Is God Good?

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 Thousands of years ago when the English language was forming, the words good and evil were devised to describe those things which worked for and against human well-being. Later, as our ability of conceptual thought further developed, we evolved to the point where we began to ponder the origins of our existence and realized there must be a Creator.  We named it God, derived from the word “good.”  We assumed that God must be good because he created our universe, Earth, life, us.  Certainly these are good deeds by anyone’s standards. 

Below the realm of good lies a whole spectrum of life events which are unpleasant and difficult, things like illness, tragedy and death.  These are natural occurrences of life which do not involve any evil or malice.  Even though we know that these too are God’s doing, we don’t label them as good.  Rather, our society explains them away with, “God works in mysterious ways.”

Below this are occurrences that involve ill will or malice—theft, violence, murder, etc.  We cannot bring ourselves to believe that an entity as beneficent as God would ever be behind these things, tearing down his own creation.  So we ascribe them to the Devil, derived from the word “evil.”

It is natural for us to want descriptors of opposites—hot/cold, up/down, right/left, good/evil, God/Devil—for such language and concepts are tremendously helpful in negotiating our way through life. For example, it’s very helpful to be able to tell our toddler not to touch the hot water, lest she be scalded.  And it’s very helpful to be able to tell someone trying to get somewhere to turn left, as opposed to right.

We assume that all descriptive opposites are fixed, set in stone.  Up is up, right?  Wrong.  For people living only 8,000 miles away on the opposite side of the planet, our up is their down.  And for someone facing you two feet away, your right is their left.  And for an Eskimo, his warm is our cold.  It’s all relative.

Each pair of opposites describes opposing points on a given continuum.  For example right/left desribes the direction continuum, up/down describes the elevation continuum, hot/cold describes the temperature continuum and good/bad describes the moral continuum. 

This holds true for moral judgments as well.  Everyone agrees that murder is evil, right?  Again, wrong.  The murderer doesn’t view it that way.  Nor perhaps do some of the victim’s enemies.  And, at the most objective level, “good” things also come from a murder.  The district attorney gets to try another case, justifying his job and feeding his family.  There is one less human being in an already overcrowded and environmentally overstressed world.  The undertaker gets another customer, as does the casket company.  The worms and bacteria that eventually consume the casket and buried body are provided with nourishment.

Or take war.  Most people agree that war is a major evil.  Yet there are two sides to every war, each one certain that their side is right/good and that the other side is wrong/evil.  Who is right?  Why “we” are, of course.

As we examine things more closely we begin to see is that every set of opposites is not fixed but is relative to the observer.  Earlier, we defined evil as something that works against human well-being.  But which human are we speaking of?  As we have seen, one man’s good is another man’s evil.  All of our descriptive opposites are based upon an anthropocentric (man-centered) view of life and existence, more specifically from a me-centered view of existence and, as such, they are all arbitrary. This is why we can’t find universal agreement on anything; it’s all relative to who you are and where you stand.

So where does that leave us with regard to God and the Devil?  We realize that these too are but descriptors of anthropocentric opposites, that we made up these concepts for our own conceptual and communicative convenience.  And if we look deeper still, we realize that these are but two descriptive opposites along the divine continuum of creation and destruction as they relate to human life. 

Since God is the God of all life, of all creation, perhaps we can realize that he is not as obsessed with what is good or bad for human life as we humans are.  In fact, maybe he doesn’t even care.  He had quite a phenomenon going with the dinosaurs but then they were all wiped out by an asteroid colliding with the Earth 65 million years ago.  Was the evolution of dinosaurs the result of his caring about them?  If so, why did he then obliterate them?  The evidence suggests that while God is a force behind all life and existence, God is an impartial force.  His creation is all one big grand ongoing unfolding drama.

 So while it is in the best interests of each species to look out for itself, promoting “good” and avoiding “evil,” it is foolish to ascribe these to God or the Devil.  There simply is God and he has no opposite.  God is every adjective you can come up with, including what we subjectively call good and evil.  The Hindus understand this—they believe that God is both the creator and the destroyer.  When you get through listing all the adjectives you can ascribe to God, you realize the futility of trying to describe God.  Our limited human minds cannot begin to comprehend the expansive magnificence that is God. Ultimately we are left with one truth about God. God simply is.