God is Goodness itself, and the cause of Goodness in Things

If God is completely self-sufficient it is because of the abundant Life that is in Him and is Him. “Everything desires its own perfection” says St Thomas [STI, Q.5], and indeed God is his own perfection. God himself being everything, He lacks nothing. What God lacks does not exist, it is lacking existence. God is plenitude and all want is alien to Him. Every perfection is in God, and God thus in desiring His own goodness, desires His own perfection. He is therefore his own Good. Everything God creates is poor to Him, poor in that it is not him, in that it needs Him and is sustained by His abundance. God is also objectively an existential good, because being existence itself, he is by definition better than the alternative, which is to not exist. The refutation of this assertion does not exist, it is difficult to win a debate more convincingly!  Going further, goodness is that toward which the will tends. God is himself the directionality for man’s life, the very directionality that defines what is good for man, evil being in the direction opposite from it. Thus one can simply state “If God exists, then “goodness” lies in seeking Him”. This side-steps all relativistic attempts to define goodness with respect to local referents. God is good for man, and all else is good only inasmuch as it enables man get to God.

St. Thomas differentiates between the goodness of man and the infinite goodness of God saying:

“…Yet not as we love. Because since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by its object, our love, whereby we will good to anything, is not the cause of its goodness; but conversely its goodness, whether real or imaginary, calls forth our love, by which we will that it should preserve the good it has, and receive besides the good it has not, and to this end we direct our actions: whereas the love of God infuses and creates goodness.” [STI Q19 Q.20 A.2 co] Our intellect wills the good: “…we have the act “to understand,” of which the object is “the true”; and the act “to will,” of which the object is “the good”” [STI Q53 Art.2]

Aquinas also states that “truth” is notionally (“notional order” is the order in which the human intellect grasps ideas) prior to “good”:

“…Although the good and the true are convertible with being, yet they differ logically. And in this manner the true, speaking absolutely, is prior to good, as appears from two reasons (…) because the true is more closely related to being than is good. For the true regards being itself simply and immediately; while the nature of good follows being in so far as being is in some way perfect; for thus it is desirable…” [STI, Q16, Art. 4. Co].

It is true that we exist because Existence is true, it is good that we exist because Existence is good, and that is a reason for existing. This is the argument against any assertion that existence might be an imagined dream-like state, or that even if real it might be purposeless. Existence cannot be imagined because it is truth and it is God, and is cannot be purposeless because it is good. We can see the notional sense of the Holy Trinity here, of course: Being, Truth, Goodness- the Father, Truth which is his Word, and the Desire for Truth which has the aspect of Goodness and Love, the Holy Spirit.

God is not Responsible for Evil

God creates human souls in freedom, with the freedom to choose right and wrong. Such Creation in freedom has the potential to spawn evil acts resultant from that freedom, or it could not be truly free. But the act of creation itself is not evil, but rather a mercy, for had God not created we would not be here at all. Any created being necessarily lacks the perfection that is God itself, for it is not a second God, and that “lack” necessarily has real consequences. The creature resembles God most closely in this: that it is free, and has Free Will as does only God himself. However it does not resemble God in having the absolute ability to choose rightly, this ability is only of God (God can grant this ability to creatures through grace, but that is for a different article). All evil is a free choice made by God’s free creatures. That it is indeed free implies that it is un-imposed and therefore the fault of no one but the one exercising that choice in freedom- sin is owned by creatures alone. Were God to blame for sin, it would imply that God had not truly succeeded in creating free will agents at all. Either being free means owning sin in toto, or we are not totally free. Thus verses like Isaiah 45:7 “I (God) create both good and evil…” can only be true in this sense- had God not created anything, there would truly be no evil. This is akin to a child who becomes evil through no fault of his parenting. Had God directly and willingly created corruption of soul, only then could God have been personally held responsible for evil. It is only such an act which could possibly assign an evil intent to God specifically and make God himself evil, and the performer of an evil act. That is the full answer to the challenge “is God evil?” God does not corrupt the soul of the creature, rather having created the soul, he desires its purity, and provides the graces by which that purity might be attained. It is the creature which refusing God’s graces in favour of created pleasures causes that corruption through repeated abuse of his created freedom. To state “God is not loving” based upon any of these outcomes is to judge God’s based upon our own morality. However it is not us, but God who first loves:  1 John 4:19 “We love because he first loved us”.

God’s Unconditional Love

God’s attributes are infinite, and therefore his love must naturally be absolute. When Final Judgement comes the unrepentant sinner bears the consequences of rejecting the unconditional love of God. That Love is the Salvation God, so it does not make sense to ask “why does not God save him?”, since his saving got refused. Love is offered unconditionally and freely refused, hence God could not be called unloving. In order to assert the contrary one would have to state what conditions were present in the love of Jesus, if any- indeed we find none. Jesus dies for us before we accept his love, not after. Jesus dies for us in full knowledge of our sins that are as yet unrepented, that is what is meant by “our sins were forgiven on the Cross”, that our sins did not prevent Jesus from offering his Love in this manner. A conditional relationship is like a secular marriage which is drawn up with the included understanding of the possibility of its dissolution through the unilateral action of one o the partners involved. However that which is not absolute is not love at all. Love is that very thing which transcends all conditions, that is why it is different from our every other motivation- the motivation of love is the intrinsic value of the human soul and none else. This is why marriage in Christianity as signifying the highest form of human motivation can never include a divorce clause. Christians are called to imitate the love of Christ, and neither also do our relationships with persons come with the options of hatred. There is no condition placed upon a human being who expresses sincere repentance and this is the meaning of unconditional love of God.  As St. Paul’s says in his famous discourse in 1Cor.13, “love always forgives…”.

Love is unconditional when love is “first”, not “following”, and when a relationship is “because of love” rather then love arising “because of a relationship”. The closest that a human being might get to an unconditionally loving relationship is perhaps in the parental love of an unborn child, since here many of the usual considerations of “relationship” are in a sense not available yet, and perhaps especially so in the case of the father. However all human emotions are tainted, while in the case of God, all his relationships are described in this way. We are loved by him like unborn children in a sense since there is nothing in us that is a consideration for him to love us “in return”, nor ever will be.

God’s Immutability

For God to both love and hate involves positing contradictory emotions in co-existing God. This is an anthropomorphic view of how emotions might work in God. If God is perfect he should be able to love perfectly in spite of any behaviour of his created objects. That their creation also constituted the creation of hatred, or that it were a cause of divine hatred violates God’s immutability. The eternal God if viewed in the absence of any created objects would have no reason for hatred. Creation would be the occasion of change for God if indeed it were true that only by it, God began to hate. Therefore to avoid such pitfalls we must be careful not to confuse the flow of emotions nor attribute emotions to God that we ourselves feel. I was asked once “can God love a rapist/ murderer?”. In fact is it not the rapist that fails to love God, rather than other way round, I answered, and we must not confuse the two. The fact that the rapist does not love God is his own fault, it is not due to any failure on the part of God to love him. It is God who loves us first and in doing so engenders love for him in our hearts, not the other way round, we do not “cause love” in God nor hatred in him. Human beings don’t cause changes in God, period. To be loving is the Nature of God, and so in creating things this Nature does not change. Thus in positing an unconditionally loving God we avoid the violation of divine immutability. There is every chance that the relationship of love as it develops in time, and in a lifetime can turn into rejection and hatred. But that change is on the part of man, not God. Man cannot change the way in which God sees him and values the intrinsic worth of the rational soul, he can only reject it through his own hatred for God. We see and hear this played out in our daily lives as we hear of those who reject and hate the idea of God because of the suffering that they perceive around them in the world, or because of restrictions that they experience in their freedom from that concept, or the absence of what they might consider as adequate evidence to substantiate that concept. All these can be given as reasons to refuse that unconditional offer of love on the Cross.

God Loves Sinners- Both Justice and Mercy Satisfied

The whole point of the Biblical account is that God loves human beings enough to give them a powerful example of his own love, that they might be empowered to choose God rather than godlessness. This is why Christianity can never be a deterministic religion, since in such a model God would simply not be required to perform such an act. Christianity is presented as a loving proposition to the will, so it could not possibly also be a denial of freedom of that same will (we discuss the specific problem of determinism vs. foreknowledge in the next article). But God who presents us with a free choice could not possibly hate us, since freedom is the definition of love (its opposite being tyranny). The great Sacrifice of Jesus would be absurd, were the destiny of man determined, for why must a God who has acted already to determine the destiny of man once at creation, act radically in this manner to influence that destiny again rather than merely watch destiny play out as determined?

The entire story of the Bible is the story of God’s desire for the conversion of sinners. God sets up his Law, sets down strong deterrents for disobedience, constantly reiterates and renews his covenants, reiterates his love for his people, his desire to be with them and dwell in their midst. Not only that but when those same people are unfaithful and fall into the worship of foreign gods he does not desert them, but is constantly calling them back to him, and even brings them back from exile. There are seven such cycles of sin and redemption in the story of the Old Testament starting when the Israelites abandon the Lord for the worship of false gods and called back by Him, for eg. ). See the account of these cycles in Judges 6:1, 2:11-23, 3:7-31, 21:25 and God’s promise in Deut.4:28-40. We find the unconditional declarations of love in verses like Psalm 145:8-10, Ezekiel 33:11 and many others. Read also my apologetic article “Does God hate?”.

Jesus teaches how God’s love is available unconditionally to the reprobate sinner throughout the course of their lives, and in spite of the sacrifice that this entails. Jesus states in his famous sermon, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same?” (Matthew 5:44:45) strongly implying that God loves sinners. It is not God who errs in the creation of the unloved reprobate, rather the reprobate who sins in the rejection of God’s love: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8).

Because the obstinately reprobate person was also truly loved, and had the same grace available, as the one-to-be-redeemed, this also satisfies God’s Justice. Thus both Mercy and Justice are satisfied by a God who reaches out to a sinner in their sin unconditionally, meaning irrespective of their final outcome- Mercy because of forgiveness and justice because the outcome is not a failure of love, the reprobate sinner has been fairly treated. It is not as though the life of a reprobate sinner was a series of traps laid out for him since his birth by God because God hated him, rather he would have had the same grace to love God back as any believing person, only that the rejected that grace. St. Paul says (8:28,31,32, 35): “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God (…)If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?….who can separate us from the love of Christ?” and in 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, (when we did not love him) Christ died for us”, or Jesus himself saying “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners”: God loves sinners, and because all men sin there is no doubt in the Christian economy that God loves all men. It was because the problem of sin was so great among those that he loved, that He “did not withhold his Son”, and in this he “demonstrates his love for us” for in giving his Son, God is giving himself to us in love.

The Cross is a radical act of Love in which God literally gives everything- “his Son”, which is to denote God giving all of Himself. It is as though everything depended not on what had already been determined but rather upon how much love God showed and hence he showed it all. This is a completely natural and understandable concept for it is precisely the manner in which a father or mother would deal with their children: for they would always aim to love all their children equally, and the wayward child would be longed for until they made theirs return. So that when St. Paul speaks of pre-destination in Romans 8:29, we can be confident that this is a pre-destination only related to God’s fore- knowledge “those whom he foreknew”. St. Paul continues this wonderful passage on the love of God “…in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (27) …nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (39)”. You can tell how St. Paul is equating the love of God and Jesus as one and the same.

Both rapist and saint received equally, God is not partial. One returned (reciprocated), one did not. That’s why they went to Hell. The reason persons go to Hell is not that they reject the hate of God but rather that they reject his Love.

Absolute Love and the Problem of Hell

If asked how come God does not allow us to repent “after” out earthly lives, the answer is that there is not “after” in eternity. When we are dead then our eternal state is either Heaven or Hell. Hell is one’s state when we reject unconditional Love in our earthly lives. There are no “conditions” in eternity, since in “condition” is a temporal succession of events, the antecedent preceding the consequent, nor is the notion of “choice” really present in eternity for the same reason, therefore it is not possible to “choose God” in that state if he is not chosen already. In earthly life on the other hand, that “choice” is made solely on the basis of the fact of unconditional love (I’ll state here that there are some philosophers who take the view that Heaven will be an eternal succession of times as well for us, since we will continue to have physical bodies. While I don’t agree with this view, and see eternity as timeless, it dose not change the argument that “free choice” ends with earthly life, since we see God in Heaven and there is no more need of “faith” as such. I will discuss the difference in the two views in a separate article on Heaven).

It is Man who rejects God. God does not reject man. It is man who hates God, not God who hates man. If you go to buy a car and after seeing it you decide not to buy, it means you rejected that car, it did not mean that the car rejected you. It is the same for hate, the car did not hate you, you hated the car. There’s no need to transfer feelings of hatred onto God, because the situation is fully explained through man’s hatred.  The car you rejected doesn’t “need” to drive to your house if you don’t want to be driven, so also God does not “need” to take you to Heaven should one desire to reject him. No one goes to Hell saying “I want to go to God”, so how then can the outcome of Hell be the fault of God? Further, there’s no need for God to torture anyone for God being so infinitely desirable that the mere absence of God is the definition of torture in the spiritual realm. That torture is inflicted by man upon himself when he rejects God. That absence of God itself is the “fire that does not go out and the worm that never dies” for the condemned, and the “fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. Further, were God, through some act of force, to fill Heaven with such unrepentant blasphemers, then the greatest evils in the world would simply be played out in Heaven eternally. To allow this would also not be the act of a loving God. As it is, the greatest evils of the world are played out eternally in Hell, and the greatest of them all, blasphemy. If we truly love God then that the absence of God be torture should come as no surprise. For it is the very absence of God that is the true horror of damnation, and the reprobate sinners consciously make such a choice in choosing to reject all consideration for God during their earthly lives. It is the absence of God which is intolerable to the soul, unhindered by the distractions of this life in which they rejected him. If God is desirable above all else, then it is the deprivation of this good to the soul that is the  most intolerable, even more than the deprivation of other goods like freedom from pain  and the provision of comforts for the physical body. For example a person who commits suicide from depression is no longer averse to the pain entailed in dying, because life to them has become more intolerable than the pain of death. Relationship breakups can lead to person neglecting food drink and self-care because the pain of the absence of the beloved is greater than the pain of the deprivation of even basic sustenance and nutrition.

It is the rapist or murderer that fails to love God, not the other way around, and we must not  confuse the two. The fact that the rapist does not love God is his own fault, it is not due to any failure on the part of God. It is God who loves us first and in doing so engenders love for him in our hearts, not the other way round, we do not “cause love” in God. Human beings don’t cause changes in God. Both rapist and saint received equally, God is not partial. One returned (reciprocated), one did not. That’s why they went to Hell. The reason persons go to Hell is not that they reject the hate of God but rather that they reject his Love.

So how do we answer the question of whether God continues to love the soul that is damned to Hell? Hell is truly the most loving outcome for a soul that dies in the state of unrepentant blasphemy. Just because God sends persons to Hell for eternity does not mean that he is not “all-Loving”. People go to Hell because that was the most loving decision in their case. It is also the most loving decision for everyone else’s sake, which also needs taking into account. But a judge does not also need to hate a person he is condemning to life in prison, in fact he too can love that person and know that in his case it is the most loving outcome.  But we must also consider that it is only to the damned that Hell is a reality. For those who are in Paradise, Hell is the spiritual equivalent of non-existence, and total spiritual annihilation. So there is not necessary “change” in the attitude of God here when the “object” of that attitude is in this sense non-existence. God created that soul in love, and knew that the soul would be damned at the time He created it. Nevertheless having created it in freedom and love, he did nothing to determine any of its acts. God created every soul with the same love, so it is not God who had the wrong attitude towards that soul at the time of Creation. Hell is the ultimate lie, the final twisting of the truth which preserves reality only for those who have so twisted it for themselves and of their own accord.

God that is not all-Loving, could not be All-Good

Let us consider the simple proposition that being “all-loving” and being “good” are the same thing. A loving person does what is the perfectly good thing to do. That is the meaning of love. When we say “good actions” it means “loving actions”, basically. Were we to believe that God were not all-loving, then he could also not be good, and we have a “bad god”. Thus you reach a contradiction. Neither also does justice require hatred. God’s Love is the only special thing in the Universe, it is the only thing that is pure, and this is so because it is unconditionally and freely given: this  and no other is the meaning of purity. The unrepentant sinner goes to Hell because they are unrepentant, not because of God. We must not blame God for bad things that happen to people. Relationship breakdown can be unilateral. Take a marriage for example, it can break down if only one of the partners is a hater, it does not require both the partners to be haters. Thus we do not posit God to be a hater. We do not also describe love in God as “responsive” to some criteria that are fulfilled by humans, or would God love anything if no one loved him back?

Were we to truly believe that God hated sinners, we would have a God that creates in hatred, and hates from the cradle to the grave. We would have to believe in babies are hated and wilfully misguided to Hell, because obviously God knows already that that is where they are going. Rather what we have in Christianity is a sort of paradox where God loves and still allows the tragedy of Hell. But that is an acceptable paradox, and we have explained why already. There is a sense in which both views (those that believe God hates the unrepentant eternally and those that believe that they too have received God’s love) believe the same thing at least with regards to the repentant and those that are destined for Paradise, that God is unconditionally loving toward them, and unconditionally merciful, because he forgives all their sins. The difference then, is seemingly to do with an assumption with regards God’s to emotional state with respect to the unrepentant. Does God not have mercy on all, and is this not because he loves all? Does not God desire the conversion of the sinner and is this too not because God loves the sinner? I know this, that I want to die believing in a God who loved to the end even those who went to Hell, and did all he can to save them, “…even to death, death upon a Cross”.

Love as the Reason of God’s Existence

God can therefore not be anything but absolutely loving. In fact Love is God’s raison d’etre (reason for being), and the answer to the eternal question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That answer is simply “because of Love”; which not only answers the question of why created things are here and the Universe, but also answers what is not asked: “why there is God rather than no God?” God’s own reason for being is not purposeless nor purpose-neutral but rather “because of Love”. Quite apart from philosophical considerations we feel in our bones that love is eternal, even atheists romanticize these feelings- “my heart will go on and on” and so on in a million familiar popular poeticizations. We seem to feel in our hearts that which we cannot name and yet it rules our hearts, we call it “love”, we believe in God and he rules our hearts too- why would they not be the same thing, do we really need to dichotomise the two? We feel there must be a cause for us to be here and we call that cause “Creator”- we feel there must be a reason we are here, for we must be Beloved. Why are those two things different, they would seem to answer the same question “why”.

Finally read about some verses in the Bible that might seem to buck the trend here Does God Hate, and here to read about Violence in the Old Testament.

Critiquing “Divine Command” theory

The “necessary being” argument has nothing to do with God’s attributes, only God’s necessity. But if one believes that God is the best that we can possibly conceive (and this is a moral argument, not an argument from necessity), then its hard to see how God could be bad. The moral argument is also an important philosophical proof of God’s existence- “how can we have a standard of morality” etc. Another way of arguing for God’s goodness is to consider that if God were evil he would be perfectly evil and were this the case then having no one else to hate, he would hate himself. Being omnipotent, he would then either successfully destroy himself. We cannot have equally valid competing models of God, as though God could have been “different” in another world. Since they are our own models, we ourselves need to attempt to determine the merits and demerits of each model. Just because people can seemingly come up with several intellectual concepts of God, does not make all those concepts equally viable. The evil deity is possibly the poorest concept that a human could possibly come up with, and would rank even lower than most pagan and polytheistic conceptions of deities

ARGUMENT: ***“God is the ultimate arbiter of what is good and what is evil .. that’s why morality comes from His definition of morality.***

REPLY: This means that there is no “absolute” good, “good” is a behavior God arbitrarily ordains without reason. This is typical divine command theory and the Euthyphro dilemma “ Is something good because God ordains it, or does God ordain it because it’s good?” I see that you take the former option. A Christian and Thomist (follower of Aquinas) would not only take the latter, but would go a step further and say that God himself is goodness. This removes the problem of God doing things without a reason.

God himself is goodness and love, he is not a random slot-machine, for which “goodness” means whatever way the dice roll on a Tuesday. That is exactly what is implied by divine command theory. It is the denial of absolute good. This has the consequence of absurdity.

ARGUMENT: ****But is He obliged to adhere to something He is the one who defines ? No.****

REPLY: If God did not consider that something was worth adhering to, why would he define it, especially if it is something transcendent (I’m not talking about some laws that apply only in a creaturely context, which includes most of the 10 Commandments). God would fulfil even human notions of what is good, but in a transcendent manner. He not only “adheres” to the good, the “good” that we are given to obey is just a sliver of the glory of his own Goodness. That’s the reason that we are given it, again, it is not randomly generated like at a roulette table. Divine command theory has the latter problem, once again.

ARGUMENT: ***He can choose to be perfectly just and good, and He can choose not to be.***

REPLY: Why would God “choose to be good” if he was bad? Then having “chosen to be good”, why would the likelihood of reverting to evil exist, is this a temptation. Again, Christianity goes a step further, God does not “choose to be good”. Love and goodness are his Nature. Just like you didn’t choose to be human rather than dog etc. Love, truth, goodness, beauty, unity…these are the definitions of God, his Essence and Nature. God could not be ugly and lie, for example. Goodness and evil or not “things“ that are created. Goodness is when a Created Thing obeys God. And evil, when it does not. God creates beings with free Will to do either.

Goodness and evil are not something floating around like a balloon are they? They have no independent existence in created things, they are qualities. Your philosophy is anthropomorphic, its not as if Allah wakes up every morning and has to decide before he gets out of bed “Hmmm…shall I be good today or bad today?” There’s nothing wrong with saying “absolute goodness is in God’s eternal knowledge” because you’re not making an ontological assertion here. But “absolute badness” is just the opposite of that, its not as if it requires a separate filing cabinet. Whatever is contrary to God’s eternal Will is “absolute badness”. Its amazing that a monotheist can refuse to believe that God is good by Nature.

God is (like) a good-natured guy, that’s monotheism. Not some anthropomorphic conception of a tortured soul that’s struggling with random decision making. I’m not making an “emotional argument”, you’re making an anthropomorphic argument by ascribing human emotions to God. We are not “forced” to do what we do by nature. Your argument has already failed right there, as it has several times in this conversation