On the Goodness of God: Socrates, Plato, and Most Christians Against Calvinists
I noted here that Plato (or perhaps Socrates before him) might have been the first philosopher to engage in perfect being theology (PBT). Consider this inference by Socrates in Republic, Book II:
Socrates: God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.
Adeimantus: Right.S: And is he not truly good? And must he not be represented as such?
A: Certainly
…
S: Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
Later in Book II, Socrates notes that God is perfect: “But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?” “Of course they are,” answers Adeimantus.
The gist is that since God is perfect and thus wholly good, God is not the cause of moral evil. I suspect most Christians would agree. But some might object. To see this, consider the following inconsistent triad. If any two limbs are true, the third is false.
God is not the cause of moral evil.
Some events are morally evil.
God is the cause of all events.
Let’s grant (2). How could one reasonably deny it?
Now, Socrates, Plato, and most Christians accept (1) and (2) and thus reject (3). God does not cause morally evil events. Humans and perhaps other non-divine persons are the authors of moral evil; we freely choose to do what is evil, thereby introducing into human life the “many evils” Socrates mentioned.
Yet some are universal divine causal determinists, i.e., they hold that God causally determines every event in the world. John Calvin seems to have been a universal divine causal determinist, as do a great many (most?) of his informed followers.* I will call them Calvinists. Such Calvinists would likely accept (2) and (3) and therefore must bite the bullet and deny (1).
As I see it, supposing that there is a Perfect Being, the Calvinists are wrong, and Socrates is right.
*I have discussed this issue with Calvinists. I recall a Calvinist asserting to me that God causally determines every event in the world, thus including the smallest movement of atoms, and the most significant and insignificant of human choices. He claimed, for example, that God had caused me to wear the jacket that I was wearing that day. I indicated that I found that claim implausible. I also asked him if he believed that humans have free will. He claimed that we don’t but seemed uncomfortable with making that assertion. He then tried to hedge by saying that we have “free choice.” I responded that those are two terms for the same thing, and hence that he was making a distinction without a difference — which is no distinction at all.