I commend your efforts with your daughter and agree that it can be a tiring task. I have heard the statement that God does not need a lawyer, which is logical on principle, but it doesn't always feel that way (hence the statement's origin).
To your point about assuming God's benevolence, it is true that if one unwaveringly believes Him to…
I commend your efforts with your daughter and agree that it can be a tiring task. I have heard the statement that God does not need a lawyer, which is logical on principle, but it doesn't always feel that way (hence the statement's origin).
To your point about assuming God's benevolence, it is true that if one unwaveringly believes Him to be good then nothing the Bible says can change that belief. I would note that the belief of His goodness and our concept of morality itself are intertwined with each other (i.e., the source of morality is God, evidence for his existence includes some common ground on morality). In other words, square 1 isn't "God is always good" but rather that's a conclusion which is then a lens through which everything from that point should be understood.
People do not grant God status as the moral law giver so they allow some parts of their view of morality to be shaped by their own setting rather than an external source. But morality must be objective to be maximally useful: if two interacting people (or cultures) disagree about whether an action is immoral they are at an impasse as to whether to allow it. And agreement on very basic moral concepts is wide and apparently innate, thus pointing to an external source (a law giver). For example, if a person approached a stranger and punched him, the victim would universally be opposed to that and feel no need to appeal to a complicated moral code to justify that the action was wrong—it just is clearly wrong.
Indeed some crimes are universally accepted as immoral, such as the killing of babies. That's precisely what makes the last plague so hard to reconcile with benevolence. If God commits an act that everyone regards as immoral, what claim does He have on being the universal origin of morality? Almost nobody thinks killing babies is a moral act.
The Bible presents God as at liberty to do what He deems best with His creation. For example, His extended speech to Job (“where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”), telling Moses He will have mercy on whom He has mercy, the potter having rightful control over the clay. Of course this is nearly impossible if not impossible to accept if one does not understand God to be the Creator, and still very challenging for those who do think He is, but God having an entirely different relationship to the world as its Creator than we do as its finite inhabitants means He can act accordingly while still being moral.
So, to recap, God is not so much always good as he is the source of the very notion of objective good, which we can identify with what is universally recognized as good, except when he kills babies, which is a case where he is still good because he made those babies, even though not many people think that if you make a baby that gives you the right to kill it.
I would recap differently of course. God is always good and we cannot judge Him as being wrong because He is the source of objective morality. It is expected that many would not accept Him as the one true God and so they view His acts through the lens of what all other beings can permissibly do. And even for those who do accept Him as God, it is expected that He would act in ways that we do not understand.
Thank you so much, John. Your faith is inspiring. My debate is really not with you, but with people that have considerably less faith than you. What I'm looking for is a role for reading the Bible with children within a religion that worships doubt as the source of all insight, not God as the source of all that is good.
Bottom line. If God is the highest objective good, He cannot be all-powerful. He must be fragile, and hidden and hard to discern. He cannot have written the Bible, because only people could have written the Bible and their perception of the highest objective good was bound to be flawed.
I commend your efforts with your daughter and agree that it can be a tiring task. I have heard the statement that God does not need a lawyer, which is logical on principle, but it doesn't always feel that way (hence the statement's origin).
To your point about assuming God's benevolence, it is true that if one unwaveringly believes Him to be good then nothing the Bible says can change that belief. I would note that the belief of His goodness and our concept of morality itself are intertwined with each other (i.e., the source of morality is God, evidence for his existence includes some common ground on morality). In other words, square 1 isn't "God is always good" but rather that's a conclusion which is then a lens through which everything from that point should be understood.
If God is the source of all morality, how can the view of what is moral and not moral vary across the cultures of the world?
People do not grant God status as the moral law giver so they allow some parts of their view of morality to be shaped by their own setting rather than an external source. But morality must be objective to be maximally useful: if two interacting people (or cultures) disagree about whether an action is immoral they are at an impasse as to whether to allow it. And agreement on very basic moral concepts is wide and apparently innate, thus pointing to an external source (a law giver). For example, if a person approached a stranger and punched him, the victim would universally be opposed to that and feel no need to appeal to a complicated moral code to justify that the action was wrong—it just is clearly wrong.
Indeed some crimes are universally accepted as immoral, such as the killing of babies. That's precisely what makes the last plague so hard to reconcile with benevolence. If God commits an act that everyone regards as immoral, what claim does He have on being the universal origin of morality? Almost nobody thinks killing babies is a moral act.
The Bible presents God as at liberty to do what He deems best with His creation. For example, His extended speech to Job (“where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”), telling Moses He will have mercy on whom He has mercy, the potter having rightful control over the clay. Of course this is nearly impossible if not impossible to accept if one does not understand God to be the Creator, and still very challenging for those who do think He is, but God having an entirely different relationship to the world as its Creator than we do as its finite inhabitants means He can act accordingly while still being moral.
So, to recap, God is not so much always good as he is the source of the very notion of objective good, which we can identify with what is universally recognized as good, except when he kills babies, which is a case where he is still good because he made those babies, even though not many people think that if you make a baby that gives you the right to kill it.
I would recap differently of course. God is always good and we cannot judge Him as being wrong because He is the source of objective morality. It is expected that many would not accept Him as the one true God and so they view His acts through the lens of what all other beings can permissibly do. And even for those who do accept Him as God, it is expected that He would act in ways that we do not understand.
Thank you so much, John. Your faith is inspiring. My debate is really not with you, but with people that have considerably less faith than you. What I'm looking for is a role for reading the Bible with children within a religion that worships doubt as the source of all insight, not God as the source of all that is good.
Bottom line. If God is the highest objective good, He cannot be all-powerful. He must be fragile, and hidden and hard to discern. He cannot have written the Bible, because only people could have written the Bible and their perception of the highest objective good was bound to be flawed.