January 26: 2010: Why I Believe In The Goodness Of God

"In light of the suffering that is going on in Haiti, how can you believe that God is good?"

That question is distinct from the one that asks whether God even exists. I have never been able to doubt his existence. (See the February 1, 2004 posting, "Why I Am A Theist".) I cannot conceive of a self-creating cosmos: the mere fact that there is a universe has always been enough to persuade me that a self-existing Creator made it. Or, to put it another way, I cannot imagine a world existing but unmade; however, I can imagine an eternally existent, unmade God. I believe that that God lives.

But is he good? That is the question that gnawed at me from time to time during my college years. I never thought that God might be bad (like the Divine Sadist of Salieri's fevered imagination in the film "Amadeus"), so much as "beyond good and evil." Could it be that things like pain and pleasure, hope and despair, right and wrong, life and death - all things of great importance to us - would all turn out to be petty parochial concerns before that everlasting omnipotent Deity? In the same way that you could never bribe such a God with money or tempt him with pleasure or feed him with food, could you ever please him with goodness? Did he care about right behavior? Or were goodness and badness sub-divine, human creations that did not rise to the Eternal Spirit? I knew that goodness must govern human action, but could anything, even goodness, govern the behavior of God? Was he "above all that"?

Part of the answer to my questions has come from the fact that, in the end, I have not been able to conceive of goodness as a "petty parochial concern." There is something fundamental about goodness that resists all efforts to reduce it to the product of blind evolutionary forces, and if a Creator "put" goodness into his universe, then how could he himself not be good? Where in the world did goodness (and our awareness of it) come from?

If it is asked, "But couldn't exactly the same thing be said about evil?", the answer is no, it couldn't. Evil is spoiled goodness, or the absence of goodness; but contrariwise goodness is not "reformed evil" or the absence thereof. Goodness has a "stand-alone" quality that evil lacks, as though goodness were the host and evil the parasite. Take away evil and you have good; take away good and you have nothing. Evil is not so much the opposite of good as it is the perversion or degradation of it.

I believe in a good God because I believe in goodness. When I say I "believe in goodness" I do not mean that I happen to like it or favor it or that it holds a strong appeal for me or that I wish there were more of it. I mean literally that I believe in it; I believe goodness exists, like a mathematical primitive, and cannot be explained as the product of other elements. Just as numbers would still exist if there were no humans to count things, so goodness would exist if there were no humans to do right.

While "the problem of evil" is frequently invoked as an argument against the existence of a good God, I believe that atheism and deism (the belief in a non-moral, distant God) have a far more serious difficulty trying to explain "the problem of good"! How do you account for it? While it cannot be denied that there are horrors in Haiti (and elsewhere), neither can it be denied that there exist pleasures inexpressible, scenes of great beauty, acts of kind service and self-sacrifice, music, chocolate, hope, hospitality and good cheer. All that kind of thing. Goodness in every form beckons us, through a vale of evil and pain, to the Power that installed it in the universe as a reflection of Itself. Goodness trickles down to us through cool streams in desert lands from its source high, high in the mountains of God.

Only because I believe in goodness, real goodness, am I able to despise, reject, hate, oppose, flee from, or try to fix evil. All badness must be "put to right" in accordance with the will of our good Creator. So: heal the sick, feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, repent of your sins, vanquish all selfishness and pride. That is what our good God wants and delights to see.