You state your fundamental question as follows: How do we know that God is good?Now at one level, as I explained in last week’s Question #294, that question is easy to answer: it is conceptually necessary that God be good. That is to say, goodness belongs to the very concept of God, just as being unmarried belongs to the concept of a bachelor. For (i) by definition God is a being worthy of worship, and only a being which is perfectly good would be worthy of worship; and (ii) as the greatest conceivable being God must be morally perfect, since it is better to be morally perfect than morally flawed.
Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRvGSh7H
Notice, That this doesn't answer what is good? Is it what humans define as good? What is moral, is it humanity's morality that defines all morality? It also assumes that there is such a thing as absolute or objective morality, it is an open question whether such truly exists.(some have even argued that morality requires authority, which is another open question).
It is also questionable to say that the greatest conceivable being must necessarily be either good or moral, at least by human standards, and even without human standards, this depends on objective goodness and objective morality existing. All that it needs to be is perfect, and we can't say humans definition of perfection is necessarily equivalent to true perfection. An entity of absolute knowledge and power, a truly perfect divine being, might have arrived at a rational basis for action that could be entirely alien from a human perspective, it could very well be beyond human morality and human definitions of good and evil.
Thus, the source of our moral duties is God’s commandments. That’s why what Herod did was wrong: he transgressed a divine command to not murder. Now since God presumably does not issue commands to Himself, it follows that He has no moral duties. Hence, it is logically incoherent to allege that God has done something which He ought not to do.
Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cRzCRr7o
Notice that the commandments require very high level of proof to say they are tied to a divine being, also note that archaeological evidence regarding the exodus story is scant. IT is looking highly likely that like Noah, and Adam and eve, this too is yet another fictional story in the bible some ancient writer made up. How can we claim the writings from some ancient uneducated man emerge from a divine being? These were believed to be literal events that took place, but if they're made up, we have no more reason to hold them up than say the Illyad or Harry Potter.
Does that mean that God can just do anything? No, for God cannot act contrary to His own nature. God is essentially loving, fair, patient, consistent, and so forth
Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/on-the-goodness-of-god#ixzz3cS08WX6L
Again we observe that what human's consider good, moral, just, perfect are being attributed to the divine. But the imperfect products of evolution, whose morality is nothing more than a bare code to act in a social setting, is in all likelihood inadequate to match any objective morality there may or may not be, nor are humans' visions of the perfect necessarily correspondent with what is truly perfect.
Now in another question and answer it seems the fallibility of man is accepted
Still, some attributes, such as moral perfection, omniscience, and omnipotence are evidently great-making properties.You ask, “Even if we could imagine a greater being, can it not just be that those ''greater/higher attributes'' are unnecessary and therefore not really greater attributes?” Of course, as the examples just given show. But that is very different than disputing that God is the greatest possible being. We might mistakenly esteem an impassible God to be greater than a God capable of suffering, but that only shows that we failed to form an adequate conception of the greatest conceivable being. God is necessarily the greatest being possible, even if our concept of what such a being is like is fallible and so capable of correction and refinement.
Read more:http://www.reasonablefaith.org/why-cant-god-be-just-the-greatest-being
Well omniscience and omnipotence, within certain constraints are reasonable. It is interesting to note that true omniscience basically requires determinism, and seems incompatible with true randomness. Of course true randomness, like free will seems like a nonsensical concept if you look deeply into it. Yet without free will, an incoherent concept, human beings are not truly morally responsible for their actions. Thus they're guilt free, especially in a deterministic system, which it likely is, where it would be the one who set everything in motion upon whom all the moral responsibility would fall upon, as the initial conditions would determine all that was to come... unless this entity too was internally complex, and it too was deterministic then the blame would fall on no one.
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