In Response to the Following:
“But how did we come to that conclusion [that God is morally good], nothing in the bible seems to point to that.”
It depends what you mean by “nothing in the bible seems to point to that.” The people in the Bible clearly do point to it, and not just point, but directly assert. For example:
Psalm 145:9
The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.
The Bible is full of such assertions. Even from people like Job, who could, if they wanted, make a truly convincing case that God is evil, based on personal experience. Yet, time and again, Job and others do exactly the opposite. The more evil they suffer, the more they insist on the goodness of God, and this continues right up until Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
In any case I suspect that this kind of thing is not what you mean. When you say “nothing in the bible seems to point to that”, I think what you mean is that you see that God inflicts pain, commands death, and generally allows all kinds of atrocities that you deem unnecessary. Thus by your judgment God is evil. Now, I could ask why you think your own judgement is sufficient, but that would simply bring us back to where we started. Instead, let us continue.
“What if the greatest trick Satan played was that he was a good God?”
This is what the Satanists have always claimed. That we all have the story backwards, that Lucifer is actually the good guy and God the Evil One. While God demands obedience, the Devil promises freedom. God gives commandments, the Devil says: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Isn’t freedom better than obedience? Why then do we side with God?
Well, it turns out that “do what thou wilt” is horrendous advice. It does not even serve as a good principle for secular practicality, let alone as the metaphysical axis of all human behavior. Even the Greek philosopher Epicurus, whose whole teaching boiled down to “seek pleasure while avoiding pain”, became convinced that his followers must “be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance”. Epicurus knew from experience that unchecked pleasure seeking ultimately brought far more pain than pleasure. Anyone who has been close to an addict, or has themselves been through addiction, knows this all too well. Epicurus felt obligated to pass this knowledge on to his disciples. And here we have an example of a commandment in its purest form - the passing on of knowledge for the good of a community. We shouldn’t be taken aback by the fact that God provides similar guidance. And anyone who has put God’s commandments into practice can tell you that, far from being evil or tyrannical dictates, they are solid and wise guidelines for a fulfilling life.
But I do not think you really wish to advocate for Satanism. I think your comment there was largely in the vein of your follow up commentary on the possibility of an evil God. I won’t quote the entire passage as it is quite long, but from what I can gather the main point of it comes down to something like:
Perhaps the God of the Bible truly is an evil God, perhaps he only allows us the little hope and goodness we have so that, through his evil schemes, he can crush us even more brutally when he ultimately deprives us of it. And, after all, given his track record in the Bible, doesn’t this seem quite a likely scenario?
How to respond to such an accusation? As it turns out, trying to prove that God is not evil is a funny task. As human beings, there is simply no argument, either from experience, or from evidence, which is truly immune to the divine machinations of an evil God. For example, I may say “I have experienced the goodness of God. I have felt the goodness and love of His Spirit, in prayer, and at various times when it pleased Him to make His presence known to me.” This is in fact quite true. That really is my experience. But of course an evil God could simply be tricking me. Being all powerful, he wouldn’t have too much trouble fooling a mere mortal. And this same problem reappears in every argument.
If we say “But look, he gave His only begotten Son for us! Surely this means He truly loves us”, you can say, “no, the whole Jesus thing was simply a trick, designed to give us false hope. Nothing was accomplished on the cross, it was all just illusion.”
In short, it is impossible to back an all-powerful deity into a corner. There is no logical proof which can defeat the Almighty, who is Himself the Creator of logic and the only one able to escape it. While this means that we could never truly prove that God is good, it also means we could never prove that he is evil.
So, seeing as this question cannot be answered propositionally, I instead ask you a practical question.
Unable to know for sure whether God is good or evil, do you want to bet on Him being evil and live the rest of your life from that perspective?
The consequences of such a choice would be devastating to the human spirit. The worst speculations of the depressive state would suddenly become reality. There really would be no point to anything. Nothing would matter. Whatever good you thought you could achieve would be meaningless. There would be no salvation, and no hope of anything ever getting better. To accept the proposition of an evil God is to choose, voluntarily, to live in a hopeless nightmare beyond the fantasies of even the darkest, most pessimistic nihilist.
In Dante’s Inferno, the phrase inscribed on the gates of Hell is “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here”. To propose that God is evil, is to scrawl that message across all of Creation.
We can be sure that a truly evil God would have no interest in providing for his creatures anything resembling an eternal, blissful Heaven. His afterlife would, no doubt, consist of nothing but endless suffering. Thus, after admonishing God for sending sinners to Hell, you propose to replace Him with a God who sends saints there as well.
On practical grounds, such a philosophy cannot be long entertained.
“No, this isn’t something different. This is a judgment of behavior vs a judgment of behavior. If we say that one definition of “good” is to not kill people and God kills people, then he isn’t good according to us.”
But the behaviors of two completely different creatures are never judged by the same standard. Do we judge the actions of an ant the same way we judge the actions of a dog? Both are judgments of behavior. But if we are bitten by an ant, we don’t accuse it of being a “bad ant”. We blame ourselves for sitting near it’s nest. But if we are bitten by our dog, we do indeed say “bad dog!” and usually concoct some punishment so that it alters it’s behavior.
Alternatively, do we judge the behavior of a child the same way we judge the behavior of an adult? Of course not. When my six month old daughter grabs the cat by the tail and pulls with all her strength, we do not say that she has committed some morally abhorrent act. But if I grabbed the cat by the tail and pulled with all my strength, I would indeed be guilty of abuse.
By what right then do we hold God to our standard? There is far more difference between us and God than there is between the child and the adult - indeed, there is more difference between us and God than between us and the ant. We are less than ants, less than fleas, less than mites, in comparison to God, and this makes the whole concept of levelling moral judgements against him absurd.
And even if we make our judgements, why would we expect them to be sensible? Can a flea give a reasonable complaint about the morality of a man? Can a two year old provide a detailed explanation of why the invasion of Iraq was morally justified or not? We are not God, we are not equal to God, and we are certainly not greater than God. Therefore our judgement is useless against him. God himself tells us as much through the prophet Isaiah:
Isaiah 55:8
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
“If you are going to claim that our judgment isn’t good enough for valuating God, then it means that our feelings and language doesn’t work and we should just shut up. In other words, we can’t say that God is good either.”
It is true that we cannot say that God is good purely as a consequence of our ability to make moral judgements about Him. But we say he is good for other reasons. First, because of our faith in Jesus who said:
No one is good but God alone.
Secondly, because many of us have had personal experiences of God’s goodness in our own lives. Sure, as we discussed, that could all be tricks from an evil God, but on a practical level it would be foolish to assume so. We are willing to believe that the good we have experienced is truly reflective of the good nature of God.
In any case, I would be happy enough to accept your proposal that we “just shut up.” I will not try to convince you to accept that God is good - I will leave that for Him to show you in due time - but I will take it as a step toward agreement if we can settle on being unable to judge God’s character altogether. Even if you do not agree that He is good, I think it would mark progress if you will remain agnostic on the question of God’s moral character in general, particularly if we can agree that your own judgment would be insufficient to make such a ruling.