It is a central tenet of traditional Christianity that God is omnibenevolent or all-good. This very complicated philosophical claim has been neatly packaged into a popular opening line used by many preachers for their homilies/sermons. I am not certain of this, but I think it is a uniquely Caribbean refrain, a testament to our creativity.
Priest/Pastor/Brother/Sister - God is good!
Congregation - All the time!
Priest/Pastor/Brother/Sister - And all the time!
Congregation - God is good!
AMEN!
For about two years of my life as an active Christian, I would join wholeheartedly in this back and forth, call and answer ritual between leader and led. The feeling that one gleans doing something in unison with a large crowd is like no other. You become part of something larger than yourself, so large that you actually lose yourself entirely after being subsumed into the crowd; you're at the mercy of the preacher.
If you remember well from the introduction of this series, I related to you that I had become somewhat of a preacher myself. Being part of the prayer group in a Catholic school, the Principal was more than willing to give some of us the opportunity to lead the school's morning prayers once or twice each week. I also helped other, more experienced preachers, with their own ministries around the country. Eventually I started getting calls to do ministry on my own. I couldn't resist using the refrain to start many of my talks because it gave me a sense of power over the audience. It brought excitement and centered everyone around what I was about to say when the excitement subsided.
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| Me giving a talk in my old parish. |
I had become one of them, one of the big boys. Knowing the usefulness of this technique (and others) made me critical of other preachers when I was just a part of the congregation, listening in. Whenever they started their sermons similarly, I would smile to myself because I knew what they were doing. I stopped entering into the fun of responding, not because I disagreed with what the statement said, but because I thought I was above the 'herd mentality' now that I was a preacher myself.
Now that I was an observer, separated from the madness, my mind was left free to think about the contents of the refrain itself. "God is good?" I wondered. Why did we say this? This is not something you would hear us say in every situation, at least not with the same exuberance. If I saw a picture of a beautiful sunset, it was impossible to resist the urge to shout "GOD IS GOOD!"
This sort of ambiguity never rests well with me for long and my tolerance for it wanes the more I read. So in order to make sense of this claim, there are two questions that followed.
1) What is the meaning of the word 'good'?
2) If 'good' means X, why do we think God is good?
What is the meaning of the word 'good'?
This is one of the most difficult of concepts I have ever attempted to understand. Be prepared for some re-reading of paragraphs and scratching of heads on your behalf. Thou hast been warned. 'Good' is one of those air-fairy words that we like to use to describe things but find it hard to define when it stands alone. In contemporary use alone it wiggles its way into so many sentences, each with their own nuances.
For example, when I started playing pan again and I got a little better, sometimes after a performance a person would say to me "good job". In this use of the term, 'good' tells me that I played well and showed some level of skill that the listener found pleasing to his ear.
Another way the term pops up is in meetings where a person shares an idea for a project. "That's a good idea, hoss," someone might say. This someone is trying to say that the idea seems to be suitable for the intended goal of the meeting.
The last (in my thoughts), and relevant, meaning of the word good is with regard to ethics. This time 'good' is used to describe a moral action. Most people would agree that helping an old person to cross the street is a 'good' deed or that Mother Teresa was a very 'good' person because she did many 'good' things for those poor people in Calcutta, India. It is this definition of good that I found challenging to understand, especially when used to describe God. If you are interested in checking out some cool definitions, check here and scroll to the 'Ethics' section.
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| St. Thomas Aquinas |
This made sense to me because I had a conscience - just like you do, I presume. I remember getting angry with my brother one time for breaking my new reading lamp. Man did I want to kill him. But he's alive and well today, thanks to my conscience. Something inside my head told me "No. He just young and stupid. Ease him up." I eased him up.
Here is the problem with this definition of goodness. For one, it assumes that everyone's consciences are the same, a claim that should be easily dismiss-able for anyone who pays attention to their friends or knows about various cultures. No two people share the exact consciences far less for varying cultures. I can put my head under an elephant's foot in saying that many of you reading this probably see nothing wrong with the death penalty, a little less see nothing wrong with abortion, most of you are okay with using contraception. All of these things are said to be against natural law, according to the Catholic Church that I was a part of.
This confusion is provided for by saying that some people are the unfortunate possessors of imperfect reason. Michael Ruse, an atheist Philosopher, says that "The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2 = 5." William Craig asserts that "People who fail to see this are just morally handicapped, and there is no reason to allow their impaired vision to call into question what we see clearly." Well, this is just a matter of majority isn't it? The fact that most people think that sexually abusing children is wrong does not show it as an objective truth at all, only a common perception held by a majority number. This is actually just how objectivity works. The colour blue does not 'objectively' exist; it is just that the majority of brains assimilate light on from that angle on the colour spectrum as blue. There are a few who don't and probably see it as brown. I actually agreed with the claim that the few people who had different ideas of morality were 'impaired' right up until God was factored in. I wondered why a just God would create souls to go into bodies that couldn't see right from wrong the way he wanted them to and upon which their salvation depended.
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| A possessor of corrupted reasoning faculties. |
On what grounds did the Catholic Church make this claim? It makes it based on the fact that they were the first Church established by Jesus Christ through the Apostles who handed down the authority given to them by the laying on of hands. Peter was the 'rock' upon which Christ built his Church, making him the first Pope. Jesus said to Peter and the apostles that 'whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth is loose in heaven.' Even though I disagree with this today, I still think that if Jesus Christ established any Church, it would be the Catholic Church, at least the way it exists in theory. Theoretically, the Catholic Church is fairly logical in the way it reasons as long as you accept the foundational precedents.
So after all this deliberation, I have only showed that this idea of goodness is dependent upon the divine authority of the Catholic Church. If you're Catholic you're okay with that and we can move on, but if you're not, not so much. I was fine with it but you're probably not. It puts the following discussion in a strange place because I am going to explore the goodness of God without an acceptable working definition that would satisfy Catholic theologians who would argue that I am not engaging the real argument, non-Catholic theologians who would email me their own thoughts, and the average person who doesn't particularly care about such things.
Forgive me, theologians, but we would work with the good-ole online definition for now which I think is a suitable compromise. Good from now on simply means "to be desired or approved; that which is morally right." Theologians may disagree with me, but I think this is the better way forward because the only thing we have to assess the goodness of God is our own language.
That was another problem I had. So many of these defenses for God that I was coming across were found in old books filled with complicated theologies and philosophies. Again, I was lucky enough to be able to understand them, but what about those who couldn't? I find it difficult to believe that God who wants us to think he is good would expect us all to be brilliant theologians and philosophers to assert it truthfully. Let's move on.
Is God good?
If the goodness of a thing or action is dependent upon what we think desirable or morally right, we are in a good place to talk about the goodness of God. This is where my journey picks back up. I had begun to notice that we only asserted the goodness of God for certain things. Standing outside to wait for a taxi while the rain is pouring all around you is not a pleasant experience. I would pray that God would send a taxi, like any normal person would. Sometimes a taxi would come and I would say "God is good man." But this is not the meaning that the Church refers to when calling God the Supreme Good. God's goodness has to do with Him being the ground for all moral truths.
My cursed curiosity made me stumble upon a very simple question called the Euthyphro dilemma.
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods. It has been re-translated into the more popularly known form - Does God command a particular action because it is morally right, or is it morally right because God commands it? In other words, does God command you not to murder because murder is morally wrong or is murder morally wrong because God said so and only because God said so?
If you pick the first option, you have essentially separated moral goodness from God. You are saying that there are actions which are good independent of God, and God asks us to do them. This moral standard is apart from God. Traditional Christianity is not willing to accept this teaching because God is said to be the Supreme Good, there is no good that is separate from Him. This is an unacceptable teaching because it means that even without the existence of God, good actions would still be possible. I believed in God.
If you chose the second option, you have made God's commands the determining factor in whether an action is right or wrong. The action, say Mass on Sunday, becomes both good and a moral duty because of God's authority. This is called 'Divine Command Theory' (DCT). DCT, although it is an unattractive string of words, is an attractive theory because it seems to create an objective basis for morality in God.
Between these two opposing views, a Christian should give more weight to DCT because it is well documented as scriptural truths. The Bible is...the Bible. It is where we go to learn about God, get glimpses of his action throughout history. The usual refutation of DCT is that if God were to command us to kill someone, we would be obligated to do so. William Lane Craig defends this by saying God wouldn't do something like that because God, "by definition", is "just and loving". Unfortunately, this reminded me of Abraham's story. You know, the guy who God commanded to kill his only son? Yes, we know that God relented eventually, but God's response to the situation reveals my creeping point.
God didn't say to Abraham "What the hell Abraham!? I was only checking to see how good you were! Sheesh. You are so serious sometimes about this relationship thing." This would have been the response of a God-morality relationship as seen in the first option. God would have been checking to see if Abraham was living up to the standard of good that was separate from himself. Abraham, in this case, would have been wrong, because he chose to obey God as opposed to doing the 'right thing.'
Instead, God sent a message with an angel on his behalf that said "Do not harm him, for now I know you fear God. You have not refused me your son, your only son." This is DTC.
DCT attempts to say something about goodness, but instead, goodness becomes synonymous with faithfulness to God which renders the word 'goodness' just a bit useless. It sounds nice in a sentence, but now I'm scared of Christians because God may wake one of my friends up tomorrow with the idea that they should kill me. But, God wouldn't do that...right? I haven't even started my degree yet, give me a break.
If you haven't caught on to my sarcasm yet, I am being facetious, but only just. DTC is madness no matter how long you squint your eyes at it because it basically sanctifies every act of terrorism or cruelty ever committed throughout history in the name of God, providing God actually commanded them. Unfortunately, there is no objective means of ascertaining whether God really spoke to a person or not. At first I thought miracles would be an accompaniment to the true servant of God, but the Bible says that many would work miracles in his name but not be of Him.
Here are a few scriptures where God did and said some pretty dirty things. Children sing the song 'Round the walls of Jericho' with smiles and great mirth, not knowing it is song about genocide. Joshua, with the divine go-ahead, commanded his men to storm into Jericho. The story says that "men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys" were "massacred." God's goodness, however, was extended to Rahab, the harlot (prostitute), and her family because she hid spies from Israel's army who checked out the city before laying siege to it. If you think it's just 'harmless singing' like I used to, you're wrong just like I was. George Tamarin (1966) studied the thinking of some Israeli students with regard to the story of Joshua. 66% of them thought that Joshua was right to do what he did because people were trespassing on the land promised to them by God.
When asked "Suppose that the Israeli Army conquers an Arab village in battle. Do you think it would be good or bad to act towards the inhabitants as Joshua did towards the people of Jericho?", some choice responses were "In my opinion this behaviour was necessary, as the Arabs are our enemies always and the Jews did not have a country, and it was necessary to behave like that towards the Arabs." The children were using the scripture to inform present day circumstances. Singing "I am a soldier in the army of the Lord" with the heartbeat of the djembe drums surrounded by a crowd of singing people, some marching in a circle around the room, was exhilarating. Not anymore.
None of these actions supposedly commanded by God fit any imaginable definition of goodness.
At this stage, DTC was never going to become an acceptable theory for me. I sort of went along with the first option in the Euthyphro dilemma because although it made God a little smaller, I was still able to conclude that God was good in the sense that I would say a person was good. God was good, then, because he commanded and did good things. I couldn't think of another option like an evil God because that would just be psychologically unbearable. Therefore all those people who did horrible things in his name were either demented or liars. This made more sense to me but it forced me to come up with a new understanding of morality and I had to re-think Biblical inerrancy. Does the Bible give accurate account of God's hand throughout history?
Many of us think that in the absence of a God, morality would be baseless and all things would be permissible. I was once a groupie of William Lane Craig who argues that without God, objective moral values would not exist. Firstly, his argument succumbs to the slippery slope fallacy. "Oh no! We have no objective moral values? The horror!" It makes you feel that if objective moral values did not exist, that all hell would break loose or that morality would be one big farce. I remember asking my atheist friends "So what's stopping you from going out there and killing everybody?" People ask me that today and I can't help but chuckle with compassion.
Craig would repeatedly ask how we would determine, in the absence of objective morality, the wrongness of the holocaust. He, and others, would ask 'If Germany had won the war and brainwashed the whole world to thinking they were right, would that have made them right?' It's a silly question, you see. If that had happened, the question itself would not exist because, being brainwashed, we would not be asking ourselves about the morality of our actions. What the question is trying to imply is that without objective morality, we have no grounds on which to say Hitler was wrong for what he did.
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| Which way do we go? |
But we can have objective morality otherwise. First we need to understand why any sense of morality exists in the human race in the first place and then, based on this, come up with some objective moral indicators. These indicators would be objective because they would be things inherent in all human beings. I was skeptical about this approach once, because I didn't like the idea of putting the power of choosing what is right and wrong in the hands of humans. Now I realise that it always was, only sometimes we claimed divine permission.
The fact that at one point in time, slavery was acceptable, and that people could find scriptures to support it (whether wrongly interpreted or not) shows the evolution of morality. The Colosseum was built by Jewish slave labour and many of them were maimed and killed within its walls in the jaws of lions and large boiling pots. We have come a long way in many regards, but still have more to go in others. After all, there is still female genital mutilation and 'corrective rape' occurring in South Africa; children are still working in Chinese sweat-shops; there is still female infanticide in India and China causing a significant difference between the male and female gender populations.
But there is hope! The media does a good job in making us feel as though the world is on the brink of destroying itself and there seems to be something about our psychology that makes us more willing to believe horrible assessments of our situations. I used to say "The world in ah mess now yes!" The older heads always say "I dunno what wrong with these young people today. Bring back de ole time days!" Bullshit.
The world is indeed chaotic, but we have always lived in chaos as a human race. And though it may be hard for you to acknowledge because you have become so committed to your world-hatred, Steven Pinker shows that we have become dramatically less violent as a people, a decrease that has been steady from the time of the Enlightenment. This can be attributed to economic growth and interdependence and also good old empathy. We depend on each other for survival so we have become less violent with each other. I can go on, but I will expound more about morality in my post on God and evolution.
Conclusion
I had planned to close all the installments with a 'simple truth' and then a short conclusion. Unfortunately, there is hardly a simple truth with regard to ethics. As a believer, I wanted a simple answer to this very complicated problem. I wanted black and white answers. It was either okay for Catholics to come out with a Carnival band or not. It was either acceptable for me to party or not. No inbetweens, maybes or sometimes. Simple answers would give me place to stand firmly and go about my merry way, enjoying life with large blinders on. But here's a harsh admonition from Antonion Labriola:
"Lazy minds are readily satisfied with such crude statements. What a holiday and what gladness for all light-minded and un-fastidious people: to obtain, at last, in a small summary, composed of a few propositions, the whole of knowledge and to be able to penetrate by means of just one key into all the secrets of life! To reduce problems of ethics, aesthetics, philology, historical criticism and philosophy to a single problem, and in this way save oneself of all difficulties!"
I was shocked out of lazy thinking and I let my mind loose. No one seemed to recognise a change in me because I continued preaching, continued writing, defending the faith, praying for people, playing pan in Mass. I kept up the farce well. Then again, I think people only see what they want to see, which is usually informed by what they've been seeing all along. I started putting some 'suspicious' posts on my Facebook profile, yet no one seemed to notice.
I was comforted by the thought that, at least, God still loved me. In the end, God was good because he did good things. My understanding of the Bible was just wrong and I needed to be more informed about it.
Look out for my next post on God and the Bible.
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