Mailbag: Could God Make Torturing Children Good?

Mailbag: Could God Make Torturing Children Good?

David Baggett

Curtis writes:

Hello.  …

In chapter two [of Good God] in a discussion of the Euthyphro dilemma, you point out that one horn of the dilemma is the voluntarist position that God could say that torturing children is good.  You seem to dismiss that position and I can't seem to grasp why (not that I think torturing children is good).  It seems to me that if God is the ground of goodness, then what he determines to be good is good.  Whoever challenges this is assuming that torturing children is bad.  But where did they get their notion that something is bad?  If God is the foundation of good, then he would determine what is good.  I would say that God would not say torturing children is good because it is outside of his character, but I am drawing from scripture, not just philosophy.  If I were just drawing from philosophy it seems that God COULD say that torturing children is good and we would have no basis to say otherwise.

Anyway, as I said, these are the thoughts of an arm chair philosopher.  I hope your family is safe and enduring the isolation.

Curtis

David Baggett replies:

Hi Curt,

We do indeed think that God is the ground of goodness. In fact, we gravitate toward a theistic Platonic account—more theistic than Platonic—that in some ultimate sense God is the good—the ultimate exemplar or archetype of the good. But that makes God’s nature, you might say, even more than his will, the grounding of the good. His will is shaped and constrained, one might say, by his nature. So there are some things God can’t do. An axiomatic assumption here is that the argument we’re formulating is for a God who’s worthy of worship. God is essentially good, but this has two readings—one’s called a de dicto reading, the other is a de re reading. On the de dicto reading, “God is good” is to be understood in this sort of way: “God” is more a title than a name, and to affirm that God is good is to say that whoever inhabits the office of Deity, if you will, must be good. Maybe there’s someone who inhabits the office, maybe there isn’t, but if anyone does, a qualifying factor, a necessary condition, is to be perfectly good. That approach isn’t without merit, and in fact this alone would disqualify anyone from counting as God who isn’t essentially good. On those grounds alone we could infer that God couldn’t call good something that we know isn’t. (We could be systematically deceived of course, but this just shows the challenge of acquiring Cartesian certainty, something hardly worth hankering after.)

The de re reading, though is the deeper reading in a way, and it’s designed to say something of God himself (not just about the general qualification for Deity). On a de re reading “God is good” is to suggest that of God himself we can predicate the property of perfect or essential goodness. God himself really is perfectly, essentially, and wholly good. We also argue that he’s recognizably good, which is important, because otherwise our ascriptions of goodness would mean very little—if we regularly go around affirming God’s perfectly good but also that we have little clue what goodness looks like. Sometimes, of course, we have to acknowledge limitations in our understanding of goodness. The OT conquest narratives, for example, challenge us to reconcile such difficult passages with our best moral intuitions. Good God distinguishes, though, between what’s merely difficult for us to make sense of and what’s flat rationally impossible. We actually offer an algorithm of sorts to distinguish between the two, and we would argue that torturing children for fun clearly falls into the category of the rationally impossible to square with moral goodness. If we were even possibly able to say, in principle, that child torture for fun would be good, then the whole system of morality would break down. An analogy would be how our ability in principle to say that the law of noncontradiction could fail would vitiate the whole system of logic. Or if in principle we could say that inferences should be based on good reasons is false, the whole system of epistemology would break down. Likewise we know that morality includes, among other things, issues like well-being and flourishing. This is something that we bring to our consideration of ethics—something of a deliverance of reason or rationality, that is, philosophy. And it’s perfectly appropriate and common sensical to do so. We do such things all the time, and we needn’t chuck those things at the door of the philosophy seminar room. Philosophy would be a feckless thing indeed if we had to!

Ours is something of a bottom up approach. We start by considering the logic, language, and phenomenology of morality, including locutions like ‘good’. And we begin to make inferences on this basis. There are features of morality in need of explanation. Among them is the axiomatic assumption that torturing kids for fun is wrong. This moral insight, notice, is something about which we can feel quite sure. There’s a reason it’s axiomatic. It’s less something we reason to than reason from. That we can apprehend its truth with such clarity doesn’t liberate us from the need to explain its truth, but arguably makes it all the more pressing to consider. Its very clarity and certainty, we might say, gives us all the more reason to think it can provide us insight into the nature of ultimate reality—which in a real sense is the most basic assumption on which the moral argument for God is predicated. If someone were to try to provide the explanation that God could come along and fundamentally alter the content of any and all moral truth—dictating, say, that child torture for fun is good rather than bad—then they would be embracing, as you note, a radically voluntarist conception of theistic ethics. The content of morality could completely change on such a view, and specifically the content of goodness itself, which is just part of morality. Like most ethicists, we distinguish between axiological matters of moral goodness, on the one hand, and so-called deontic matters of moral rightness (which includes obligations), on the other. We happen to be divine command theorists but only with respect to rightness, not goodness. We’re rather divine nature theorists of the good. Especially the necessary moral truths—like the badness of child torture for fun—provide veridical windows of insight into God’s very nature. What radical voluntarism does is empty out the category of necessary moral truths, and rather than this being a strength of the theory, it’s a good rational reason to reject it. So yes, one can embrace such a theory, but there’s reason to think it doesn’t track reality.

There are good theological reasons for rejecting it, too. The Bible says God can’t deny himself. He can’t act contrary to his nature. So telling us to torture children for fun isn’t possible for him—not because anything outside of God constrains him, but because of his own essentially loving nature. So a properly explicated and nuanced theistic ethic ends up, we argue, both consistent with scripture and a philosophically powerful account of morality that can avoid these so-called arbitrariness problems associated with radical voluntarism. God’s Trinitarian nature also gives us excellent reasons to think God couldn’t altogether alter the content of goodness. His essentially social, personal, relational, and loving nature in the perichoretic relationship of the Trinity is an even more fine-grained account of his “nature,” and one that entails God would never count child torture for fun morally good. You might think that if he never would do such a thing, that’s enough, but we think we actually need to say he can’t, for this reason: If he could say child torture for fun is good, even if he never would, then in principle, theistic ethics would countenance the possibility that child torture for fun is good. And any theory with such an implication is worthy of rejection, and simply in fact irrational to believe. Some resist because they’re uncomfortable with saying there are some things God can’t do. But it’s obvious there are some things God can’t do. He can’t deny himself, he can’t commit suicide, he can’t sin, he can’t be tempted (in some ultimate sense), etc. He can’t do such things because he’s perfect; if he were vulnerable to such things it wouldn’t mean he’s greater and more powerful, but susceptible to weakness and imperfection. His inabilities here are signs of his perfection.

Two last points and then I’ve got to set this aside for now. First, there’s a difference between how epistemology works and how ontology works. We have to reason bottom up, so epistemology—this matter of how we come to know things and find justification for believing things—starts from the bottom and moves upward. So we have no choice but to start with what is self-evidently true to us. This  makes appeal to axiomatic facts like the wrongness of child torture appropriate starting points. If your theory ends up having to reject such truths, all the worse for your theory. There’s no rational way, it seems to me, that one can reasonably argue that we’re more sure of radical voluntarism than we are the essential badness of child torture for fun. But whereas epistemology works bottom up, ontology (the way things are) works top down, we argue. If we have good reason to think God’s the best explanation of a whole range of moral phenomena, and if attentively paying attention to all that evidence leads us rationally to infer so, then God, we rationally conclude, is the ultimate foundation for all these things. Reality itself is “top down,” but that doesn’t mean that as finite human beings we still don’t have to figure out stuff bottom up.

Second, we argue God is the good, and also say God is good. The former is known as the “is of identity,” and the latter the “is of predication.” We affirm both. Following A. C. Ewing, we think it’s reasonable to think that the source of goodness is also perfectly good. So I’m comfortable affirming both that God is the archetype of the ultimate good as well as aptly described as good himself, albeit in a somewhat different way from how we ascribe moral goodness to human beings. We’re good most likely in virtue of relevant resemblance to God’s archetypal goodness; God’s good and also is the very archetype of it. But that doesn’t mean goodness can become just anything at all because of divine caprice, unless God’s nature itself could vary so radically. But if that were so, theistic ethics wouldn’t be the best explanation of morality. We don’t argue that morality points to God’s mere existence—but to the existence of a perfectly good God. The “gods” of, say, the Greek pantheon don’t provide as good an explanation of morality as does the God of the Bible.

Sorry this has to be far briefer than it ought to be. But I hope this helps. As you continue to read the book, much of this should become considerably clearer. After Good God, perhaps consider reading our God and Cosmos (2016) and The Moral Argument (2019). Other good books on the topic are John Hare’s God and Morality, The Moral Gap, and God’s Command; Robert Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods; and C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligation. After those, I can give you  more suggestions. Also please feel free to look at the resources at MoralApologetics.com; all the content is free.

Blessings in your investigations of such matters!

Best,

Dave