6.6 A Note on Aquinas’s “God Is Good” and “There Is No Evil in God”
6.6 A Note on Aquinas’s “God Is Good” and “There Is No Evil in God”
Polytheism (belief in many gods) is not an option for Aquinas since he reads the Bible as teaching that God is one (meaning that there is only one God, not that God has a property of “oneness”). Polytheism is also not an option for Aquinas since he thinks of God as the source of the existence of whatever can be counted together with other things, as the reason why there is a world in which one can distinguish between individuals of the same kind. At the end of SCG 1,42 Aquinas notes that the Bible contains passages in which the word “god” is used in the plural and in reference to what is not divine.33 But he claims, surely rightly, that such passages do not say that anything is God as is the one true God. Rather, they employ the word “god” to refer to what is not divine but which displays some perfection that one can associate with divinity (compare describing the object of one’s love as an “angel”).
Polytheism does indeed seem to be ruled out if we accept Aquinas’s frame of reference and think of God as the simple, eternal, unchanging source of everything that has being and that is not Being Itself. The same can surely be said when it comes to belief in God as finite. If God is the simple, eternal, unchanging source of everything that has being, and if Aquinas is right about “God is perfect,” then, in certain senses of “finite,” being finite is not readily attributable to God. In the SCG, Aquinas does not consider “infinite” to be a positive descriptive adjective like, say, “square.” He thinks of it in negative terms, as denying finitude to God. Indeed, in SCG 1,43 he explicitly says that “in God the infinite is understood only in a negative way, because there is no terminus or limit to his perfection.”34
So, even if you disagree with some of the arguments in SCG 1,42 and 43, you might sympathize with what Aquinas seems basically to be saying in these chapters concerning God’s oneness and infinity. You may not, however, sympathize with what he says about God’s goodness and lack of evil in SCG 1,37–41, because you might think that Aquinas should be explaining in these chapters how God is morally good. As I have noted, Aquinas does not speak of God as being morally good in SCG 1,37–41. But should he not have done so? Should he not also have tried to defend the proposition “God is good” while citing ways in which God might be morally exonerated for permitting the evils that we encounter? In what follows, I want briefly to defend the way in which Aquinas does and does not proceed in SCG 1,37–41.
6.6.1 Why Aquinas Might Be Thought to Be Wrong in SCG 1,37–41
It is not hard to see why one might conclude that SCG 1,37–41 is off-beam and misguided because of its lack of attention to God’s moral goodness. As I have noted, people often take it to be axiomatic that “God is good” means that God is morally good. Yet we find nothing about God’s moral goodness in SCG 1,37–41. So, if “God is good” means that God is morally good, something must be wrong with SCG 1,37–41 since it says nothing about God’s moral goodness. How, one might ask, can Aquinas hope to have offered a decent account of God’s goodness without mentioning God’s moral goodness? And how can Aquinas hope to have offered a defense of “God is good and not evil” without taking note of the evils in the world? If God accounts for the existence of the universe at any time, then he presumably accounts for the evils that exist. Yet how can God do this without being bad in some way? And is Aquinas not just being insensitive to the force of this question as he goes about his business in SCG 1,39, in which he claims that there is no evil in God? How can there be no evil in God if God allows people to suffer? How can there be no evil in God if he allows children to suffer? How can there be no evil in God if, for example, he allows for the occurrence of war, murder, genocide, and pain in general? After all, is not God a person? And are good persons not people who do their best to fight against moral evil and evils that inflict us because of how things work in nature? Yet in SCG 1,37–41 Aquinas says nothing about God being good as people are good.
One problem with the above line of argument is that it assumes that “good” always means “morally good,” which it does not. “Good” is a general term of commendation, and we employ it when praising things of various kinds for different reasons.
We speak of good people, of course. We say that so-and-so is a good man or that so-and-so is a good woman, and when we do that we are typically referring to them as morally praiseworthy. It is in our general references to people as being good that the notion of moral goodness has its home. But we use the word “good” even when not commending people morally. We speak of good restaurants, good teachers, good books, good doctors, good music, good pianists, good refrigerators, good scientists, good radios, and good philosophers and theologians.
In short, we call all sorts of things good, and for much of the time when we do this we are not thinking of moral goodness at all. Good restaurants, good books, good music, good refrigerators, and good radios are not morally good. Again, even when we apply the word “good” to teachers, doctors, pianists, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, we need not be thinking in moral terms. To be sure, we might agree that, for example, good teachers are people who behave ethically toward their students and employers. However, when commending someone as a good teacher we would normally be thinking of teaching skills, not moral excellence. Again, we might readily concede that someone who is morally wicked can be a good, indeed brilliant, doctor or pianist or philosopher. Something can be good under one description and bad under another. Fred might be a great scientist but a bad husband. Mary might be a wonderful opera singer but a bad wife.
“Good” resembles “perfect.” It is what Peter Geach (1916–2013) calls a logically attributive adjective. It gets its sense from the nouns to which it is attached. So goodness in teachers, say, amounts to something different from goodness in pianists or refrigerators. Good teachers are individuals who educate well, engage with students in a lively way, care for their students, prepare their classes, and so on. By contrast, good refrigerators are things that keep food cool, do not make noise, conserve energy, have plenty of room in them, and so on. This is not to say that we have to be equivocating when calling different things good. It is not to say that there is nothing at all common to everything we call good. But it cannot be any particular property had by things of one kind, as, say, being mammalian is a property shared by dogs, cats, and whales. As Geach observes: “There is no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good and bad so-and-so.”35
Some philosophers have suggested that when we call things good we are not describing them but expressing a reaction to them. On this account, “X is good” should be understood to mean something like “I approve of X.” This view has been criticized on the ground that “good” is an adjective. Yet we sometimes use adjectives when we are merely expressing a reaction of some kind. Americans often speak of things as being “awesome.” When doing so, they are chiefly saying how wonderful or amazing they find something to be. They are not ascribing a distinct attribute to it, as they would if they said, for example, that X is a plastic bag rather than a paper one. Again, “astonishing” is an adjective, but one would only seriously call something astonishing because one finds it to be unexpected or unusual, not because it contains in itself an attribute of astonishingness together with the other attributes that it possesses. In short, the fact that “good” is an adjective does not mean that it is always used to describe.
Yet “good” is grammatically an adjective, and there would seem to be a question of fact involved in its correct usage. If I return a radio to a store, I might say that the radio is bad or no good, and I might well be expressing my feelings or reactions to the radio. My retailer, however, will want me to prove that the radio I bought is defective in some way. Again, if my retailer insists that the radio I bought is good, I will expect him to demonstrate that he can, for instance, make it work properly. The words “good” and “bad” may be context- or noun-sensitive, but they are genuinely descriptive.
Can we, however, say what is common to everything that is genuinely good? Several times over in his writings, Aquinas responds to this question by quoting Aristotle, according to whom something is good insofar as it is desirable.36 Aquinas thinks that we call something good because we take it to have features that we want it to have or that it needs to have considered as the thing that it is. And this conclusion makes sense. We will say that someone is a good teacher because he or she matches up to expectations that we have and find desirable in teachers. Or we will say that X is a good radio because it matches up to expectations that we have and find desirable in radios. Or we will say that something is in a good way insofar as it flourishes considered as what it is. Hence, for example, though my cat will not be in a bad way because it cannot function as a radio does, it will be in a bad way if its lungs are congested or if it has cancer. In general, we take things to be good insofar as they are working well considered as what they are.
What, though, if we say that God is good? If Aquinas is right in his teaching on divine simplicity, then we cannot mean that God is functioning well considered as something in the world. We cannot even mean that God is functioning well considered as the kind of thing that he is. We might say that God is beneficent in that he provides certain goods for creatures. Yet this will not commit us to the conclusion that God is morally good as people can be morally good. For we surely commend people as being morally good while thinking of them as spatiotemporal individuals who do what they ought to do in circumstances in which they find themselves or who, in the circumstances in which they find themselves, display virtues of the kind listed by Aristotle, virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. Yet why should we suppose that God is morally good in these senses?
Aquinas does not do so because he takes God to be the source of all things that we can label as being “good” as members of a kind. He also does not do so since he thinks of God as goodness itself, not as someone trying to do the right thing in some particular context. As I will show when we come to SCG 1,93, Aquinas is prepared to say that God has “moral virtues.” As I will also show, however, he thinks that there are moral virtues in God only insofar as God is what accounts for there being moral virtues in people, not because he thinks that God is morally virtuous as people are virtuous—as individuals who exist in time, who tend to do what makes for their fulfillment as human beings. You might say that if God is good then he is a good person. As I have already noted, however, Aquinas is not mesmerized by the nonbiblical formula “God is a person.” He thinks that God accounts for the sheer existence of what we have in mind when we use the word “person” when talking of human beings. We can get our mind around persons of our acquaintance so as to understand what they are and whether they are well behaved or badly behaved. As I have noted, however, Aquinas does not think that we can do anything comparable when it comes to God. He does not even think that we understand what God is, and almost all of SCG 1 proceeds on the assumption that, if we are to know anything about God, we have to know it on the basis of what God has produced, not on the basis of some prior understanding of God. And if Aquinas is right in thinking along these lines, then he is right to focus on the goodness of God while not starting with the idea that God must be good as morally good human beings are good. If God, as Aquinas says in the SCG, is the first cause of all things and the simple and eternal and unchangeable source of there being something rather than nothing, then God’s goodness can hardly be what we might affirm or deny while thinking about moral goodness in people. One might even suggest that to do this would be to engage in idolatry, to take God to be a creature of some kind.
It is with thoughts such as these in mind that Aquinas says what he does about God’s goodness in SCG 1. Understandably, therefore, he does not defend the proposition “God is good” by trying to show that God is morally justifiable for allowing badness or evil to exist. Philosophers discussing the problem of evil frequently imply that we cannot say that God is good unless we have explained what God’s good moral motives are for allowing evils. Aquinas, however, seems to think that such philosophers would be mistaken since (1) they assume that if God is good then God is morally good, and (2) they assume that, while abstracting from evils in the world, it is impossible to defend the claim that God is good. Aquinas does not think of God as a morally good person. But he does think that he can offer a defense of the proposition “God is good,” and his defense of this proposition should be considered on its merits and not cast aside because it does not engage with reasons for supposing that God might be morally bad. As I will show, Aquinas goes on in the SCG to talk about what causes evil and what evil or badness are in general and in particular. In SCG 1,37–41, however, he is talking about God and goodness without claiming that God is a good thing of some kind. Insofar as he is doing this, there is something seriously wrong with criticisms of SCG 1,37–41 based on the idea that God, if he exists, is a morally good person who needs to be defended accordingly.37