Goff's Moral Mistakes About God
Professor Philip Goff argues against the existence of God on Twitter from the idea that God would not have the right to create a world like ours, particularly on the supposition that God causes suffering and death to bring about certain goods.
This Tweet tells me that Goff misunderstands classical theism and Christianity. Both assertions, after all, are mistaken. First, God is not under any sort of moral obligation like we are — that is a category mistake. In other words, it does not make sense to talk about what “right” God has. Second, God does not cause suffering to bring about certain goods like courage or fortitude, etc., a’ la typical soul building narratives. Rather, God permits suffering as the best or only available means to thwart of the worst possible thing for human beings, which is self-willed eternal separation from God.
Allow me to briefly expand upon each point.
God is not a moral agent like we are. Morality is a rational enterprise, applicable only to being like us that can contingently self-determine our development, choosing to pursue real or lesser goods which either contribute to our perfection or detract therefrom. Morality concerns the pursuit of happiness, or (better phrasing, I think) objective flourishing. For example, a critical aspect of the moral life is the pursuit of virtue, since virtue is the perfection of our power, the attainment and expression of which amplifies us along the relevant lines of existence, makes us “more fully” what it is to be a rational human being. More excellent, as it were.
Moral obligation comes in, first, from the conditional that if we want to be happy/flourish, then we ought to obey the dictates of human nature (or the natural law); the conditional assumes categorical force by the simple fact that, by nature, we all do want to be happy. That, traditionally, is the ground of moral obligation, and from there one can develop a quite extensive theory of “rights.” (I commend the work of Fagothey on this matter).
Obviously — quite obviously, in fact — none of that applies to God. God, as purely actual, has no further perfection to attain (thus God cannot be obligated by nature to pursue flourishing as if there is some higher state God could fail to attain). God has no dispositions either, thus the idea of acquiring virtue is irrelevant to God. These are some of the reasons that many Thomists, particularly Brian Davis, insist that God is not a moral agent. And in the respects so far considered, they are correct to assert this. A proper understanding of God within the wider theoretical context of traditional morality makes it immediately obvious that rights talk does not apply to God. God is under no moral obligation whatsoever, particularly as if some moral standard existed beyond God which God must make use of when making the decision to create or govern. The idea that God “does not have a right” to do something is simply to anthropomorphize God, ultimately to not be speaking about God at all. That is Goff’s first mistake.
The second mistake is thinking that God causes the suffering of this world to bring about certain (though Goff leaves them unspecified; and fair enough, it’s just a Tweet) goods. Here I take it that Goff is thinking about goods often identified by those promoting a soul building theodicy, goods often seen as logically dependent upon negative states of affairs. The obvious one being the good of overcoming adversity insofar as this demands adversity to be overcome. (Courage, fortitude, temperance, forgiveness, empathy, etc., are also typically identified.) Now, whether one could actually make the case that a world whereby such goods are realized only through considerable amounts of suffering, is, on the whole, a better world than one without such goods, is an interesting project, but completely irrelevant to Christianity. Because the theodicy inherent to Christianity is not one of mere goods collection or even of soul building but rather of soul saving and soul healing. This distinction is significant, and to be fair to Goff, it is a distinction missed by many Christians themselves (typically because they have a whacky theory of salvation and the atonement).
The Christian story, simply put, is that God allows suffering as the best or only available means to thwart of the worst possible thing for human beings, which is eternal separation from God. According to Christianity, we all suffer from an inherent spiritual cancer (the result of original sin), which, if left untreated, will ultimately result in our psyche becoming permanently internally fragmented, closing off the possibility of mutual indwelling between persons, particularly between us and God. Traditionally, that state is known as Hell. Christianity, furthermore, provides both an upper and lower bound of human flourishing; the upper bound being union with God, the lower bound being separation from God in Hell. There is nothing worse, within the Christian framework, than Hell.
The reason this matters is because no matter how we feel about causing or permitting certain bad things to attain certain good things, the almost universal moral intuition is that we can cause or permit bad things (sometimes truly terrible things — think of chemotherapy1) to occur if that is the best or only available means of staving off something worse. And that is the Christian story. Moreover, it is a story that makes quite a good bit of sense with just a few plausible assumptions at play about human agency, God’s relation to the world, and God’s motive for creation (union with creation; love).
I will not defend these assumptions now (I have a considerable amount to say about each in my forthcoming book), for it is merely enough to show that Goff has not understand what the Christian understanding of God is, nor the Christian understanding of why God permits the evil and suffering of this world. In all, Goff’s objections are misguided and nowhere near the devasting sort of refutation of “the omni-God” (as Goff likes to phrase it) that he takes them to be.
In relation to Goff’s complaint about organ harvesting: Importantly, the benefit God intends to deliver is to the individual upon whom the suffering befalls, not somebody else; hence chemotherapy meant to save the life of the individual undergoing the immensely painful treatment is a more apt analogy.