What Does It Mean To Say That God Is Good

The immediate, visceral response to this question is: yes of course, God is good. However, upon further inspection of God’s character—specifically with the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Job in mind—we see that God commits unspeakable acts of injustice against the human race over and over again. Should we, then, excuse His actions because He is God and therefore above all reproach? No, if God were a human, no one would hesitate to condemn Him for his unpredictable acts of genocide, prejudices, and inconsistently cruel and unusual punishments. As such, God cannot be considered good by any human standard.

This argument subsists on the idea that we, as humans, can judge God for his behavior. After all, don’t we get our morals and ideas of what

It is easier to define by explicitly stating what it is not. For example, any sane person could see that killing one’s own children is not good, nor is damming an entire race of people—and, coincidentally, God does both of these things. However, goodness is not only the absence of badness, but something more: additional action for the betterment of mankind. Throughout the first three books of the Bible, we see few, if any, examples of God doing blatant goodness. Malice underscores all of his seemingly “good” actions: God doubles Job’s fortune—only after forcing unwarranted suffering on him, God leads the Israelites to the promise land—only after decimating the Egyptians, and God gives Adam and Eve a beautiful garden to live in—only after ensuring that they lack the mental capacity to ever leave.

But, let us discuss the things that God has done that are definitely not good—but dare I say horribly, inexcusably bad. After all these things tend to be rather catastrophic in scope and have major repercussions for generations to come, and are therefore much more interesting to

Take for instance, the story of Adam and Eve. He told the first humans not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because He was worried that with that knowledge, humans would become more like Him. This action is against the betterment of humankind in its own right, because God wanted to keep humans ignorant and easily controlled. However, this is not God’s biggest crime against humanity in this story. Once Adam and Eve did eat from this tree, God furiously, and perhaps unjustly, punished them with banishment from the garden. This action effectively condemned the rest of humanity to an eternity of suffering. Now, any reasonable person would not hold innocent children responsible for the sins of their parents. Adam and Eve’s children never even set their eyes on this ruinous fruit, and yet they will feel the implications of its ingestion until the end of their days. Clearly, God simply is not