Trent Horn tackles the challenging question of how to engage with someone who believes in God but struggles with the concept of God’s goodness. He delves into the nature of God, the problem of evil, and the foundation of objective morality.
Transcript:
So, my question for Trent is, I have a good friend who seems to believe in God, but just doesn’t believe God is good. Basically thinks God is basically evil in a sense, like just thinking he’s allowing everybody kind of like we’re toys. Like he’s just watching us all be miserable and suffer, and then to top it off, he’s going to send us to hell.
Sometimes it feels a little silly when I bring up my love for God.
So I’m just wondering how you think I could kind of meet this person where they’re at, and like, I don’t know, just talk to them a little in a way that they’ll hear.
Sure. I think you might ask them some questions. So I might ask them, well, how do you know? Like, what do you mean by the word God? What does that mean to you? Because traditionally, it’s actually theologians and philosophers that say it’s impossible for God to be evil.
I think a lot of modern people have a misunderstanding. When they say God, they just mean creator, and that is one of the attributes of God, creator of the universe. But we believe that God is more than just the creator of the universe, right? If it turned out our universe was part of a science project and some other dimension, and some kid mixed chemicals together in that dimension made our universe, that kid might be the creator of this universe, but he wouldn’t be God, because we naturally asked, well, what created that kid’s universe and him and all of these other people?
So God is not just the creator. We would say that God is the ultimate grounding of reality. God is not a being in the universe or a being floating outside the universe. God just is being itself. Or we might, some philosophers put it this way. God is a maximally great being. What’s the most perfect thing you can think of? And that would just be infinite being, infinite existence. It has all the great making properties.
So we say infinite, I should say, without limit. Like unlimited knowledge, unlimited power, unlimited goodness, right? Because something that has unlimited knowledge and power but isn’t good, well, it could be even better. So I think if they’re using the word God to just mean creator, then you might ask, well, are you saying that you just think there’s a creator of the universe, but the creator’s evil? How do you know that? Is it because, well, I see this evil thing and that evil thing and some people go to hell, so the creator is evil? Okay, but by that logic, you could say, here’s a good thing, here’s a good thing, and some people go to heaven. How do you know the creator isn’t good? Well, the fact of the matter is you can’t look around at the world and try to count elements of good and evil and say, oh, that’s how we know if the creator is good or evil. Instead, we have to say, well, what do you mean by good? What do you mean by good? Are you saying the way things should be? Like we watched in the Olympics, right? A good athlete is doing the sport the way they are supposed to, following the rules, hitting their marks, getting the points they’re supposed to. A bad athlete fails to do the sport as they should. But what do we mean to say that just creation should be good or God is good? To say there’s an objective goodness is to say there’s a way the universe ought to be. But if atheism is true, there’s no way anything ought to be. It’s just an accident.
But if God exists, that explains the existence of objective, perfect goodness itself. So if this person is trying to say the creator is evil, one of the ways of showing that God exists is to show, well, look, if there is an objective standard of good, if there is a grounding for objective morality, this goodness and goodness, moral goodness, especially obligations and commands between persons, that involves perfect persons.
Objective morality would flow then from an objectively perfect person who is the universal source of morality, makes moral statements true in all places, times, cultures, etc. Well God is the one thing that’s transcendent and perfect in all places, times, and cultures. So you might want to go the route of what C.S. Lewis did in showing that if there is objective goodness itself that grounds morality, we know what objective good is. Well what is that? If not God himself? God just is the objective good. And so you can’t even say that God is evil and trying to say something is good or evil, you’re borrowing from God as the objective foundation of morality itself. So that’s a few approaches I might take. Would you like any follow up from that? And I also have some resources I’d be happy to send you.
Thank you so much, Trent. Yeah, I read Mira Christian and I honestly, I personally struggled with even maybe grasping the whole if you think that the world is a skew then there must be a straight line to measure it against.
Right. I don’t know, I just feel like out there in the world there are these different cultures that do seem to have different kind of takes on what is morally right and wrong. And I mean even in one culture people can have different thoughts about what is morally right and wrong. What’s your response?
Right, but I would say just because cultures differ in what they claim to be moral, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t a correct answer. Throughout the history of humanity cultures have differed in what they consider to be scientific truths or mathematical truths are a good example. We don’t invent mathematical truths, we discover them. And some cultures got pretty far ahead in math and others had to catch up and still others they still have to catch up. But it doesn’t mean that math is an arbitrary thing and we all just come up with it on our own or each discovering it sort of at our own pace. If morality were independent of culture, if cultures could just decide what is moral, what isn’t moral, you have a lot of problems here. First, you wouldn’t be able to say one culture is better than another. That includes both seeing chronically like saying that one culture that practices genocide and another that opposes genocide that both of them are morally equivalent. You couldn’t do that if morality comes from culture or diachronically, so like across time. So how could you ever say, you might ask the person, we as a culture, did we become better in abolishing human slavery, like slavery, for example, the United States? Did our culture become better or did it just become different? You know, fashion changes, but just because men don’t wear top hats and tail coats anymore, it doesn’t mean we’re morally inferior, we’re just different.
But most people would say that things like slavery or child labor that exploits children or oppression of women and other marginalized people, that these things, it’s not just changing fashions or tastes that when evils are abolished and they go away and hearts and minds are changed, there’s an objective good, things are objectively getting better.
But otherwise, if culture just decides, then you can’t really make those sorts of claims. And you can’t even say that the culture that thinks, well, everybody should do what we say, that if you say morality is just dependent on culture, well, isn’t that just a product of your own culture? What about a culture that says morality is absolute? It ultimately is self-refuting.
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