Good Without God

My next door neighbor is a bit of a superhero on our street. Last year, he was out on a jog when we saw a man abusing his dog. He stopped and confronted the man who shouted, “You want this f***in’ dog? He’s yours!”

A thousand dollar vet bill later, Eureka has become a loved member of our little community, and my neighbor is the admiration of us all. An assistant professor at our local community college, Dom drives an OG EV with a bumper sticker that reads, “Science is my God.” 

Google him. He belongs to a number of ‘humanist’ organizations, and he is listed as an officer of Reason not Religion. In other words, he’s a ‘card carrying atheist’ - but that hasn’t stopped him from being a much better person than a certain pet free church going next door neighbor of his.

Whenever I hear some puffed up theist claim, “There is no Good without God!” I can’t help thinking of Dom. He is living proof that believing in God is not a prerequisite for doing good. 

But things are not quite that simple, are they? 

In academic theology, there is a division between those who believe that ‘Good makes God, God’ and those who believe that ‘God makes Good, Good’. Is God ‘God’ because he is Good or is Good ‘Good’ because God wills it’? Those holding the later view understandably seek to defend God’s Sovereignty. Good on them, but IMO, their view is neither Biblically grounded nor philosophically cogent.

On the contrary, the Old Testament shows YHWH in perpetual moral crisis: “How do I feel about slavery? Why shouldn’t I wipe out the sinful human race? Did I treat Job unfairly? Should I spare a wicked city for the sake of a tiny minority of virtuous residents - I mean there’s such a thing as collateral damage, isn’t there?”  

The New Testament introduces us to all-loving Abba… One God, two faces!shows us YHWH in an almost perpetual state of moral crisis: 

The entire Book of Job  is basically an elaborate symposium on the nature of Good generally and Justice specifically. The agenda features leading theologians from neighboring countries and graphic testimony from a victim of great human suffering, none other than Job himself. Finally, spoiler alert, El Shaddai, God himself, makes a cameo appearance…and there’s a whirlwind. (Andrew Lloyd Weber, eat your heart out.) This is ‘must see TV’!   

In the language of existential theologian, Paul Tillich, Good is God’s Ultimate Concern. In Jesus’ parable (Matthew 13: 45-46), Good is the Pearl of Great Price for which one eagerly sacrifices all else. 

This ethical meditation undermines both standard theological theses (above): (1) If Good is nothing but God’s Will, then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done! But (2) if God is God because he is Good, in other words, if Good is essential in God’s nature (Sartre), then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done. 

If God were indifferent to Good, he’d just do what he felt like doing and, if challenged, shrug and say, “Whatever!” He actually tested this strategy in Job…until he realized that his nature does not permit him to ignore the Good. 

Clearly neither of the standard theses is up to the task of elucidating the nature of the Good as it is presented in scripture. 

So, is the Good a subjective preference or an objective imperative? Is it the same for everyone in every circumstance or does it adapt and evolve? How does Good manifest in our world and how do we apply it to specific events? 

Historically speaking, the eight ‘earliest’ books of the Old Testament (Torah & the 3 J’s - Joshua, Judges, and Job) provide a detailed record of Israel’s search for firm ethical principles on which to build a new society. While each book has its own special take on the subject, a consensus emerges:

1. The Good is not a matter of caprice…yours, mine, or God’s.

2. The Good is manifest in our World through several modalities, including at a minimum Beauty, Truth, and Justice.

3. The individual actor is ultimately responsible for identifying and pursuing the Good (Beauty, Truth, Justice) in each specific event.   

In his process of decision making, God takes advice wherever he can get it, even from mere mortals like Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets. God is not deciding whether to do good; God is deciding how best to be good. Something we should all be doing!

No actual entity, divine or other, can undertake to do anything that is not good. By definition, to act is to move toward a goal and a goal, to be a goal, must be good…as Good is conceived by that actor in that situation. 

Example: I let 100 people drown in order to save myself. What I did was good…in my eyes. In this instance at least, I prioritized my interests over others’. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll race into a burning building to rescue a baby. In both cases I will have done what was good in my eyes, then and there, even if later on I’m ashamed of myself.  

Good per se is eternal and invariable but what is good is specific to each act of each actor in each situation. God’s actions in the World, and ours, are undertaken in pursuit of universal, transcendental values. 

The New Testament introduces all-loving Abba: ‘Meet the new God, same as the old God!’ (The Who) While YHWH resolved ethical dilemmas through a synthesis of action, Abba resolves them through a synthesis of Love. One God, two faces! 

We do not always agree about what is good. I’m sure there are people out there ready to take the side of Eureka’s cruel owner. And they could be well intentioned and armed with cogent arguments. We don’t always agree about what is good, but we should agree about what is Good.

‘Good’ is an abstract concept; it is a label we slap on obedient children so that we can justify loving them… and so that we can say we’re proud of them. It has no denotative meaning. We are only concerned with the concrete manifestations of Good and those manifestations include, at a minimum, Beauty, Truth, and Justice. 

Again, we won’t necessarily agree which paintings at MOMA are the most beautiful (or which version of history is true, or which set of laws is just), but we should agree that Beauty (or Truth or Justice) is the criterion to use in judging them. 

My neighbor is a good person; he appreciates Beauty, he seeks Truth for a living, and he is obsessed with Justice. The fact that he does not believe in the existence of God is irrelevant.

Logical Positivist A. J. Ayer did not believe in the existence of God either. Contrary to Nietzsche, however, he believed that he could give his life meaning by choosing to live according to a self-selected set of values. Ayer’s preferred categorical imperative was kindness.

Now in our circles, this would seem to be a pretty safe bet. I’m not sure I know anyone who would argue that kindness is incompatible with Good. On the other hand, such an ethical choice would have made Nietzsche sick.

In fact, I am not at all sure that the majority of the 100 billion human beings who have ever lived on Earth would have agreed with Ayer, or me, that kindness is an ethical absolute. 

In this age of moral relativism, when ‘everything is permitted’ (Dostoevsky), it is up to us to define what we consider good. Ayer’s choice of ‘kindness’ barely raises an eyebrow. But what of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anti-hero, the great Gatsby? He chooses living well as his ethical imperative.

Gatsby is a man of Faith. The object of his faith is his Ultimate Concern (Tillich) but he is ultimately concerned with sensual gratification, conspicuous consumption, and social status. His faith has become idolatry.

So Good is an invariable but abstract universal standard while good is determined by each actor in each circumstance using the concept of Good as a guide. This is an inescapable element in the human condition Hot Link to Human Predicament; it is an inescapable element in the cosmic condition as well. Good is a guide, not just to human beings but to every entity capable of conscious experience, including God himself…and perhaps the cosmos itself. 

And how is this working out for you? I think you’ll agree that we’re pretty much in a state of moral chaos. So what went wrong?

For that answer, we need to travel back more than 3,000 years in Israeli history. According to the Old Testament Book of Judges, during this era which lasted up to 250 years, “…Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 17:6 and 21:25)

So just like now in other words? Well, no, not exactly! During the reign of judges, actors had access to more than their own subjectivity in determining what was right. The abstract concept of Good, manifest as Beauty, Truth, and Justice, was given concrete relevance via the 613 Mitzvah of the Torah.

Ultimate ethical responsibility, then and now, rests with the individual actor. Likewise, the Good and its manifestations (Beauty, Truth, Justice) were just as normative in 1250 BCE as they are today. 

However, our ancestors had access to a 250 page Instruction Manual (Torah) that included detailed assembly directions, virtual schematics, and helpful tips (anecdotes) generally. Our kits, on the other hand, arrived from IKEA with nothing more than a box containing the jumbled parts. 

You know the rest: while our ancestors built a stable, prosperous and relatively peaceful theocracy, we’re building dystopian Rube Goldberg machines. Truly, we are Beyond Thunderdome!  (Mad Max)

No one needs God in order to be good. My neighbor proves that. A. J. Ayer chose to make kindness his moral imperative, and I’ll assume he lived his life accordingly. But he might have chosen inflexibility or indifference and who would we be to disagree. As moral relativists, we are forced to concede that all ethical systems are equally valid and normative…for those who adopt them. Everyone is doing what is right…in their own eyes.

We don’t need God to be good; but we do need God to know what good is. We must be able to differentiate objectively and normatively the ethics of St. Francis and Mother Theresa from those of Mussolini and Stalin. Any cosmology that fails to satisfy this imperative is intellectually bankrupt. 

God is ‘Good with a Guide’. We are existentially free to follow any moral code (or no moral code) but we are ethically bound to instantiate God’s values in whatever we do… to the extent that we are able to recognize and apply them in situ.

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Image: The Paralytic Man Helped by His Children by Jean-Baptiste Greuze is an 18th-century painting that portrays a touching domestic scene where a paralyzed father is tenderly cared for by his devoted children. With its emotional depth and realistic detail, the work exemplifies Greuze’s focus on moral virtue, family duty, and sentimentality, central themes of the Enlightenment. The painting highlights the nobility of everyday life, emphasizing compassion and filial piety over grand historical or mythological subjects.