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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.
God is not just good by analogy, but what humans like you and I can understand about His goodness is only by analogy. He is not good the same way you are (presumably) good. When we see a saint, we see God's goodness there. A saint is good in the way God is, but God is so far beyond human behavior that we can't work the other way back to him. It's directionally confused.
Yes, we learned something additional to God's nature through revelation, that doesn't discount the things we can reason about His nature and is revealed in Scripture as well.
No, explicitly God is good but not in the sense we mean when we say a human is good. When we say a human is good, we colloquially mean something along the lines of a human behaves well. That is not what we mean when we describe God as good, that is entirely the point I am trying to make!
Omnibenevolence is a recent term and I object strongly to people outside the religious tradition inventing it and then using their own invention as an attack against the logical consistency of God. I have no objection to calling God benevolent. He is. I object to Omnibenevolent, because it can be defined any which way. It's the "omni" part that I object to.
Goodness, must I sing God's praises with every Motte Post!
God is great, He created us for such good things. He is an ocean of love. He holds nothing back, He takes pity on my who is weak and has entered into the depth of God-forsakennesss for our sake. God went out from God to the furthest reaches of not-God, to the furthest reaches of degradation, torture, despair, guilt, shame, DEATH! So that no matter how far we run away from him, He will always be there first. So we can always find our way back to Him. Forever His praise shall be on my heart!
If I start every theological discussion like that will it make people listen better?
Why would you call God "good" if it's explicitly not the same thing as human good, and you explicitly cannot understand what God's version of it is? When a blind man hugs an elephant's leg, is he right to conclude that an elephant is like a cylinder, except perhaps not the same kind of cylinder that we know?
It is a lot like the blind-men-elephant analogy. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. We can see how that goodness interacts with us. Our own human goodness has its source in His goodness as well. Since our goodness has its source in His goodness, we can say that it really is something like a goodness we recognize. It's not some kind of alien shrimp colors. But it is vastly beyond our morality as well, encompassing it and exceeding it.
The average normie Christian hugs the elephant's leg and thinks it's just like us. Look, it has a torso to hug! And that's wrong, but not necessarily dangerous. The average normie 8th grader thinks that the Earth goes around the sun in a circle and that's wrong but not necessarily dangerous or impactful to how they go about their daily life.
But those who have reasoned more about it or have further experience with the Goodness of God start to see other parts of the elephant. The goodness of God inspires such sentiments as:
or
Or the desire many Catholics have to suffer, their only desired relief being the presence of mind to offer that suffering to God as a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.
The goodness of God starts to look kind of distorted and weird the deeper a soul dwells in it. A human can reach beyond just a leg and we start to see something immense, kinda scary, but still recognizable and connected to the leg. We have every reason to believe it goes on further and further, beyond our comprehension but still Goodness because it's all part of the same animal, connected together.
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