RE: Christians, Prove Your God Is Good
February 26, 2015 at 10:13 am
(This post was last modified: February 26, 2015 at 10:14 am by watchamadoodle.)
(February 25, 2015 at 11:39 pm)The Reality Salesman Wrote: Because the nature of this conversation is about varying degrees of a commonly used sentiment, such as "good", it's important to be particular with the words used to describe each degree that separates them. Sounds confusing but consider how you might rank things that are good on a scale of 1-10. 1 being a buy one get one half-off coupon on hemorrhoid ointment, a 10 being the highest example of things that qualify as the word. But what is the ultimate standard by which all things are determined to be "good". Just as a shadow of a person shares the characteristics of human shape, it is not human. And so on a scale of 1-10 with regard to human-ness, a shadow could rank somewhere on the list, but it would be lower than a reflection since a reflection shares more of the human-like qualities. 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!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good
Thanks, that is easier for me to follow. I'll read that link and see if it resonates with me.
Essentially this seems to be a roundabout way of saying that God is good because we define him that way. Why don't we imagine an ultimate standard of evil and call that God? That would be more consistent with the Bible narratives in many cases.