Is God Necessarily Good?

Abstract

Few propositions are so widely affirmed among Christian theists as (1) God is wholly good. We say of God that he is wholly good when we mean to say that God never does evil. One proposed explanation for why God is wholly good, of course, is that (2) God is necessarily good. Although (1) is (I suspect, wholly) uncontroversial among Christian theists, (2) clearly does not enjoy such universal favour. Whereas such prominent theists as St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, Alvin Plantinga (1974), and T. V. Morris (1987) have defended the truth of (2), other theists claim to have found good reason to doubt God's necessary goodness. In this paper I will attempt to show that God's goodness is accidental to him. My argument will proceed faithfully along Anselmian lines, i.e. a key premise will concern God conceived of as ‘ the being than which none greater can be conceived’. In addition to this, I will need to activate action-theoretic machinery which will be crucial to the derivation. Rather than detracting from God's greatness, the argument's conclusion, namely (3) God is contingently good, is seen as faithfully articulating one facet of Anselm's core intuition of God as the ‘greatest possible being’. Is God necessarily good? I shall shortly present an argument which gives one good reason to doubt God's necessary goodness. But before I begin, I shall need to develop a backdrop of philosophical theology and action-theoretic machinery from which to suspend the argument in question.