Response to Papers Critiquing “God’s Moral Goodness”
Authors:   University of Oxford, Swinburne Richard 
Published: December 2023

This paper is a response to the critiques in Filosophia Religii 2022 and 2023 of my paper, “God’s Moral Goodness” (in Filosophia Religii 2022). I argue for the preferability of Aquinas’s way of arguing to God’s nature from the most general observable features of the world, over Anselm’s way adopted by Mark Murphy of drawing out the consequences of God being a “most perfect being”. I claimed against Vladimir Shokhin, that my probabilistic argument leads to the simplest and so most probable kind of God. To Igor Gasparov’s claim that an even simpler kind of God would be one who has no un-realised potentialities, and so one in which his one property of divinity includes all his activity, I argued that on the contrary, such a God would have no free will, and so not be truly omnipotent. To Mark Wynn’s claim that Christianity holds that God does not choose arbitrarily between equally good alternatives, but has preferences which do not merely track the relative goodness states of affairs, I answer that to postulate a God with such preferences simply moves the arbitrariness of God from his actions to his nature, and so postulates a less simple God than I postulate. I argue also against Vladimir Shokhin’s claim that humans do not have the power to discover God’s reasons for permitting horrendous evils, by drawing attention to some features of my own theodicy, which might begin to make it plausible that we do have this power. I reject Mark Wynn’s claim that on my theodicy no possible balance of evil over good observable by humans on earth could constitute evidence against the existence of God, and that in consequence nothing observable by such humans could constitute evidence for the existence of God. Kirill Karpov pointed out that there are vast disagreements about which world states are good and which are evil, and so we are in no position to judge whether my requirement for a cogent theodicy that every evil state is a logically necessary condition for some comparable good state, is satisfied in our world. I argued against him, that the mere existence of moral disagreement does not show that none of us can discern moral truths; and that on the contrary, many moral disagreements are resoluble by the method of “reflective equilibrium”. To Mark Murphy’s claim that God does not have “requiring reasons” to conform to the “familiar welfare orientated” morality, which humans are obliged to follow, I reply that the same very general principles of morality apply both to God and to humans, but their application varies with the degree of power, knowledge and freedom possessed, and the causal power exercised, by humans and by God. To Murphy’s claim that God as “the ultimate source” of the goodness of created beings cannot be constrained by what constitutes their goodness, I object that what constitutes moral goodness is determined in part by paradigm examples of moral goodness, including promoting, and preventing setbacks to, the well-being of created beings. To Vladimir Shokhin’s endeavor to support his view that God is too great for humans to understand his ways, by various quotations from Scripture, I adduce quotations from Scripture which suggest the contrary. None of the contributors expressed a view on my claim in the earlier paper that God is not merely a “best acting” God, but also a “best feeling” God, except for Vladimir Shokhin who agreed with me; and so I welcome this conclusion to our symposium.