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If
you were ever a kid, you probably went through a stage when you asked your
parents why something was right and when they told you, you asked why that
was right, and then why that was right, and so on until you got an
answer that was final enough, such as: (a) “Because I said so;” (b) “Shut-up,
kid;” or (c) Here’s why (whap, whap, whap).[1]
Perhaps
you were not completely satisfied with those answers, though, and now that you
are older and more philosophical, you might want to return to such
questions. Why should you avoid X? The answer, perhaps, is that X would do
somebody some harm. So, why is that a
bad thing? Well, no one wants to be
hurt. That in turn raises other
questions, such as “aren’t some things good even though they hurt?” and even
“why should it matter if people don’t want to be hurt?” Whatever the answers to those questions
might be, you can keep asking why, and keep asking why, until eventually you
come to a point where there is nothing left to say.
It
seems as if there is not, and cannot be, any final answer to Why?
Does
God solve that problem for you? Not
really. When you get to the point where
you are saying, “Avoid X because God commanded it,” the perfectly obvious
question is: Why should that matter?
Would we avoid X because Saddam Hussein commanded it?
God
has at least three good things going for him, according to common belief: he is
all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, whereas Saddam Hussein comes up a tad
short on these measures. Do these
things matter, though?
God’s
power seems irrelevant, unless all you are worried about is his ability to
punish you if you mess up. The devil is
supposedly powerful too, but in an evil way.
Power, by itself, does not equal goodness or provide a moral mandate for
obedience. One rule we all know is:
might does not make right.
Knowledge
seems like a better recommendation – though not a really solid one. After all, the devil is supposed to be
supernaturally knowledgeable, too – not necessarily any less so than God. The relevant difference between God and the
devil is not power or knowledge, but how that power and knowledge is used: God
uses it for good, the devil for evil.
But how do we know that? If God
says, “I’m the good one,” but Lucifer says, “No, I’m the good one,” how do we
determine who’s telling the truth?
If
good and evil apply to beings at the top of the supernatural food chain, then
this seems to suggest that good and evil are something outside and even above
God and the devil. If God ceased
existing, would good and evil still make sense?
Most
of us think that it would. What God
says is good is not good merely because he said so. Rather, it seems, God tells us what is good because it is
good and he wants us to be good. God
does not make it good. Wanton murder
would not be good if God was having a bad day and decided to say that it was.
Furthermore,
if things were good just because God said so, then we couldn’t say that God
himself was good. All we could say is that
he is in the lucky position of being able to set the standards. God can only be called “good” if that word
has some meaning outside of God’s say-so.
Therefore,
God is not the final justification for good and evil. We might suppose that he knows more about it
than anyone else, and that if we are wise we will follow his commandments on
that account. But that would be mere
prudence on our part (or maybe not – we’ll come back to this later).
So
we are still left to wonder, what makes goodness good, and makes evilness
evil? It isn’t God. But if not God, what?
If
you’re waiting for the answer, you’re not going to get it yet. This line of thought leads us into empty
space. At some point, we just have to
say: I can’t explain it, I just know (or am willing to accept) that certain
actions or certain principles are good, and others are bad. And we have to do that whether we believe in
God or not. So from this angle, belief
in God doesn’t solve our problems.
Let’s
go after it a different way.
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© 2006 by
C.S. Yanikoski, Harvard, Massachusetts