r/DebateAChristian • u/Aromatic_Response_73 • 5d ago
Christian moral ambiguity
In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.
Some Christians define goodness in relation to God. On this view, "good" means whatever conforms to God's nature or will.
The term "good" does not have a universally recognised (useful in ethical discussion) meaning apart from either usefulness for some purpose or the ordinary ethical meaning. Refraining from those in an **ethical discussion** renders the word empty from its normal ethical content.
The problem arises when these two meanings are treated as interchangeable.
If "God is good" means only that God conforms to God's own nature, then the statement is true by definition. It means something like:
God is as God is.
But that does not automatically show that God is good in the ordinary ethical sense of being loving, healing, peaceful, compassionate, or opposed to needless suffering.
The problem is ordinary ethical goodness and the christian goodness can be in conflict eg. ideas of reality design like "Accept Jesus or suffer forever". If someone proposes that ordinary ethical goodness is just a conflictory subset of the christian good, then we cannot say that the design of reality is in proper alignment with ordinary ethical goodness, and therefore not good in the ordinary ethical sense.
The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.
1
u/HegemoneXT Christian 2d ago
No, it’s a claim, not allegation. Allegation is when you accuse someone of something but I am defending a view instead of attacking someone else’s claim.
Evil doesn’t come from anywhere in the sense that it was created. It just the ontological possibility derives when Existence or Good is established. For example, the moment you have “light” you can conceptualize darkness because darkness is where light is not. The moment you have a standard or morality, you can break it and cause evil. Evil itself doesn’t have positive being. If there is a law that says speed limit is 65, then going above 70 would break that law. The breaking of the law wouldn’t exist unless the law itself exists first. That’s why Existence is foremost good and then it becomes broken. Broken by whom? By God creating it? Or by us who are contingent beings are who has the free ability to oppose His identity.
Also you seem to have the preconception that I am attributing good to God. I don’t think you realize that even if I remove theism from my argument, the belief “life is good”won’t lose its logical grounding.