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Goodbye Jesus

Can Mankind Judge God?


FarflungWanderer

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This one has been on my mind for a while, just would like to see how it fares out here in the wild.

 

tl;dr: Read the last paragraph, and the segment of verse quoted below. Sums it up pretty nicely, I feel.

 

Genesis 3.22(KJV): "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil"

 

I feel like this section is important, so let's take a while to talk about it.

 

For anyone who is worried about context, the rest of the verse is about expelling mankind so they don't eat from the tree of eternal life and become immortal like God. And no, this discussion isn't about God's unusual use of the personal word "us". Sorry to disappoint.

 

"Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" is a phrase that will form the basis of my question. It's extremely straightforward: Mankind ate the apple, and now knows good and evil. However, of particular importance is the phrase "become as one of us".

 

Now, you may say, "oh, this is just simile, he's not saying they're literally the same", but if you said that, you'd be contradicting years upon years of interpretation of this phrase. To sum up the general consensus, when Mankind ate the apple, they become capable of understanding good and evil the same way God can.

 

Why is this important, you may ask? To me, this verse establishes a level playing field between humanity and Yahweh. It is stating fairly simply that both God and Man now can see good and evil identically. God can't see higher goods that we cannot, and we cannot see lower evils that He cannot.

 

With this established, I move to the question itself: Can Mankind judge God?

 

The usual defense of all of the atrocities committed within the pages of the Old Testament by God is that "God is Good, everything He does is Good, and He did it for good reasons (usually to defend Israel from the next wave of oppressive states, or to punish a particularly insolent Israel, which is shockingly often for a nation that regularly interacts with the divine. You'd think after a while they would have got with the program)."

 

Yes, I know I'm making a bit of a straw-man. No, I'm not going to apologize, this is more or less what is said.

 

However, what must be asked is if God is truly good. A layperson looking at what God does to Egypt with the final plague, or his commands for the Israelites to massacre everyone who occupied Canaan, or other such horrific events that would be a bloodstain upon history if they were real (we'll save that discussion for another time, okay?) would instinctively look at Yahweh as a monster of Hitlerian scope. Floods annihilating the world, innocent firstborns being struck down for the crime of being the children of Egyptians, entire towns sacked and destroyed because they were in the way of Israel... All of these things would be crimes against humanity if someone were to attempt them in our world.

 

Yet the fall-back position is that God did this for good reasons, and that He is always good. Yet none of these answers are ever good enough to defend genocide. No answer ever will be. Had Hitler won the Second World War, history textbooks would talk about the holocaust (on second thought, they likely wouldn't. There's no need to remind the subservient populous that you are regularly exterminating "undesirables", but I digress) as being "good". A rational person would obviously object to such a view of history, stating that the end of life, no matter how necessary (or in the case of a holocaust, horrifically unnecessary), is never good.

 

For instance, killing Usama Bin Ladin was necessary so that his schemes against all those he considered his enemies would be stopped forever, but the fact that he had to be killed, or that there was a need for him to be killed, is morally wrong. Necessity does not equal moral right, and if it were so, the world would be a much bleaker place.

 

Regardless of the necessity of killing who He does in the Bible, the argument I have made above would put God in the wrong. Yet again the defense would be "God is always good, He cannot be bad."

 

Can He?

 

This brings me back to that verse. According to scripture, Humanity possesses the ability to determine right and wrong at the level that God can. When we say that the holocaust is ​morally wrong, God would agree with us, as we share the same moral capabilities.

 

So then I pose the question to you: Given that we can judge morality, particularly right and wrong, at a level equivalent to Yahweh as according to Genesis 3.22, can Humans legitimately judge God, and even find Him to be anything other than good, regardless of any reason given by Him in defense?

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Farflung,

 

I think I detect a flaw in your argument.  (Sorry, but it's surely better for me to say so, than to keep quiet, right?)

 

There appear to be two distinct actions involved.

First, that humans can know good and evil, like God.  Second, that humans can apply this knowledge to judge God.

 

Now, since you are taking the Bible as the basis of your argument, what does it tell us?

It tells us that even though humans acquired a moral sense (like God's), that act of acquiring it also corrupted the human moral sense.  Scripturally speaking you can't divide the two.  The human moral sense is fallen. This is why Adam and Eve's act of gaining a moral sense is known as the Fall.  

 

According to the Bible, fallen humans can know good and evil - but only in an imperfect and corrupt way.    

Therefore, any judgments they make (based on this imperfect and corrupt knowledge of good and evil) will be equally imperfect and corrupt.  All of their judgments will be suspect, rather than legitimate.  Therefore, they cannot judge anything legitimately and therefore, they cannot judge God legitimately. 

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.

.

Does that help?

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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     The "fall" is a xian concept not a Jewish one and so I'd say judging god based on that Genesis text alone is legit.

 

     (Disclaimer: I only scanned the last paragraph of the OP)

 

          mwc

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I'd never thought of that verse in this context before.
 
I think you're right Farflung, this verse does seem to indicate that humankind now knows good in the same sense that God does. This seems to mean that when the Christian says "God is good", they cannot be saying that God is the standard against which moral actions are adjudicated. They must acknowledge that this verse implies that there is a standard of "good" to which God conforms.
 
I don't think the rest of your argument washes, however. God's understanding would still be greater than ours, because He is eternal, onmiscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. He can therefore make decisions that seem horrible in the moment if there is a greater good to be had down the road. We would not be able to do so, because we don't know the future. Hence I don't think it follows that we can judge God's actions, because we don't know the repercussions of them.
 
Of course, this response necessitates a flat rejection of the following:
 

A rational person would obviously object to such a view of history, stating that the end of life, no matter how necessary (or in the case of a holocaust, horrifically unnecessary), is never good.

 

This is simply not true. I know many rational people who disagree, and I am one such. I agree that unnecessary ending of life is not good, but there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances. I think to say otherwise is to take a very naive view of ethics.

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Good question, Farflung. It does seem as though Genesis provides an answer to the argument that "good" is just whatever God says it is (at any given time), apart from any other standard that may be known by humans.

I have to agree with others, though, that other doctrines seem to qualify the human ability to discern good and evil, even despite Gen. 3:22.

 

As to whether we should even ask, "can we humans judge God"...

 

 

Humans can judge the content of the writings of other humans.

 

So we can judge the OT and can make judgments about the character, Yahweh, in those texts.

 

We can also make judgments about the Canaanite god, Yahweh, as know from other historical sources.

 

We can then circle around to evaluate whether the bronze-age texts that make up the OT, or that even make up Genesis, present us with moral absolutes, as some humans say they do.

 

We can do all this without getting into the "can we judge God" question.

 

It begs the question for the apologist to leap to the "can't judge God" assertion as though it's been demonstrated that Genesis gives us information about "God."

 

Christian apologists like to say that when we make moral judgments of any kind, including judgments about the character God in the OT, we already, even if unknowingly, appeal to God, since otherwise we have no standard of moral judgment at all.

 

Again, begs the question, and leads into arguments that go beyond this thread.

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I think the counterarguments you guys are giving are fair.

 

BAA-I think that makes sense, yes. I feel like, however, that mwc's counter does make a nice response to this.

 

Disillusioned-I suppose that is true, though I'm confused as to why my view of the death of a person is naive.

 

Ficino-This is true, we're making more of a scriptural analysis than one on a being that would need to exist first.

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Yes, if god was real we can. As shown in the first book of the bible, man has knowledge of good and evil. As such we can make the distinction.

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If God is real then you can think whatever you like about God but you can't judge him because he alone has the power, he is going to torture you for all eternity and he really doesn't give a shit what you think.

 

 

If God is not real then you can judge God just like you can judge a play, novel, a brand of wine or anything else humans create.

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We can't fairly judge the actions of another until we know and understand the facts and circumstances that led to the actions we are going to judge. For example, a man shoots and kills another man. If those are all the facts we are given, then we are in no position to judge the killer's actions. What were the facts and circumstances that led to the killing? Was it self defense? Was the shooting an act to protect an innocent third party, like his child was being kidnapped and he shot and killed the would-be kidnapper to protect his child? Was the shooter robbing the man and when the man resisted giving him the money he had in his wallet, the robber shot and killed him to secure the cash? So, knowing good and evil is not enough to judge, facts and circumstances are needed in addition to that.

 

I, therefore agree with disillusioned' words:

 

I don't think the rest of your argument washes, however. God's understanding would still be greater than ours, because He is eternal, onmiscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. He can therefore make decisions that seem horrible in the moment if there is a greater good to be had down the road. We would not be able to do so, because we don't know the future. Hence I don't think it follows that we can judge God's actions, because we don't know the repercussions of them.

 

If, for the purpose of this discussion, we assume the existence of the Christian God with all the attributes attributed to him by Christians, in order to judge that God's actions, we would have to know and understand in detail of why he did what it is said he did and that may very well be beyond our capabilities. Even if within our capabilities, we would have to have everything explained to us by some method, either (or both) by God himself or by some form of extrinsic evidence, neither of which is available to us.

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Humankind can judge the gods portrayed in ancient holy books, and we must, if we are to make progress beyond the messed up world we have at the moment.  We need a new Age of Enlightenment, as Hitchens said.

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Disillusioned-I suppose that is true, though I'm confused as to why my view of the death of a person is naive.

 

Perhaps naive was the wrong word. "Idealistic" might be more appropriate. What I meant was that I think that the view that the ending of life is always morally wrong assumes that the world is a much nicer place than it actually is. I agree that in a perfect world this would be the case, but we don't live in a perfect world. What this means to me is that absolute moral statements of this nature are problematic. But maybe that's just my relativism talking.

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Disillusioned-I suppose that is true, though I'm confused as to why my view of the death of a person is naive.

 

Perhaps naive was the wrong word. "Idealistic" might be more appropriate. What I meant was that I think that the view that the ending of life is always morally wrong assumes that the world is a much nicer place than it actually is. I agree that in a perfect world this would be the case, but we don't live in a perfect world. What this means to me is that absolute moral statements of this nature are problematic. But maybe that's just my relativism talking.

 

 

I think there's truth in that. I would like to clarify that even though I find killing morally wrong, that does not mean I wouldn't do it if I absolutely had to. If someone were trying to kill me, or a person in my vicinity, I would not hesitate in killing to prevent my death or the death of another if it absolutely had to come to that. I just think that killing is a horrible thing to do and it scars you in way nothing else can.

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According to the verse it seems like we have the "tools" to judge God. I also agree that we do not have sufficient data to do so.

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