Hi Sonia,
I’ll agree with Oxy, but my guess is that we’ll disagree on how to apply this in understanding God or in judging the plausibility of other theological claims (say, claims that seem to implicate God in doing evil).
If God does the things he does ‘because they’re good’ then one could argue that there’s a standard of “goodness” outside of God which measures God and to which God conforms. And I think that’s something we ought not to suppose is the case (i.e., we shouldn’t think of God’s choices as conforming to a standard of goodness outside God himself).
So for the above reason I’ll agree with Oxy (and I think that’s the traditional view).
But there’s a danger in the saying the competing claim, that what God does is good just because it’s GOD who’s doing it. In a sense it’s true. We can trust that whatever GOD does, by virtue of being the God he is, it is good. But SOME will take this as an opportunity to justify actions THEY believe are rightly attributed to God, like unconditionally determining all that happens in the world, evil included, or to argue a divine right to arbitrary choice/determination. So predetermining all the evil our world has known IS perfectly good just because it’s GOD who did the determining of it. SOME might say, “You can’t judge determinism on the grounds that attributing all the world’s evil to God’s unconditional decree makes God evil since it’s GOD who is doing the determining.” If you smell something fishy going on here, you have good instincts.
What I would want to say is that God IS that standard. If it’s the case that God does good things ‘because they’re good’ then instead of locating that objective standard of goodness to which his actions conform outside of God, why not just make GOD that standard? And that’s what I do. This way I avoid conforming God to a standard of goodness outside himself AND avoid making God capricious or arbitrary. God doesn’t conform to some standard of goodness outside himself, but this doesn’t mean there is no ‘standard’ or that God is just as likely to condemn the righteous and justify the unrepentant as he is otherwise. See what I mean?
So for me, to say “What God does is good because God does it” means we can always conclude the goodness of acts RIGHTLY identified as God’s as being good for the simple reason that God IS goodness. Only goodness flows from him. God IS his own standard. This would be scary and make God arbitrary IF God was not dispositionally self-determined always to pursue the most aesthetically pleasing, existence-promoting, and person-building course of action possible. But what “what God does is good because God does it” does NOT mean, to my thinking, is that we can insulate a claim like ‘theological determinism’ from the criticism that it’s not true since God is not evil and can do not evil on the basis that it’s not evil God is doing precisely because it’s GOD who is doing it. That won’t fly. Indeed, something’s being evil is persuasive argument for concluding that God is NOT the one doing it.
Tom
