Tree, it's a pleasure crossing swords with you.
No I am not saying that God’s reasons are unknowable. I’m saying that it’s possible that God has morally sufficient reasons even if we do not know them.
I'm happy to go with that, yes. But I note that you are saying that you actually do not know what these reasons are. Therefore, you do not know if they exist or not.
There’s nothing contradictory in believing that a person is good and also not knowing their reasons for action.
Certainly there is. If a person has acted in an evil manner, you cannot then say that they are good - much less that they are the pinnacle or essence of goodness - without knowing what their motivations are.
This isn't absolutely true of course, as I shall point out below. But let's say you knew someone, someone you knew from long experience to be a good person. Then one day, indisputable evidence of evil conduct was found - say, your friend was arrested for being a serial killer and confessed to it. Would you still say he was a good person? Would you seriously be able to expect anyone else to apply the term "good" to him? At the very least you find yourself faced with a serious problem. How much worse the problem is when we're talking about God, who is supposed to be goodness itself.
We don’t need an omniscient, exhaustive knowledge of all a persons deeds, motives, and reasons in order to believe they are good. Otherwise we could never believe that anyone is good.
I think the confusion here is that we are mixing up the way we apply the description "good" to humans and to God.
Would you agree that there is nobody you know - and, quite possibly, no human in existence - who is pure good? Indeed, isn't that a key part of Christian dogma?
So, when you say "Otherwise we could never believe that anyone is good," my answer is, "Well, we don't."
When we say of a person that he or she is good, we understand what we mean - that this person, while a flawed human being, in, on balance, more good than evil, often in impressive ways. If a "good" person does something "evil", we don't necessarily stop calling them good, especially if the deed was sufficiently small - a small lie, stealing a trifle, an angry word.
But God is a completely different matter. When we say that God is good, we actually mean it in the literal sense. God is supposed to be completely good. And so the defense that "Otherwise we could never believe that anyone is good," fails. We don't believe that anyone is completely good, but this is the claim about God.
If I must be able to explain God’s specific reasons for absolutely everything that occurs throughout history in order to show that he is good, then I cannot show that he is good. I simply lack that staggering knowledge. I would think one would have to be God himself in order to fulfill that criterion. But I also disagree that this is a reasonable requirement in order to believe or show that God is good.
First, the fact that you are unable to explain every one of God's actions - that it would be ridiculous to ask you to do so, because it's impossible - is not necessarily a problem for the atheists. If God is charged with being evil, yes, you have to defend Him. If this proves an impossible task, too bad for you.
But you may not have to explain every one of God's decisions. It may be that you only have to explain one of them - His decision to allow evil to exist in His universe.
@InterestedAtheist let’s approach this from another angle. We can all agree that evil exists. We can agree that some of it, in theory, seems explainable. We can agree that some of it seems very hard to explain - especially if God could have prevented it.
Agreed.
Setting aside the issue of whether or not we know God’s reasons, is it possible that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil?
It certainly is. And I am happy to agree that this rescues you from the argument you advanced earlier in the thread. The problem is, in doing so, you have now admitted that you do not know that God is good. And that is an impossible position for a Christian. If the only way you can answer the Argument from Evil is to admit that you do not know if God is good or not, then you have sacrificed your religion in order to rebut an apologetic argument. You lost a war for the sake of winning a battle.
From the atheist's point of view, I'd call that a win.
