You are not willing to apply a moral standard to God (whatever that word means to you) and you’re saying God has no obligation to intervene and prevent evil, even though He knows about it and can intervene. How moral standards can know things is unclear to me. Omniscience requires a brain to store that knowledge. Moral standards are abstract concepts without brains. You also seem uncertain about whether God is good at all:
God doesn’t have a brain? Anyway, you’re taking a typo of mine and running wild with it. God isn’t a set of moral standards. He is, however, a being that isn’t just higher than us, but truly something that transcends all categories. My point is that God doesn’t have some lower bar. That doesn’t mean he must behave as a human. It’s kind of like saying “A good orange is orange in color, therefore good men must also be orange in color.” It’s a non-sequitur.
Well, that’s the main point. If you don’t want to assert that God is good, then we’re done.
God is Good. You keep making a categorical error and trying to treat God as some superhuman. He is not good in that he behaves good (though he does), he is goodness itself. It’s more of a noun than an adjective. Goodness is convertible with his Being, as well as his Power, Knowledge, etc . . .
Goodness is being. Evil is a deprivation of being. For a finite object, we are looking at how well something instantiates what it is. A good triangle is a closed shape connected by three geodesics. (A good euclidean triangle furthermore has angles that add up to 180 degrees). A failure for a real triangle to instantiate it’s form perfectly, such as it not being a perfectly closed shape, or having imperfectly straight sides, are deficiencies in it instantiating its being. It’s what makes it no longer a good triangle. Living beings have their form as well, and they also have ends as part of it. Living, growing, reproducing. These ends are intrinsic to what something is, and a good squirrel, for example, is one that not only has four legs and a bushy tail and scampers up trees, but one that stores acorns in its abode for winter instead of rocks, and successfully pursues its end as a living animal. Humans are animals as well, but we are rational beings, and these furthermore come with ends that are intrinsic to what we are and to which good humans pursue. It’s only a moral issue when it comes down to rational choices regarding these ends and our actions. But the better we instantiate the moral ends of a human being, the better we live our lives as moral beings. To act otherwise is actually a deprivation of being, being meaning our existence and instantiation of what we are.
God is not a biological being. He’s not a material being. He’s not a temporal being. He’s not *a *spiritual being. He’s not even *a *being. He’s Being itself. He is Existence. What he is is no different than that he is. He is full actuality with no potential in himself. He is simply being, and being is convertible with goodness. Everything is good insofar as it
is. It’s when a being rationally chooses to act against what it is (and the ends intrinsic to it), to create some type of non-being in itself (as it’s final causes for being, that is, its ends, is a part of its being), that evil is done.
God is Good. But he’s not some individual who behaves morally, if that’s what you’re asking. And the issue there isn’t even really the moral part, it’s the treating of him as some type of individual. You pull God into the realm of creatures and no longer speak of God when you do so.
Your posts seems to be missing my repeated stressing on the use of analogous language in reference to God. It doesn’t mean I’m saying God is not good. It means I’m saying that, when we say God is good, we mean it analogously to how we understand good, and we can illustrate that analogy by understanding the different ways we speak analogously in everyday language, and we mean in it the sense of that common thread that runs between all analogous uses of good, not as simply a good human or moral good as applied to human beings.
But if you reject the use of analogous language in general, we’re talking past each other. And if you won’t recognize analogous language, then it might be more beneficial to stop speaking of God as good, and easier for you to understand if, instead of affirming any positive attribute, we simply say negative statements like “God is not not good” and “God is not evil” without affirming anything positive, because if you insist on univocal language, any positive description is ultimately inadequate to describe God. I don’t think univocal language is really proper, but at least we can avoid the anthropomorphic view of God.
But here we go off topic, but it’s why I find the problem of evil to be such a poor argument. Perhaps I rule it out too strongly, but it’s no home run or even any clear argument for the atheist, and is at best some type of gray area which ultimately rests on a conception of God I don’t believe in. And if the best arguments for atheism rest on rebuttals of a conception of God that is not the same one that’s been affirmed by theists or even just the Catholic church for millennia (you’d think that would be plenty of time to come to properly understand what you’re supposedly objecting to), I’m not going to find it that persuasive.
And it’s why I think that the argument about God’s apparent absence, which is not in any way a proof either, is the best argument against God’s existence.
