The Moral Argument and Necessary Goodness

As Christians, we believe that God is good, not merely contingently but necessarily. Thomas Morris, in his book The Logic of God Incarnate, suggests that no biblical or philosophical argument for that position is successful. Rather than believing that God is necessarily good by reasons, we believe it by intuition. We believe that God is the greatest being and necessary goodness is greater than contingent goodness. Yet Morris is wrong. There is an argument for the necessary goodness of God.

Morris' first mistake was to take good and evil as commonly understood properties of actions and characters without giving a description of what good and evil were. Oddly enough, this is also a common mistake in arguments about the problem of evil. Some opinions about good and evil are quite different from others. Nonetheless, he appears to be working with the idea that good is necessarily so, while also being objective and real.

His second mistake is to ignore any argument for the existence of God that depends on moral categories. These arguments are arguing for the existence of a being that has special moral properties. So if they argued for the existence of a being that was necessarily morally good, then one would have a very good start on an argument that God was necessarily morally good!

Combining these two points leads us directly to the argument that Morris ignored. This is the moral argument. If good is necessary, objective and real (as Morris assumes) then where else could morality exist other than in God? Now is good is the same as God, then God is necessarily morally good. So now we have the argument. God is necessarily morally good because he is the ground of morality.