Good Without God

1,650 Words, 8 minute read.

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 (ahem).

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 a perpetual state of moral crisis: “How do I feel about slavery? Why shouldn’t I wipe out this 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 resolves these doubts and introduces us to all-loving Abba…one God, two faces! 

The Book of Job is an elaborate symposium on the nature of Good generally and Justice specifically. The transcript features remarks from certain ‘wise guys’ from neighboring countries as well as 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’!   

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 to 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, “Six Seven!” He began following this strategy in Job…until he realized that his nature does not permit him to ignore 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 Good a subjective preference or an objective imperative? Is it the same for everyone in every circumstance or does it adapt and evolve? And how does good manifest in our world, i.e. in specific events? 

Historically speaking, the ‘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. Good is not a matter of caprice…yours, mine, or God’s.

2. The Good is manifest in our World as Beauty, Truth, and Justice.

3. The individual actor is ultimately responsible for identifying and pursuing what is Good in the context of 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 be good; God is deciding how best to do good. Something we should all be doing, BTW!

No actual entity, divine or otherwise, 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. I weighed the options and I made my choice. Now I just have to come up with some sort of justification for my actions. 

In this instance, 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 I’m ashamed of the former and proud of the latter.  

Good per se is eternal and invariable but what is good is specific to each act. It can even evolve over the course of an act. Nevertheless, God’s actions in the World, and ours, are always undertaken in pursuit of transcendent, universal Value. 

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 old 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 that there is Good.

We won’t necessarily agree which paintings in MOMA are most beautiful (or which version of history is most true, or which set of laws is most just), but we should agree that Beauty (or Truth or Justice), however defined, is the proper criterion for judging. 

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 today, 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 imperative. 

Ayer chose to make kindness his moral imperative, 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 does what is right…in their own eyes.” (Judges 21: 25)

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 ethos.

Gatsby too is a man of Faith. The object of his faith is his Ultimate Concern, but he is ultimately concerned with sensual gratification, conspicuous consumption, and social status. His ‘faith’ is idolatry.

So Good is an invariable 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; 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 self-determination, including God himself. So no, we don’t need God in order to be good; my neighbor proved that. But we still need God to objectify (i.e. model) Value in and for our World. Good is not just a pile of specific goods. Good is an organism consisting of specific goods and functioning harmoniously in service to the whole (which is God). 

Part of what makes goods good is their limitless ability to work in harmony with all other goods in a single organism, the Good. God constitutes the arena that makes it possible for innumerable specific goods to work together to manifest a single Good; but it is the mutual compatibility inherent in all goods that makes it possible that God exists. God and Good are symbionts. 

Again, Nietzsche nailed it: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols) 

If nothing transcends the immediate and the immanent, the concept of Value per se is meaningless. Value must transcend what is being valued. We must be able to differentiate objectively and normatively between the ethics of St. Francis and Mother Theresa and those of Mussolini and Stalin. We can only tolerate so much subjectivism, humanism, and relativism. Any philosophy that fails to satisfy this moral imperative is bankrupt and for that we still need God.

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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.