Derf
Well-known member
You just cited a verse that says how morality applies to the perfect Creator God. He is "without iniquity". How can anyone be judged "without iniquity" unless a moral standard is applied to him?
What Is Morality, and is it Absolute?
- Thread starter JudgeRightly
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Right Divider
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God IS the standard.
Derf
Well-known member
But He gives His standard verbally, and if there's some way that He can be said not to be iniquitous, then He would have to be consistent with the standard He has given in words, or He would be a divided kingdom that cannot stand. This is the argument against higher Calvinism that says God WANTS people to sin.
Right Divider
Body part
Duh... how else would He do it?
Double-negatives are a bad way to communicate.
Yes, God IS the standard that He uses to describe the standard.
Blah...
That's from left field.
God is not judged against Himself.
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Derf
Well-known member
Yes, He is:
Hebrews 6:13. “For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself,”
Morality applies to God in precisely the same fundamental way that it applies to us, although with one critically important distinction.
Morality is grounded in life itself. Life is the standard of morality, and reason is the means by which a rational being identifies what is good and what is evil. That which promotes and sustains life is good. That which destroys or undermines life is evil.
Now, God is a NECESSARY being. He is the self-existent, rational and living Creator upon whom all contingent existence depends. That means God's goodness is not something He acquires by conforming to some moral standard external to Himself. Nor is something good merely because God happens to do it. Rather, God's moral perfection follows necessarily from His own living and rational nature.
God is necessarily living, necessarily rational and therefore necessarily just (i.e. righteous). His nature is the ultimate foundation of the very principles by which morality is understood. Put another way, God does not arbitrarily decide what is good. Goodness is grounded in what/who God IS. This is why Scripture can declare that God is righteous and that all His ways are just. His righteousness is neither an arbitrary decree nor obedience to some authority higher than Himself. It is the necessary expression of His own nature.
The distinction between God and us is that our existence is contingent, while His is necessary. We must discover what is good through reason and choose whether to act accordingly. God's perfect rationality and necessarily righteous nature mean that He will never act contrary to Himself, which is to say that He will never act contrary to Life, which is to say that He will never act contrary to the good.
Thus, morality applies to God because He is a rational, living being, and His moral perfection is an inherent and necessary attribute of His existence. Indeed, if God were capable of acting contrary to reason, justice or righteousness, He would not be the necessary being that reason identifies as God.
P. S. I happen to writing a book that deals with this exact subject!
You don't get to believe anything you want and still meaningfully call yourself a Christian, SQ!
And what biblical evidence to have that God created EITHER the physical or spiritual laws in advance? Did it ever occur to you that such laws are not required to be independently created? What we call physical laws are merely descriptions of how the physical world works. God make things the way they are and the laws are what they are as a result of that creation. There is precisely no evidence anywhere, including the bible, that it was the other way around.
That's just one mostly innocuous example of what appears to me to be a nearly total incapacitation of your ability to think critically, particularly when it comes to an analysis of your own doctrine. You seem totally blind, for example, to how you undermine your own position. You pretend to believe that Right Divider's position is no more or less valid than your own and then deride him when he says your position is wrong. You seem to be blind to the contradiction. The contention that your position is wrong is a major part of RD's position, which you just said was as valid as your position is! So which is it? Is your position correct or is Right Divider's position that your position is wrong correct? You cannot have it both ways!
That last paragraph went over your head. You can get it though! Read it over and over until it clicks!
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Right Divider
Body part
The one you posted from the American Heritage Dictionary, unless there's another one I missed, is, in my view, a rather worthless definition. I mean, it's technically correct, but in the context of this discussion, as well as most discussions about morality, it amounts to little more than a tautology.
Everyone already knows that morality concerns right and wrong. Defining morality in terms of right and wrong doesn't advance the discussion because the real question is what makes something right or wrong in the first place. What is the standard by which we determine that something is good or evil, and why is that standard objectively valid?
I know of no answer to that question that is genuinely objective other than to say, "That which is proper to life is the good, that which negates life is the evil."
Life is the standard of morality.
Every alternative I've encountered ultimately reduces to someone's personal opinion, which is the very opposite of objectivity, or else implicitly relies upon life as its standard without explicitly acknowledging it.
This is particularly important when discussing God's morality. If morality is merely a collection of rules imposed by some authority, then what standard applies to the ultimate authority Himself? If something is good merely because God commands it, then goodness becomes arbitrary. If God commands it because it is good, then goodness must have some objective meaning independent of the mere fact that He commands it.
Life is that objective standard. God is the living Creator. He is not merely the source of life, but life's ultimate expression. He is Life itself and He is the author of the rational principles by which life is sustained and flourishes precisely because He is both necessarily living and necessarily rational. His righteousness is, therefore, neither arbitrary nor dependent upon an authority above Himself. It is an expression of His own necessarily rational and life-affirming nature.
Right Divider
Body part
That's why I said: God IS the standard.
https://theologyonline.com/threads/what-is-morality-and-is-it-absolute.60551/post-1931666
Life is the standard. God Himself is the standard in so much as He is Life.
And He is Life and so it isn't wrong to say that God is the standard. The only issue is that the vast majority of people don't get what is meant by that statement. Many, particularly atheists, are ready to pounce on it to say that it is meaningless then to call God good. And in the way most people mean it when they say that "God is the standard.", the atheist is right! If God is the standard, in the way most people mean it, then morality only applies to beings other than God who can be compared to that standard. Worse than that, if God is the standard and one hypothetical day God tells a malicious lie, then suddenly malicious lies become morally good! Yikes!
Life, however, provides an objective standard that avoids this problem. Malicious deception is contrary to the rational principles upon which life depends, regardless of who engages in it. Its moral character (i.e. whether it is good or evil) doesn't change depending upon who tells the lie.
God is necessarily good because He is necessarily rational and necessarily living. His goodness is an expression of what He necessarily IS, rather than an arbitrary consequence of whatever He might choose to do.
One might respond by saying...
"If he is necessarily rational and living then there is no "whatever He might choose to do" that is contrary to what we call "right" and so what's the practical difference?"
That's actually a very good objection! There is, in fact, no practical difference in what God will actually do. The difference is in WHY His actions are righteous. Both positions can affirm that God will never act unrighteously. Both can affirm that God is necessarily good. The disagreement concerns what makes those statements meaningful. If God's actions are righteous simply because God performs them, then saying "God is righteous" tells us nothing about His character. It amounts to saying that God does whatever God does.I, however, maintain that righteousness has objective meaning. God's actions are righteous because they are consistent with the rational principles proper to life. God necessarily acts in accordance with those principles because He is necessarily rational and necessarily living. The distinction becomes apparent when we ask whether God's actions are good because He performs them or whether He performs them because they are good.
It's the difference between God's identity or authority vs. His necessary nature being what makes something good. Either yields the same practical result, but the philosophical explanation is fundamentally different.
Right Divider
Body part
That is exactly the problem with hypotheticals. They are often completely false examples of nothing.
What is the definition of life?
This always circles back to God Himself.
Yes, it's not about an arbitrary consequence of whatever He might choose to do... it's about who He is.
You've used the word "life" many times and have made it the standard, yet you've yet to define it.
P.S. Thanks for your time, I always appreciate what you have to say.
Per Bob Enyart:
"Life is God, and the property which He imparted to entities within creation that makes them either beings or organisms. The effects of this property may be further described, but it's nature, being tied up in the very nature of the essence of the Godhead, cannot be otherwise defined."
Right Divider
Body part
So it sounds like sticking with "God IS the standard of morality" is identical (or very practically identical) to "Life IS the standard of morality".
Derf
Well-known member
But the problem is that we have as hard a time defining "life" as we have defining God. He has given us some insight into His attributes and His character, some of which we debate vociferously. So, too, the definition of life is debated. We even say that when we die (which would normally be defined as the end of life) we're not really dead, but alive in another place, so that we think of humans as immortal, though translatable.
Right Divider
Body part
I think that most people would have a better general definition of God in their minds than life. That's obviously just my opinion. That's why I prefer to refer to God as the standard for morality rather than life is the standard for morality.
No argument with that.
Physical life, indeed, is temporary. We Christians believe that when God creates us, that He gives us more then just physical life.
Well, this is the first time you've asked me to define the term "life" and this is not nearly so simple a topic as most people who attempt such discussions tend to treat it as. I've spent the better part of a year writing and rewriting a single chapter of a book that makes an argument for the existence of God from first principles, a major point of which has to do with this exact issue. Up to this point, our intuitive understanding of the term "life" was sufficient to make the point and I saw no reason to complicate it. We are, after all, living beings and so what it means to be alive is rather intuitive to us. It is, however, a completely valid question and so let's get into it.
One important clarification needs to be made before just blurting out the answer.
The standard of morality, rather than being merely "life", is most accurately stated as "rational life". In other words, I am NOT talking about biology (more on this in a moment). Indeed, you'll see immediately that "rational life" is even more directly associated with the necessarily rational and living God we've been discussing. Now, I'd define this more precise term as follows...
Rational life is an active state of existence characterized by consciousness, the capacity for logical thought and the ability to make purposeful, self-directed choices.
Let's not leave it there though because someone reading this will surely jump to the obvious objection. Let's address the fact that God has, on numerous occasions, deliberately taken human life (i.e. human life is rational life). He destroyed the world with a flood, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and commanded Israel to wage wars that resulted in the deaths of thousands. How can such actions be consistent with rational life being the standard of morality?
The answer is that preserving biological life at all costs is not what is meant by promoting rational life. If it were, then killing someone in self-defense would be immoral, executing a murderer would be immoral and even God Himself would be morally obligated to preserve the lives of those who deliberately destroy the lives of others.
Such a standard would make justice impossible!
Rational life necessarily involves more than merely remaining biologically alive. It involves the ability to think, to make choices and to act according to principles consistent with one's nature as a rational being. Those principles include justice, which is indispensable to the existence and flourishing of rational beings.
Consider Noah's flood. God destroyed the world because Satan was attempting to corrupt the human race through the Nephilim. Had that corruption succeeded, it would have made God's plan of salvation impossible. The entire human race would ultimately have been lost without any possibility of redemption or eternal life.
The flood, therefore, was simultaneously an act of mercy as well as judgment! God preserved Noah (who was perfect in his generations (i.e. his genealogy - his genes) and his family, thereby preserving the human race and the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ who HAD TO BE fully human. The alternative would have been the eventual destruction of Adam's entire race without any means of salvation whatsoever.
In other words, God's act of judgment resulted in vastly more life than it took! Indeed, the life He took was temporary. The life gained was eternal. He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep for that which he cannot lose.
The same fundamental principle applies to God's other judgments. Justice sometimes requires the destruction of those who threaten the lives of others. The preservation of innocent life can require the use of deadly force, and the protection of rational life cannot be accomplished by granting wickedness the right to destroy it.
The question, then, is whether God's actions are consistent with the principles necessary for rational life to exist and flourish. That is an objective question with an objective answer. God's actions are righteous because they are consistent with those principles. Indeed, because God is necessarily living and necessarily rational, His righteousness is an expression of His very nature. God necessarily acts in accordance with the principles proper to rational life because those principles are inseparable from His own necessary existence as living and rational being. That is why rational life is the standard of morality and why God Himself, being necessarily rational and living, is the ultimate expression of that standard.
My position is right and wrong are absolutes. Some claim they aren't and you have to look at God to know what right and wrong is. I don't think those "apologetics" people explain it right. They end up arguing against themselves with their logic. This is what I mean. Life can't happen by accident. But if it did, and this is what those street evangelists miss, they ask is murder wrong if there is no God. My answer is yes, theirs is no.
I use the Holy Scriptures. Burning their children to a false God wasn't commanded, nor did it even come into his thoughts.
So, I was rereading my own post above this morning and a thought occurred to me that I have to share here. Notice the impact that the ideas expressed in that post has on things you'd never expect. If rational life is the objective standard of morality, and God is necessarily living, rational and righteous, then there are several major theological doctrines that become either impossible or, at the very least, extremely difficult to defend. What's interesting is that these doctrines concern seemingly unrelated theological questions, yet they all run into trouble with the same fundamental principle.
Consider, for example, the idea that whatever God does is righteous simply because God does it. That notion becomes meaningless once we understand that goodness is grounded in the principles proper to rational life. God is necessarily good because He is necessarily rational and living. His actions are righteous because they conform to the objective standard of morality, a standard that is inseparable from His own nature. God cannot make malicious deception righteous merely by choosing to engage in it. He cannot make injustice just by commanding it. His authority does not define righteousness. His necessarily rational and living nature is what makes Him righteous in the first place.
Now, that point is pretty straight forward and the connection to what was said in my post is clear but consider what happens to Calvinism (and related doctrinal systems) if what I said in that post is true...
If rational life is characterized by consciousness, logical thought and the capacity for purposeful, self-directed choices, what becomes of the doctrine that God has exhaustively decreed every event, including every human decision? Under that doctrine, every murder, every rape, every act of cruelty and every malicious lie occurs precisely because God determined beforehand that it would occur. The sinner does exactly what God eternally decreed that he would do, and then God condemns him for doing it!
How is that consistent with rational life being the standard of morality? The Calvinist can insist that God has morally sufficient reasons for decreeing such things, but that assertion doesn't explain how deliberately determining the commission of evil is consistent with God's necessarily righteous nature.
Then there's Irresistible Grace. If purposeful, self-directed choice is an essential characteristic of rational life, what sense does it make to suggest that God created rational beings only to render their most consequential decision irresistible? A person who genuinely chooses to trust God is exercising his rational capacity to respond to truth. A person whose response has been irresistibly determined by another has not exercised that same freedom of choice.
Of course, Calvinists will insist that the person comes willingly, but then, in the next breath will say that their will is just as predetermined as everything else. The question is whether he could have chosen otherwise. If the outcome was determined before the person ever existed, then calling the decision free doesn't establish that it was genuinely self-directed.
The same problem arises with Unconditional Election. If God is necessarily righteous and rational life is the objective standard of morality, on what basis does God unconditionally select certain individuals for eternal life while passing over everyone else? If the answer is simply that God sovereignly chose to do so, we've returned to the very problem we began with! God's sovereign choice cannot itself be the explanation for why that choice is righteous. There must be an objective moral reason for the distinction.
How about Limited Atonement? Christ's sacrifice was the ultimate expression of God's commitment to rational life. He willingly surrendered His own physical life to make eternal life possible for fallen human beings. Yet Calvinism maintains that God deliberately restricted the saving purpose of that sacrifice to a predetermined subset of humanity. Why would a necessarily righteous God, whose very nature is the ultimate expression of rational life, arbitrarily exclude most of humanity from the possibility of receiving the eternal life He died to provide? Appealing once again to God's sovereign will merely assumes the very thing that needs to be demonstrated.
Notice also how these doctrines depend upon one another. If grace is resistible, then unconditional election does not guarantee salvation. If the elect are not guaranteed to persevere, then unconditional election does not guarantee their ultimate salvation either. If election does not guarantee salvation, the usual Calvinistic rationale for limiting the atonement to the elect loses much of its force. Pull out Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints, and the rest of TULIP begins to unravel!
There is also a problem here that reaches beyond Calvinism. Any doctrine suggesting that God can act contrary to logic, or that logical contradictions somehow cease to be contradictions when applied to God, becomes impossible. God is necessarily rational! Logic is inseparable from His nature. He cannot make contradictions true any more than He can make injustice righteous.
And here's what I find so remarkable about all of this. We didn't begin by setting out to refute Calvinism, divine determinism, arbitrary sovereignty or any other particular doctrine. We began by simply asking, "What is the objective standard of morality?" The answer was rational life. Yet that one principle has implications for divine righteousness, human freedom, salvation, justice, God's sovereignty and even the relationship between God and logic itself.
These are not unrelated subjects that just happen to fit together. They are different aspects of the same reality, and the same fundamental principles apply to all of them. That is precisely what we ought to expect if those principles are actually true! Having a fully integrated theological worldview doesn't happen by accident unless you happen to start from first principles that happen to coincide with the truth of reality.
Consider, for example, the idea that whatever God does is righteous simply because God does it. That notion becomes meaningless once we understand that goodness is grounded in the principles proper to rational life. God is necessarily good because He is necessarily rational and living. His actions are righteous because they conform to the objective standard of morality, a standard that is inseparable from His own nature. God cannot make malicious deception righteous merely by choosing to engage in it. He cannot make injustice just by commanding it. His authority does not define righteousness. His necessarily rational and living nature is what makes Him righteous in the first place.
Now, that point is pretty straight forward and the connection to what was said in my post is clear but consider what happens to Calvinism (and related doctrinal systems) if what I said in that post is true...
If rational life is characterized by consciousness, logical thought and the capacity for purposeful, self-directed choices, what becomes of the doctrine that God has exhaustively decreed every event, including every human decision? Under that doctrine, every murder, every rape, every act of cruelty and every malicious lie occurs precisely because God determined beforehand that it would occur. The sinner does exactly what God eternally decreed that he would do, and then God condemns him for doing it!
How is that consistent with rational life being the standard of morality? The Calvinist can insist that God has morally sufficient reasons for decreeing such things, but that assertion doesn't explain how deliberately determining the commission of evil is consistent with God's necessarily righteous nature.
Then there's Irresistible Grace. If purposeful, self-directed choice is an essential characteristic of rational life, what sense does it make to suggest that God created rational beings only to render their most consequential decision irresistible? A person who genuinely chooses to trust God is exercising his rational capacity to respond to truth. A person whose response has been irresistibly determined by another has not exercised that same freedom of choice.
Of course, Calvinists will insist that the person comes willingly, but then, in the next breath will say that their will is just as predetermined as everything else. The question is whether he could have chosen otherwise. If the outcome was determined before the person ever existed, then calling the decision free doesn't establish that it was genuinely self-directed.
The same problem arises with Unconditional Election. If God is necessarily righteous and rational life is the objective standard of morality, on what basis does God unconditionally select certain individuals for eternal life while passing over everyone else? If the answer is simply that God sovereignly chose to do so, we've returned to the very problem we began with! God's sovereign choice cannot itself be the explanation for why that choice is righteous. There must be an objective moral reason for the distinction.
How about Limited Atonement? Christ's sacrifice was the ultimate expression of God's commitment to rational life. He willingly surrendered His own physical life to make eternal life possible for fallen human beings. Yet Calvinism maintains that God deliberately restricted the saving purpose of that sacrifice to a predetermined subset of humanity. Why would a necessarily righteous God, whose very nature is the ultimate expression of rational life, arbitrarily exclude most of humanity from the possibility of receiving the eternal life He died to provide? Appealing once again to God's sovereign will merely assumes the very thing that needs to be demonstrated.
Notice also how these doctrines depend upon one another. If grace is resistible, then unconditional election does not guarantee salvation. If the elect are not guaranteed to persevere, then unconditional election does not guarantee their ultimate salvation either. If election does not guarantee salvation, the usual Calvinistic rationale for limiting the atonement to the elect loses much of its force. Pull out Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints, and the rest of TULIP begins to unravel!
There is also a problem here that reaches beyond Calvinism. Any doctrine suggesting that God can act contrary to logic, or that logical contradictions somehow cease to be contradictions when applied to God, becomes impossible. God is necessarily rational! Logic is inseparable from His nature. He cannot make contradictions true any more than He can make injustice righteous.
And here's what I find so remarkable about all of this. We didn't begin by setting out to refute Calvinism, divine determinism, arbitrary sovereignty or any other particular doctrine. We began by simply asking, "What is the objective standard of morality?" The answer was rational life. Yet that one principle has implications for divine righteousness, human freedom, salvation, justice, God's sovereignty and even the relationship between God and logic itself.
These are not unrelated subjects that just happen to fit together. They are different aspects of the same reality, and the same fundamental principles apply to all of them. That is precisely what we ought to expect if those principles are actually true! Having a fully integrated theological worldview doesn't happen by accident unless you happen to start from first principles that happen to coincide with the truth of reality.