God is the Good

A central driving belief of the western theistic tradition is that God is the Good.  We see this claim in Augustine, Aquinas, and all the way to Robert Adams.  It derives from one prominent strand in Plato, that which takes the Forms to be exemplars rather than abstract universals.   Despite my interest in preserving central intuitions and claims of classical theism, this particular claim has always puzzled me.  What does it mean to say that something is the Good? 

I think this puzzlement tracks back, at least partially, to the fact that good is an ambiguous term.  It can mean prudential goodness, that is, something that is good for well-being or instrumentally good for.  Good can denote an emotive property, like when someone hears that their favorite basketball team won and exclaims, “Good!.” Clearly none of these uses are meant by the claim that God is the Good.

So what is meant?  I take it that the best account for the claim that God is Good is that it’s equivalent to saying that God is all-value.  “Goodness” as used in this claim merely denotes valuableness, and the claim that God is “the” Good is the further claim that he’s all-value.  Wait. Hold on.  This is still extremely puzzling. If God is all-value simpliciter, then what about other things that are clearly valuable?  The Mona Lisa, for instance.  Isn’t it valuable? And it clearly isn’t God.  So God is not all-value.  There are other things that have value.

The Mona Lisa is valuable because it resembles God.  Donating to orphans is good because it reflects the goodness of God.  Humans are valuable because we participate in the goodness of God.  These three terms are after the same idea.  (Clearly the Mona Lisa doesn’t look like God in a literal pictorial sense.  Perhaps it resembles God in a way that both are beautiful, even though they are not beautiful in the same way.)  The point of these terms is that creaturely goodness is merely reflecting back the goodness of God.  It doesn’t stand on its own.  These terms are themselves somewhat ambiguous, but I think they can do some work if we can give some sort of explanation of the terms.  I think the following analogy goes some way towards that goal.

Imagine a person who has proven a complex theorem in mathematics.  If that person shares the proof for the theorem with someone else and that person understands the proof, then the original person’s justification for believing the theorem has been duplicated.  There’s another case of unique and distinct justification in the world.  Now consider the case where you just tell another person that you’ve proven the theorem, but don’t provide the proof.  They accept the theorem on the basis of your testimony and not on the basis of the proof.  This would be a case where there’s more justified believers, but not more justification.  It’s a derived justification, not another case of justification alongside the original justification.  This story parallels the Mona Lisa case.  The goodness of the Mona Lisa is a derived or participated goodness in God, and not another separate instance of goodness.

Perfect being theology offers us reasons to accept this sort of story.  That which is not only good in itself but is the source of any goodness of other things is greater than that which is simply good in itself, and God is the greatest possible being.  So God is the source of all other goodness in other things.