Darren New wrote:
> I think the idea that there are different kinds of good and evil is at 
> odds with the concept that doing what God wants is good. You're still 
> using the "god moves in mysterious ways" argument, that we cannot 
> understand what "good" is. You're just modifying it by saying "we can 
> understand human good, but not god good." For most christians and 
> muslims, I think the idea that god's goodness is inferior to human 
> goodness is bogus. The idea that there are things that humans can do 
> that's good that God would think is evil or vice versa doesn't fly. 
> Perhaps he didn't state that explicitly.
> 
> But as soon as you start putting in relativistic goodness rather than 
> absolute goodness, where something that's good for me is bad for you, 
> then the whole "do what God says" justification goes out the window.

I suspect they might be more amenable to the concept that God's "good" 
is superior (rather than inferior) to the human version.  Theoretically 
  it could also be the case that the underlying concepts are the same 
but that God's decisions are so vast that we can't comprehend how the 
same principles are are work.

Nevertheless, I should make clear that I wasn't talking about 
"mainstream" Christian/Muslim viewpoints.  Perhaps the author was, and 
by beef is really that he didn't make that more clear.


> Sure. That's the "free will" argument. God allows evil because 
> disallowing people being evil to each other would reduce their "free 
> will" to commit evil.

Free will is one scenario which would fit under such an explanation, but 
one could probably imagine others as well.


> Well, the christian God is supposed to be a personal god. The Islamic 
> god is in control of every aspect of life, as I understand it.
> 
> This certainly works if God is either not omnipotent or doesn't really 
> care about people. But then you wind up with gods like Zeus.

You could make the view work with a personal God by assuming that all 
our earthly suffering end up being for the better (or unimportant) once 
you consider the afterlife (not a traditional view, I'm aware, but I 
think it's consistent).


> If you start with the assumption that God's idea of "good" doesn't match 
> ours, then you're ignoring the "God is good" assumption, which of course 
> has to read as an absolute. Otherwise you have no moral standing to tell 
> people what God wants them to do.

Oh yes, certainly.  Under this view it's much tricker to make claims 
about what God wants us to do, although I still think it's possible. 
For instance, once could assume that morality is based on intent rather 
than action.  Then we could still know what's good, and this would 
coincide with what God thinks is good.  The difference is that we would 
have no reason to think that we would actually *do* what God would have 
done, but rather that what's important is that we did it for noble reasons.

Under this view the apparent existence of evil (assuming omnipotence) 
would be because God's considerations is creating the universe are far 
removed from our day-to-day sufferings (surely a plausible assumption). 
  Again, I agree that you'd need more work to fit this into a standard 
Christian view, but I suspect it's fully possible.


> Anyway, what I thought you were saying is along the lines of "it's good 
> to discover the secrets of how atoms work", and "it's evil to use that 
> to blow up cities". Just because the holocaust happened doesn't mean 
> it's inherently evil to create a world in which the holocaust can happen.

I was also making this point, which one would classify under the 
umbrella of "God has the same morality, but makes decisions at a 
different scale".

I think the main problem is that I took him to be arguing against 
problem of evil rebuttals in the abstract, philosophical sense, whereas 
he seems to be making a point only about particular sorts of theistic 
views in which you have a relatively personal God and in which our time 
on Earth really does matter (as opposed to the afterlife being the man 
deal).  Certainly many people have exactly these views, but since I'd 
assumed he was making a broader argument his insistence on attacking 
that one section seemed like a "straw man" argument to me.

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