Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[Ignorant]

@Ignorant, I've spent some time pondering your definition of "good", and it still leaves me confused. You say goodness is subjective, but you also say we can be wrong about our perception of goodness (like Hitler). You also say that goodness is for the sake of other goodness, and I'm not sure what purpose that serves in your definition. Then you throw God in at the end and say if he satisfies all our desires then he is goodness itself. What does "goodness itself" mean? I thought Christians believed that God was a person.

So I give up. No more questions.

Your confusion is due to a few things, I suspect:

1) I do not mean the same thing by the words "subjective" and "relative" as in the common way most people use those terms. Subjective means that the judgment is made by a subject, a judge, an observer. Goodness is "subjective" in that it requires a subject to judge it according to his own experience. Goodness is "objective" (i.e. either truly good or else only apparently good) according to a given thing's ACTUAL capacity to satisfy the human desire for which that thing is sought.

A person may "subjectively" judge that dirt will satisfy his or her hunger for the sake of nourishment and growth. That person is wrong in judging that particular object's (i.e. dirt's) ability to provide for nourishment and growth ("objectively"), and perhaps partially correct about satisfying hunger (e.g. the space occupied by the dirt in the stomach might actually sate the hunger).

2) As far as goods for the sake of other goods is merely a part of the fuller picture. The reality is that particular actions do not occur in a vacuum. Everything we do is ordered toward the obtaining of other, future goods which are also subject to judgment. Only when those goods are sought in the correct "order" can you call actions "good". E.g. Sleep is good. Being awake is good. Deciding to take a nap after only crossing a busy street half-way is not good. Always being awake is not good. Those goods must be done in the proper "order".

3) The last, conditional statement about God was merely to show how he would relate to goodness in such a way that a person could assert that "God is good". Being a conditional statement, and not a proof, I was merely pointing to the implications for my description of goodness for any such future argument.

4) Christians don't say that God is a person. Christians say that God is three persons.

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And a human would not be on the scale of human-ness, but THE standard by which all humanly things might be measured. He's saying that if an equal standard to goodness DID exist, then we might just call that "God". But it's not necessarily true that such a thing does. Make sense? It's some old Plato stuff. Here's some more info. Hope that helped!

Thanks for helping out! This is certainly Platonic, but it isn't exactly my position. The "standard" of goodness is any given thing's ACTUAL ability to satisfy the desires of a human being. There is no single object that we encounter in our universe that satisfies all of these desires, but some objects satisfy, either more or less, particular desires individually and sometimes collectively. We must, therefore, try and obtain goods at the right times and in the right ways which actually satisfy the desires which cause us to seek them in the first place. My position, therefore, while similar to Plato, accepts Aristotle's contribution to his teacher's position, as well as the development of Thomas Aquinas, with a working development that I am currently trying to workout for myself so I can understand it in today's terminology. That said...

IF there were some thing that, when we encountered it, was considered good from every possible view/aspect, and upon obtaining it we found that it satisfied all of our desires, that would be, at the very least, the human good. Admittedly, my quick conditional statement went the extra steps and called that human good, God, but it wasn't being proposed as an actual proof. Thanks again!