A declaration that God is "Good" has a secular (non-God-based) basis for determining so. What is that basis?

Question

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How do we know an act of God is good, if not from a secular conclusion?

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Answer 1

Well, first off, it's necessary to prove that the declaration "God is 'Good'" has that secular basis you were talking about.

Which is actually pretty easy.

If your definition of good is "Whatever God tells us to do and not do", then either God is not good, or the definition is flawed.

Got has commanded us not to kill, steal, or envy, and then turned around and commanded us to do all three, sometimes posessing people when they weren't killing fast enough (read the book of Judges some time).

So clearly there's no definition of "good" and "evil" that can be derived from "what God told us to do", because there's no consistency to begin with. In addition, many of His laws (killing an entire town, starting with your own family, if one family member mentions another deity's name) are appalling to our sense of decency, and you would be hard pressed to defend them regardless your definition of good, where they are very, very easy to define as evil.

Now that that's out of the way, where DO our notions of "Good" and "Evil" come from?

Some starting points
-There's a lot of morality based on "The Golden Rule" or "Karma", which appeal to self interest in order to encourage people to do "good" things. "Good", in this case, means doing things to other people that you want done to yourself. It generally works, but in cases where you have to do things to other people that you don't want done to yourself (such as putting people in jail, or waking them up an hour early to start a new job) that can be generally agreed upon to be good, or in cases where you want something done to you (having a wound cauterized with a hot iron so it doesn't become infected, having intercourse with most people) that would be amoral for you to do to others (who don't want to be burned with hot irons and don't want to sleep with you), it becomes harder to apply.

-There's another school of thought that suggests "The greatest good for the greatest number". This is also known as "utilitarianism". Basically, this is just people acting for everyone's benefit. What could possibly be wrong with that, you may ask? That's the basis of Fascism, the philosophy of Hitler's Nazi party. When people are viewed as existing to support the state (or "everyone else"), people aren't important anymore, and can be easily disposed of when they are no longer necessary. The lessons both Fascism and Communism taught us, is that it's evil to remove people's self-interest entirely, and that in the face of an oppressive state, it's actually Good to act out of self-interest

So what is it then? Is "Good" what's good for you? For your government? For God? Is there no such thing?

I personally think the answer is, "whatever you think is good, is probably better than what I think is good". I think the most evil idea there is, is that you know what's best for everyone. Every time one group of people has decided that they know what good is, and that everyone else is evil, there have been millions of deaths, a handfull of people with 90% of the resources, and all the things people agree upon as being evil thrive.

When people can accept that other people might be right, I think that's what Good is.

EDIT:
I think Lina-Chan has a great answer, but I think she meant "subjective" instead of "objective".

Her answer was definitely easier to read than mine was :p

Answer 2

From my understanding, he didn't know what he was. He wasn't an atheist or a pantheist, because he said he wasn't. He honestly couldn't comprehend a beginning to a God (from Jewish beliefs, God has no beginning, so he couldn't believe in that God), but he couldn't also comprehend the order he saw in the universe without a God being present. But he definitely was not a Christian. I think, given the Holocaust, he would have been offended at the idea. I think the Snopes answer though probably has something to do with it. Just like people believe that blinking your headlights will get you killed, people tend to get emails saying Einstein did this or was that and take it as gospel. :P "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views." "I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God." Add: Just to say it, if Einstein said "I'm not a pantheist" which is what he said, even if what he also said seems to lean in that direction, you can't say "he was a pantheist." He said he wasn't, and... that's just how it is.

Answer 3

Hold on... I have to look up the word "secular".
Oh, so that's what it means.

In that case, the word "good" is objective. I could think that killing people is good (I don't, just an example), while another person could think that making everyone unable to die is good.

And how do we know what an act of god is? Is a baby being born the act of god, or the result of sex? One could say that a child being born is the mother's fault. Another could say it was the father's fault. And then someone else could say that it was god's fault. Then of course we have the question of whether or not the birth of the child was a good thing. It is possible that the parents did not want the child, therefore if it was god's doing, it would not be considered a good act of god.

Answer 4

Interesting question...

The truth is that God only exists with the confines of a believer's mind and the same can be said for "good" "joy," "love," etc. These are all value judgments and have no real and physical substance. They do, however, have an existence, albeit one that is temporary and entirely dependent upon the attitude of the believer.

If the believer of God should decide that "God is Good" then for as long as he believes such it is true and exists as a resident within that particular believer's mind. Likewise, God can be attached to any other modifier the believer wishes to conceive... "God is Joy" comes to mind and the statement will be equally true.

it's interesting to note here that there is no action of God that can by this thinking effect a change upon the physical world. Unless a believer is particularly skilled in telekinetic, his beliefs, of God or otherwise, are merely beliefs and will remain so.

[][][] r u randy? [][][]
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Answer 5

Interesting question.

I'm such the fundy that I don't see it. I don't believe there is a non-God basis for measuring God's goodness. I'd say that the 'secular' view when measuring God is likely influenced by God.

Answer 6

I think that first you must determine if the act was good, then you decide whether it was an act of god or not. Meaning that good comes before god and not the other way around, so it can and does exist without god.

Its "god desires it because it is good."
not "its good because god desires it."

Answer 7

The labels "good" and "bad" are gages of morality. Since morality is determined by environment, and not by religion, the basis is secular.

Answer 8

People just rather believe that God is good because the alternative is that God in a evil, sadistic SOB or the apathetic deadbeat dad of the universe.

Answer 9

God is only one o short of good, while several letters short of evil. But that is as close to good as God will ever get.