Brian Davies
Brain Davies, a philosopher and a Dominican friar, attempts to dissolve the problem of evil by questioning God’s moral goodness. The problem of evil relies on the idea that God is good. It is only because God is taken to be good that the idea of him allowing evil seems problematic. God, though, according to Davies, is not morally good. Moral appraisal is only appropriate for beings that have moral obligations. To be morally good, one must fulfil one’s obligations; to be morally bad, one must fail to fulfil them. God, as a being that has no obligations, can be neither good nor bad. He is an amoral, rather than a moral being. The problem of evil therefore rests on a fundamental mistake, taking God to be good when he is not.
"[I]t is wholly inappropriate to think of God as something able to be either moral (well behaved) or immoral (badly behaved)… we have good reason for resisting the suggestion that God can intelligibly be thought of as having duties or obligations. Could he, for instance, have duties or obligations to himself? Should he, for example, strive to keep himself healthy? Should he try not to let his talents or abilities go to seed? Anyone seriously raising such questions would simply show a failure to grasp what the notion of God as creator amounts to. One might say that God has obligations to creatures—that he is, for example, obliged to reward good people with happiness. But this suggestion makes no sense. What can oblige God in relation to his creatures? Could it be that there is a law which says that God has obligations to them? But what law? And where does it come from? Is it something set up by someone independently of God? But how can anyone set up a law independently of God? Is God not the maker of everything apart from himself? … to be blunt, I suggest that many contemporary philosophers writing on the problem of evil (both theists and non-theists) have largely been wasting their time... They are like people attacking or defending tennis players because they fail to run a mile in under four minutes. Tennis players are not in the business of running four-minute miles. Similarly, God is not something with respect to which moral evaluation (whether positive or negative) is appropriate.”
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