One thing that Christians (and even many theists) tout from time to time is how good God is.  They get a good job and say that God is good.  Someone gets saved, and they say God is good.  Someone “miraculously” is cured and they say God is good.  You can go to a church service and hear it said probably a hundred times before you leave the building.  One of the biggest things they like to say is that God is good because he provided a way out of Hell.  But is God really good?  Is it really appropriate to even affix such labels to God?

For argument’s sake, I am going to discuss solely the God of the Bible, since that is the most popular God in our country.  That is also the God that I no longer believe in, so it only makes sense.

I’m sure many of you have heard time and time again my rants about how evil God is.  I talk about how God killed many billions of people in the Old Testament, just because they didn’t worship him or weren’t his “chosen people.”  The comeback is always, “Well, those people turned their backs on God and got what they deserved.”  But how many children were killed during those events?  The Flood wiped out the entire population of the Earth save for a few, and I am sure that there were just a few children on the planet.  While the Israelites were in Egypt, God sent a plague killing the firstborn children of Egypt.  In several cities in the Promised Land God told the Israelites to kill everyone and everything, even specifically mentioning children.  Little children who had never even had a chance to accept or reject God, yet they were killed simply because God had them be born in the wrong place.  In the case of Egypt, Pharaoh was the one who refused to let the Israelites go, yet it wasn’t Pharaoh who was punished; it was the children, and not just his children.  After the Israelites left, the Bible says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so he sent his chariots after them.  In that case, Pharaoh didn’t even choose to disobey God; God made him disobey just so he could kill some more and receive glory.  David has an affair with Bathsheba and kills her husband, yet God doesn’t punish David, he punishes David’s child (and the child suffered for seven days).  After reading things like this, one really has to wonder at the justness of God.  The people responsible are not punished; rather it is the people they love who are punished, people who didn’t do anything wrong.  In the case of the Flood, God doesn’t even bother to sort out the good from the bad; he just tells Noah to build a boat and kills everyone, guilty and innocent.

If God is all-knowing then he should have been able to foresee these things before they happened, and if he is all-powerful then he should have been able to prevent it.  At the very least, one would think that an all-knowing, all-powerful God could have found a way to “cleanse” the planet without killing, or at least just weed out the bad seeds.  This would seem to indicate that either the “all-knowing” or the “all-powerful” aspects of God are not true.  One also has to wonder if God just isn’t good, and just wants to use his power for his own gain.  Perhaps he is some sadistic freak that just likes to watch people suffer.  Or perhaps God has (or had) flaws.  He might be omnipotent now, but may not have always been so.  Perhaps he looked at everything and saw the one solution, and it turned out to be the wrong one.  However, Christianity also holds to the idea that God exists outside of time.  If that is the case, and God is omnipotent and omnipresent, then God should be able to go back in time and impose a better solution.  Perhaps God just said, “To Hell with it, what’s done is done,” and just decided to leave it alone.  Or perhaps the reason why the “solutions” seem so flawed is because God really wasn’t doing anything at all.  Perhaps he just created the Earth, saw everything in advance, and just decided it wasn’t worth the effort trying to intervene.  Plus, since he gave us free will, intervention might interfere with that.  One then has to wonder why he created us at all.  It surely seems it would have caused him less headaches.  Or maybe there is no Creator at all.

Back to the point at hand (I got off on a tangent there), whenever I say these things about God being evil, about why God seems to love killing so much, I always get certain replies.  Many people will try to find some way to justify the killing, but the ones who are honest will usually come right out and say that it doesn’t make sense to them either why God would kill so much.  Some will even rebuke me by asking how I can have the audacity to question God, and will even tell me I am condemned to Hell for doing so.  The most popular one seems to be that God works in mysterious ways, and we can’t understand his will.  They say that we can’t label God’s actions as bad because we don’t know all the facts and can’t possibly understand the will of an infinite being.  This is usually where Romans 8:28 comes in, where people say something along the lines of “God works all things together for good.”

Here is my major problem with that last one.  First of all, it assumes God is good simply because the Bible says so.  Therefore, you look at everything from the perspective that God is good, and see whatever you want to see that makes you believe that.  What drives me nuts is when people will try to say that I can’t say God is evil because something bad happens, yet when something good happens they use it as evidence that God is good.  It works both ways.  If bad things aren’t evidence that God is bad, then good things are not evidence that God is good.  If we don’t know all the facts and can’t understand the will of God, then how can we automatically assume that God’s will is good?  The Bible?  Just because a book says it doesn’t mean it is true.  Besides, if God is evil and God “wrote” the Bible, then wouldn’t he try to paint himself in as good of light as possible?

If you really want to get into it, putting labels of any kind (like “good” or “bad”) on God is defining him by the standards of those labels.  In order to say that God is good, you are holding God to a standard, the standard of “good.”  A standard is not a standard unless it appeals to something “above” the individual in question.  If you are holding God to such a standard, then it means that you are putting “good” above God.  If God is the creator of all things, and created good and evil, then he is above them.  God existed before good or evil existed, and so what was he then?  So to boil it down, if you call God “good,” you are saying that there is a greater power than God (“Good”).  Personally, I believe that if God exists, then he/she/it isn’t perfect and should be held to that standard.  Just because the being created the universe doesn’t mean it is all-powerful.  All of us have a conscience, which is our only obvious window into higher things, and since it helps us determine right and wrong I have no problem with putting “good” in the highest place.

To summarize, if God truly is the highest power, then he cannot be labeled as good or bad, because there are so many variables that we can’t understand.  People will see what they want to see, and so if they want to see God as “good,” then they will.  But since there are so many variables that we cannot know, then you can never really have an objective view of God.  Either you have to say that God is not the highest power, or you have to hold to a morally-neutral view of God.