Question

Ethics homework help.

Consider the following response to Rachels' objection that theological conception of morality makes God's commands arbitrary and, hence, unacceptable: "The arbitrariness claim has no force because God would never command us to do wrong-- to murder the innocent or to torture babies, for example -- because God is all-good".

Explain the obvious counter-response that Rachels can make to the above response.

Answer 1

Rachels mentioned in many arguments that how can you believe the existence of God because by his point of view, God, must be a proper being of worship by his definition. Anyone can understand the rituals behind a religion only when he is familiar with and follows the same. Otherwise, we will criticize each and every procedure or the rituals if we are not in the same religion and vice versa. We love or hate God primarily with the sayings or experiences from other people's mouth, for example when as a child we would have heard it through our mother, father or anyone close to us. So, from that we started our own thoughts of, God is everywhere and He will help me whenever we are in trouble. If we pray, He would come and help us. When the things are not happening as we wished we either ignore God or would not believe that there is no God at all. He would not come when we are in trouble. The actual truth is that we do not know all the reasons behind our birth and why God lets all good and bad things happen in one's life. Jesus' life showed us the right way to respond to any suffering.

From the above, I can say that everything is happening not because of God's saying but it is done through our mind and the following act done by us. So, this could be related to the mental decision what we do for our good.

Let me explain with an example, if a child is grown up in a good situation with all positive things around without even knowing about the harmful situations around us. When the child gets older he follows very timid and non violent way of life all through his life. But, when he knows about the bad things around him makes him react in a different way.

Whereas a child is abused in the early age by his closest people like mother, father, uncle or aunt makes the spoilage of child's mentality towards the society, which ultimately turns him into a non human with all bad behaviours and seeing everyone as enemy and wanted to kill anybody if he does not like also. He might be impatient in most of the situations and assume things by his own.

Here, we can say that "God is all-good" and would never command us to do wrong, is a wrong assumption. Because everything is because of one's psychological behaviour and his background of his life, experiences in his life, fear factor about life, etc. If he knows fully about himself by regularly practising meditation and knowing the inner self or having self-realization; we would not say any good or bad about God. He is the actual conductor of all good and bad things, we are just acting here so we no need to react either for good or bad and just need to watch what is going on around us.