Essential Goodness
Essential Goodness
In the Scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the divine is a reality of unsurpassable greatness with unrivaled sovereignty as Creator and as a moral compass for human life, worthy of our highest allegiance, awe, loyalty, and worship. The goodness of human and other life and the good of the whole creation seem to be derived from the goodness of God. The Psalms (authoritative for Judaism and Christianity) proclaim God's great goodness (e.g., Pss 31:19; 106:1) and describe God's work and being as perfect (Ps 19:7; Matt 5:48), for example, while the Qur'an depicts God as mighty wisdom and truth, deserving all praise (Sura 31). Some passages in the Scriptures of the monotheistic traditions imply that God can do no evil, e.g., “It is impossible for God to lie” (Heb 6:18). The idea that God is essentially good follows from the idea that God is maximally excellent. A being capable of falling into evil and wickedness is not excellent.
Some theists, however, do not accept the notion that God is essentially good, offering against it “the argument from praise.”
One reply to this is that while God's essential goodness entails that “God does no evil” or, even more strongly, “God can do no evil,” it does not fix all divine action. That is, while creating a cosmos may be good, God does not have to do it. If God did not create the cosmos, no thing or person would have been harmed. The creation itself is commonly regarded in theistic tradition as a gift, and a giver may rightly be praised for giving such a gift. Praising and worshiping God are not limited to what may be called moral praise. When one feels and expresses awe before God, this can be similar to (but vastly greater than) the awe one feels before sublime, breathtaking natural phenomena (an awesome mountain, an exploding star, the birth of a child, and so on). The awe felt is not about moral behavior, but it is still about abundant value.
If God is essentially good and the final cause, then where does evil come from? The problem of evil is a constant concern for philosophers, and unfortunately we do not have space here to address it adequately. Some philosophers attribute it to the freedom of the will, others to the relativity of our subjective perceptions, others to the fact that God's constant interference in the form of miracles would result in massive irregularities in life, etc. One point worth mentioning, however, is that if the problem of evil makes sense, then you are well on your way to accepting essential goodness as integral to the concept of God. After all, the problem of evil would not be a “problem” without the concept of an essentially good God.
More objections to God's essential goodness arise when it is paired with the following two divine attributes: omnipotence and omniscience. We discuss these objections in the following sections.