Originally posted by Jim B.
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If God is the only standard of 'the Good', then it leads to a tautology. It's contentless to say that "God is good," because all you're saying is that "God is God-like." To say that 'God does what is good' is only to say that 'God does what God does.' God can only hold Himself to the standard that HE Himself sets for Himself. Furthermore, God could not know that He is good but could only know that He is God-like, since He'd have no other possible criterion to judge Himself against.
I don't know what "second standard" you're referring to here. There's only one standard, the standard of morality that is dictated by reason and that tells us that inflicting unnecessary cruelty is wrong. We could and often are wrong in our judgments about what is right and wrong and God is infinitely wiser than we are in His omniscience as far as knowing outcomes, but that fact doesn't alter the basic meanings of the words "good" and right".
Some humans find murder and torture morally acceptable, but that doesn't mean that they are right in doing so. I meant the inherent human condition of being rational moral beings that are capable of being wrong.
The thing about Occam's Razor is that you're saying, or at least I think you're saying, that for every single math, logical, and moral truth there has to be a thought in God's mind perpetually maintaining that truth in its existence. That's an infinite number of, IMO, unnecessary extra entities!
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