Dilettante wrote:The answers given by ST88 and Zoot only confuse me further. If the word "good" does not mean the same to God as it means to us, then we cannot say "God is good" in any meaningful sense. We are totally in the dark.
Welcome to agnosticism.
Dilettante wrote:The proposition "God is all good" must be abandoned or rephrased as "Good is all good, but in a sense wholly unknown to us, and which may appear as completely evil".
I find it curious that there are people who are willing to hate God because bad things happen in the world. This I don't get. According to what I understand about Christianity -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- life is not a right, it's a privilege. So if we understand an act of God to be evil, we are not asserting our right to our own life, we are denying ourselves the privilege of being in God's grace. Hating God is a corruption of belief because God is all-good, and to hate Him is to acknowledge that there is such a thing as Salvation and actively renounce it. This is irrational. Assuming for the moment the existence of God, which Christians do, it must be the case that whatever God does has meaning and is somehow a good thing. To deny this is crazy.
Dilettante wrote:It seems to me that in that case we cannot tell for certain whether, say, Osama Bin Laden is serving God or the Devil, whether he is a saint or a sinner. It means that we cannot know anything about God, let alone how to worship him.
Don't forget that by all accounts OBL thinks he's doing God's work.
Dilettante wrote:In that case there seems to be no point in religion at all.
Quite the contrary. If it is counter-intuitive to believe that whatever God does is good because it may
appear to be evil, then we would need a constant religious reminder about God's goodness in order to keep us from straying.
Dilettante wrote:Of course, it could also mean that morality rests on divine command, but this view was shown to be absurd by Plato in the "Euthyphro" as well as by many other philosophers.
Just to be contrary, perhaps, I would state that the Euthyphro doesn't exactly say it is absurd to accept divine command as morality. It says that it is absurd to an observer when someone else
acts on this divine command. Plato does not seem to come to any conclusions with Euthyphro, and, in fact, he can't. At one point Socrates says, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" There is no answer.
Dilettante wrote:I just read an article by the late Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie entitled "Evil and Omnipotence". In this brilliant article Mackie argues that the only way out for theists is to admit limits to what an omnipotent being can do, that is, to restrict the meaning of "omnipotent". This reminds me of the paradox of omnipotence, where God can, because he is all-powerful, create such a thing as a rock which no amount of force could vere lift. Can God himself lift it? Of course not, by definition no one can. So it follows that there are limits to what an omnipotent being can do.
Such arguments are easily dismissed as logic traps -- simple language tricks akin to an Escher drawing: imagistically conceivable but without meaning in the real world.