…but wouldn’t that mean that God does not have the quality called “goodness”? I mean if God can do literally anything he wants without it being evil, then there is no way to judge Him as “good.” He would then simply be God, a dictator with all the power in the world but no claim to “goodness.”
This is my approach to this issue, which I’m sure has been thought up a thousand times, but which I have not seen confirmed or denied explicitly. That is,
I am not claiming to present Church teaching or anything, but just presenting the ideas I’ve come up with because they make sense to me. Some of what I say I know is true, but I’m not quiet awake enough at the moment to be able to indicate which. The key statement that I’m not absolutely certain about (but which I do think is probably true) is that it doesn’t make sense to say that God could be in any way other than how He is.
I think part of the problem is that you’re looking at goodness as something that exists apart from God, as though there is some external standard by which we can judge Him. There simply isn’t.
You could say that this makes good arbitrary, but this is not so because God is not arbitrary and what goodness is is tied up in what God is. That is, you could claim that God could somehow be otherwise and thus what we call good would be otherwise and so that goodness is just the rules of how God happens to be. This fails though because God must be exactly how He is - there is no otherwise. So while Goodness does depend on how God is, that’s pretty much the same thing as saying that Goodness depends on what Goodness is and doesn’t necessarily indicate that it is arbitrary - and we know (if I’m right) that it is not arbitrary because Goodness could not be any other possible way (because God couldn’t be any other possible way).
So - it is not that whatever God chooses to do is good casually because He chose to do it (or command it), but that there is very little difference between saying that an action is good and that God wills it at all. Our perception of good is in fact a partial perception of the nature of God. In those cases where,
assuming our perceptions are accurate we would perceive something to be bad, this thing is something that God does not will and so something that God would not do.
Hence, Jesus simply would not sneak into someone’s house and murder a child for absolutely no reason, not because He doesn’t have the right to, but because God does not desire such things to happen. (Though He does desire that we be able to act contrary to His desires if we so choose which is why they can, but any more on that would be a bit off topic I think.)
That said, God does in fact have the right to end our lives (or, if you prefer to think of it this way, to move us to the next stage of our eternal lives earlier than we otherwise might), and so if there was something God wished to accomplish by ending one of our lives He could do so. Since we only continue to exist because of God’s continued desire that we do so, it could hardly be said that God has no right to just stop desiring our existence at all and for us to completely cease to exist - God is actively maintaining our existence and so we can have no claims against Him
at all because all that we have is from Him and is His.
He doesn’t do that - this would be depriving us of existence, the fundamental good and God desires good for all of us - however since it is clear that there is no external standard that would make it wrong for Him to stop willing our existence entirely if He wanted to, it is clear that there cannot be such a standard that would prevent Him from changing our mode of existence from alive to dead. I say “external” to emphasize that the mere fact that He does not do so means that there is a standard, it’s just that the standard is Him - He “prevents” Himself from doing so if you want to think of it that way, but there is no way in which we could say, without referencing His own nature, that to do so would be unjust because we have no claims on Him; all of what would be good or bad for Him (or, indeed, us) to do is bound up in what He is.
Or, in short, God could kill us all if He wanted in such a way that the action was moral, but since we know that He desires the best for us, we can be justified in believing that if in someway God did decide that it was time for someone to die then that would be, in the grand scheme of things (which includes the little scheme of things, just to be clear) the best possible time for that person to die. But again, this is not to say that in such case we would have God arbitrarily deciding to kill someone at a specific time and so that time becoming the best time for the person to die, but that God’s Godness, or good’s goodness (which is pretty much the same thing), make that the best time for the person to die and furthermore for it to be best that God directly cause it to occur, and so God’s will that God directly cause the death, and so God’s action of killing. Furthermore, all three of those things (best time, God’s will, God’s action) happen at the same time (casually, that is - time does not apply) in the same way because all three are more or less the same thing.
That’s my take on things anyway, hopefully it’s at least somewhat decipherable. (And if it’s not, I’m blaming it on the fact that it’s 3 am and for some unknown reason I’m just now trying to explain it.)
