of love.
The god of the philosophers cannot be the Triune God, precisely because of the apophaticism that you're defending! The God who is unknowable, ineffable, utterly perfect, cannot be grasped in his essence by philosophical categories. And pure reason would never imagine a God who is communion, who is Father, Son, and Spirit in an eternal relation of love. The Trinity is not the culmination of metaphysical logic. It is a revealed mystery that overturns what unaided reason would expect from the Absolute.
When someone comes asking whether the God of Christianity is morally trustworthy, the absolute wrong response is to retreat into terms like "God wills the good according to nature," as if that settles it. That may be defensible in scholastic language, but it's interpersonally and evangelically devastating, and empties the Christian message of the relational content that is its essence.
I think the fundamental problem with your position is you've emptied the concept of "goodness" of its volitional, transcendent, and glorious attributes, as though "well-behaved" exhausts what it means to describe someone as "good." You're affirming the universal love of God and yet denying the fundamental omnibenevolence of God -- as though "benevolent" is not a wonderful and precise way to describe willing the good for all things according to their nature!
Look at how Merriam-Webster discusses the history of the term 'benevolent':
In other words, to be "omnibenevolent" is "to voluntarily will the good for all things"... which is exactly what you just said about God!
If God is love, then we should be able to say he is good -- recognizably good. Good in a way that people can see, and praise for his goodness. Not just metaphysically perfect. Not just consistent with his own essence. But gracious, merciful, near to the brokenhearted, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. That's not a mistake of sentiment. That's the Psalms. That's the saints. That's the Cross.
So I don't think this was just a fight about a word. I think it was a moment when someone asked whether Christians actually believe God is good, and critiqued a motte and bailey in which God's goodness is affirmed in analogical terms -- but then, more deeply, denied as something humans can actually recognize or trust. You affirmed his view, by saying that Catholic Answers is an apologetics outreach and not a theological article, and thus that its answers are misleading or incomplete! You've been distracted by the term 'omnibenevolent' to the extent that you've affirmed exactly what he was arguing in a way that makes Christians appear untrustworthy and dissembling.
If we answer questions about God's goodness with hedging, precision, or tone-deaf abstractions, we've not preserved orthodoxy -- we've made it unbelievable. That's what I'm indicating here: that your vision of God's goodness is thoroughly orthodox, impeccably scholastic, and philosophically integrated... and yet utterly uncompelling, even horrifying. No one who was not raised in the Church would look at the vision of God you've outlined and say, "wow, sounds like someone I should worship." They would walk away thinking: "These people are clever. But their God? He sounds like a narcissist."
You can try to protect God from accusations of malevolence by retreating to apophaticism, but that is not the mind of God on the matter. God's answer to those who would accuse him of evil was to enter into evil, to experience suffering, to face death. God's answer to Job was not "my goodness is unfathomable to you," it was "my omnipotence is unfathomable to you." But his goodness and his love he demonstrated in his body on the Cross.
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"Malevolence is a lack/destruction is a privation" sounds like it's only true in such abstract terms as to be a useless definition. Sure, I suppose if God creates a lightning bolt that happens to strike a human dead then God has technically not held anything back from the human that the human otherwise would get. More energy has been introduced into the system!
Ok? Sure God could strike someone with lightning. No problem with that at all in most Christian belief systems. I think it's actually a cliche? A literal literary trope? You keep throwing these at me and I don't know why.
God could also preserve someone who was struck by lightning miraculously. He doesn't have to. But he could preserve and give being to a body that was struck by lightning so that no biological disruption occurred.
God can and will destroy the whole world one day - He will no longer provide it with the constant ground of being and will remake it. When God destroys He does so by no longer providing for being for a thing. Everything that exists now only does so due to God's continuous, active action of providing being to everything. He can remove this at any time without being malevolent. Nothing is owed existence except in the sense that God owes it to Himself to keep his own promises. God breaking His own promises would be an injustice to His own simple, unchangeable nature.
Saying, "well what about a hypothetical where God isn't the sustain-er of being" is just describing a hypothetical without anything that pertains to what I understand the category "God" to be. "What about a circle that had no sides?"
God made tigers. A good tiger is not a friendly or well-behaved tiger. "What about a God who made you a tiger? No eternal life, no love, just violence and raw nature?" Ok, there are tigers. It does seem to be within God's capacity to make a tiger. What does it prove that you think Christians don't know already?
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