Some of the atheists over at Debunking Atheism have complained that if God is the standard for what is good, then it is gibberish to say that God is good. For example, sdanielmorgon said:
This is exactly the question I was raising before when I said that if goodness is a by-product of god, if our standard of appraising actions and positions as “good” or “bad” is contingent upon god, rather than a capability we can objectively use to assign truth values (and thus have some semblance of free moral agency), then we can call god “goobledegook” or “good” and it means the same basic thing: that what we call “good” or “bad” can never be used to apply to god, because we are using a subset of god’s own imposed values to judge the entire set of god’s character.
I got to thinking on this issue and figured a good analogy is that of logic. Is logic itself logical?
If we start with the foundation of logic, the Law of Identity (A is A), we notice that “A is A” is itself circular reasoning. Thus, logic would be logically invalid if applied to itself.
But if logic is not logical then we have no reason to think that the axioms that logic is based on are actually true. Put it this way: if logic comes about from the irrational, then why is logic rational? And would that mean that the rational presupposes the irrational in order for the rational to even be defined?
If we are going to say that logic is not logical, then perhaps we can say that God is not good for the same reasons. However, one must not forget the fact that while logic is not logical, it results in creating and defining what is logical; and thus, in the same way, God would result in creating and defining what is good.
I, for one, would have no problem with that proposition.
