Good God Too

Once upon a time, we defined ‘being good’ in terms of an external metric like the Ten Commandments, or the 613 mitzvah of Torah, or the precedents of English Common Law, or the Rules dad just posted on the refrigerator door. ‘Good’ was a function of Rules, Rules a function of Authority, and Authority a function of Divine Right. Once upon a time…

Now we determine for ourselves what is Good, and we use that determination to regulate our conduct and ultimately, to define our God. God no longer offers standards for us to meet (“Love one another”), now we impose our standards on God (“Do this for me”). Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue, now I judge the Decalogue by my standards. 

When I say something is ‘good’, I mean that I would like it to be so. It’s how I’d like things to be: ‘a good job, a good marriage, good children, etc.’ It may or may not be so or, very likely, it may be so but only imperfectly or in part; but to whatever extent it is so, it is good. To be is to be good! What is not good, to the extent that it is not good, simply is not. 

Of course, many things seem to mix good and bad parts or aspects…but that is an illusion! Such ‘things’ are just incomplete. (They avoided military service; they failed to be all that they could be.) 

Example: A glass of milk turns sour. Now it is less perfectly ‘milk’ than it was before. It has lost one of the defining characteristics of ‘milk’, namely, its refreshing drinkability. Of course, it is still a liquid; it retains those attributes. But as ‘milk’, it is less good than it was before, and therefore it is ‘less milk’ than it was.  Its ‘milkness’ is incomplete. I know, crazy…but makes sense.

Evil is privatio boni - a privation or absence of good, much like darkness is the absence of light or cold the absence of heat. Evil is Good, unrealized! They say there’s no such thing as a ‘bad boy’ and they’re right! But I’ve known my share of ragazzi who were ‘insufficiently virtuous’. In fact, I think Sister Mary Martha wrote that very phrase at the bottom of my 3rd grade report card. (P.S. It was not well received by my overlords!)

If this seems like an arcane distinction, it isn’t. It’s a crucial tenet of Christian ontology, dating back at least as far as Augustine (c. 500 CE). It is part of what distinguishes monotheism from gnostic dualism.

Of course, we still use the word, ‘evil’: “Deliver us from evil!” But evil in this context refers to sin, entropy and death: privationes boni. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer replace ‘evil’ with ‘the evil one’ (or Satan). But even here, ‘Satan’ needs to be understood as Being’s template or shadow, not as an Actual Entity in his own right. Without God, there is no Satan!

There is no such thing as Evil per se; it does not exist because to be is to be good. Nothing is bad per se. “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” (Ray Stevens) and all things are bright and beautiful…to the extent they are at all. 

Admittedly, this is an unfamiliar way to view the world. We love black and white; we hate grey. (Or is it that we love grey and hate black and white?) We love to put labels on things so that we can relativize them and contextualize them down the road.

God is Good. Good is God’s essence; it’s what God is. Good is who God is. Good is what God does. According to Sartre…and Job  ... God's essence (Good) precedes (logically only) his existence. 

God is Good. It’s hard to imagine otherwise. And yet, for that very reason, knowing that God is good is not very helpful. It only matters if we know what constitutes Good. And where might we find such knowledge? Perhaps it was revealed by God in Torah or the Gospels…but note the circular reasoning. 

Or, as noted above, defining Good may be up to us after all. But how? Perhaps we are endowed by God with souls that have an innate sense of Good…but that too would be circular. 

Or maybe an innate sense of Good has evolved naturally and is now encoded in our DNA. But in that case, Good would just be synonymous with pragmatic and we know that that is often not the case.

Or perhaps we develop a sense of Good by applying reason to our experiences, personal and collective. Obviously, this is a big leap. It confers virtual sovereignty on our capacity to experience events accurately and to reason about them logically. 

Nevertheless, of the options available, this is the ‘least obviously impossible’, so following the logic of Blaise Pascal and Sherlock Holmes, when we remove whatever is absurd, meaningless, oxymoronic, irredeemable or impossible, we must consider that whatever is left is at least probable.

‘Good’ has a dense connotative value but zero denotative value. Saying something is ‘good’ says nothing specific about the thing itself but everything about how the thing templates its world. 

In this context, Good is a verb. It describes a process rather than a steady state. That is why we only experience God as ‘active’ in our World. That is why idolatry is a bad faith, passive version of iconoclastic Atheism. 

For a concept to be useful, it needs to be fleshed out with applications identifiable in the course of ordinary human experience (e.g. measurements); but those applications need to be something other than habits, tastes, and opinions.

There can never be 100% consensus about what constitutes the Good but, if the concept has validity, we should be able to detect some semantic convergence. Indeed, folks broadly agree that Good is experienced by us in our world as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. 

Let’s be clear: we may vehemently disagree about what objects are beautiful, what propositions true, what social structures just. But for the most part, we agree that there are such things as Beauty, Truth, and Justice and that they are desirable in their own right. The alternative is some form of nihilism.

Of course, my ideas of what constitutes Beauty, Truth, or Justice may be polar opposite to yours. That doesn’t matter as long as we agree that it is legitimate to apply these three values, as we interpret them, in every situation.

Consider the alternative: you are a person who assigns no value, or even a negative value, to Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice. Now we have a problem, don’t we? I will debate forever about what constitutes Justice, but I can’t have any conversation with someone who does not recognize Justice as a value.

Of course, in God, Beauty, Truth, and Justice are not distinct. God is one, God is simple, God is just plain Good. But that Goodness appears in our world in diverse forms appropriate to different media of experience. 

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Pablo Picasso — Guernica (1937), oil on canvas - Picasso’s vast monochrome mural confronts the horrors of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Fragmented human and animal forms writhe in a shattered space, their beauty stripped to stark geometric agony. Light—symbolized by a glaring bulb and a woman’s candle—flickers as fragile truth amid overwhelming darkness and moral chaos.