K-Ci asked:

Why is the moral disposition of (the Christian) God in the Old Testament of the Bible different from
that of Jesus' in the New Testament? God in the Old Testament allowed killing (for instance, Moses
killing the Egyptians) while Jesus won't even lift a hand to any sinner. God gave Moses "thou shall not
kill" as one of the Ten commandments yet He himself allowed such acts.

For this reason, isn't "good" higher than God? Is something good because God commands it, or does
God command it because it is good?

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K-Ci leads with a literary question that poses a problem for any theology that takes the literary
literally. It is, however, no more a philosophical question than is, for example, 'Why is Peter O'Toole's
portrayal of Henry II in the 1964 film Becketdifferent from his portrayal of that monarch four years
later in A Lion in Winter?'

K-Ci's next question is philosophical, but it requires parsing. 'Higher' implies comparison, which
implies commensurability. If God is an actual being (something that can act) and 'good' is a term of
judgment (which cannot act), neither can be 'higher' than the other, because an actual entity and a
term of judgment are incommensurable.

In K-Ci's second paragraph, the classic conundrum finally surfaces. One's metaphysics will determine
how one resolves it. Partly following Brand Blanshard (Reason and Ethics), I apply the judgment
'good' only to an actual being that both satisfies a desire and fulfills an impulse of a subject (also
actual). Neither desire-satisfaction nor impulse-fulfillment alone meets the conditions of our judging
something 'good.' The subject's nature and the wider (ultimately cosmic) causal context within which it
is situated determine what is possibly good for it.

Embedded in the conundrum is another metaphysical question. It asks whether God is unilaterally
responsible for the metaphysical situation. In classical theism, God apparently is so responsible. That
is, classical theists are disinclined to suggest, for example, that God 'finds' Godself in the
metaphysical situation, which God has no choice but to exemplify. Such a suggestion would grate
against their religious sensibility with its notion of God's majesty. They say that God never violates the
laws of logic, but only because logic is not other than God's nature. Logic, they say, is not something
'external' to God. They use such locutions as 'God does not look outside himself' to ascertain what is
intelligible, rational, or good — as if 'looking inside himself' would give God any more discretionary
control over the intelligible, the rational, or the good.

I would appreciate learning of one text of classical theism that states or implies that God's nature is as
much under God's sovereign control as is the cosmos. If it is not — if God is 'stuck,' so to speak,' with
God's nature as we are with ours — then God is not responsible for the metaphysical situation.
Indeed, according to classical theism as I understand it, before God exnihilates the cosmos God is
the whole metaphysical situation. Before God can do anything in accordance with God's nature, that
nature must be a datum (a 'given') for God. God's nature is therefore not under God's sovereign
control. Not even God can alter God's nature or annihilate its sole instance ('commit suicide').

With that foot in the door, we can now consider whether God might be 'forced,' as it were, to consult
other data that God did not unilaterally decree. This will lead us at once to our resolution of the
conundrum.

Classical theism holds that God is the unilateral 'exnihilator' (bringer-out-of-nothing) of the cosmos
(the widest possible context of all moral decision-making). This entails that God has settled what is
good for any possible subject. God's commands (leaving wholly aside how they might be known as
God's commands) merely explicate an aspect of that arrangement. For if God the exnihilator
unilaterally foreordained and then caused-to-be the whole scheme of subjects with desires to be met
and impulses to be fulfilled, it is hard to see how 'something' could be good — or better, why an
injunction must be performed — except that God sovereignly decrees or commands it. After all, God
willed or commanded into existence the whole context of injunction-performance. God's moral
relationship to the cosmos as commander to commanded mirrors perfectly his (alleged) metaphysical
relationship of exnihilator to exnihilated.

Perhaps, however, God is not at all in the injunction-commanding business just because, contrary to
the advertisement of God's public relations firm, he's not in the cosmos-exnihilating business.
Perhaps God is in the business of luring subjects into experiences of greater and greater interest
(contrast and intensity), which God consequently enjoys with them. The motive here is love. In a
relationship characterized by love, neither lover utterly controls (or would want to control) the other or
the situation both find themselves in.

Of course, modern science's imperative to expunge all aim from the universe rules out any cosmic
evolutionary hypothesis wherein an end-envisaging and end-coordinating agency plays an
indispensable role. Whatever else that imperative may have going for it, however, it is not itself a
discovery of science. It expresses a philosophic choice that precedes empirical inquiry. Modern
science's effort to explain aim in terms of exhaustive, and aimless, determination by the past has
been a failure. For to explain aim in terms of the aimless is to explain it away. That failure justifies
subjecting the aforementioned choice to critical scrutiny. On a view of evolution alternative to the
modern, final causality and efficient causality are irreducible to each other and equally indispensable
to our understanding of actual things and the cosmos they comprise.

The atheist has no greater (if unwitting) philosophical ally than the theist who poses the false
alternative, 'Either classical theism or atheism.' God's envisagement of possible goodness
(desire-satisfaction plus impulse-fulfillment) guides God's present provision of initial aims for all other
decision-makers. Each of them responds with (at least some degree of) self-determination, and the
result is the creative advance of the cosmos.

So if we are forced to choose between the alternatives of K-Ci's question, I would choose 'God
commands it because it is good,' but I would reformulate the question by substituting a metaphysics
of love for that of unilateral imposition and command.

Anthony Flood