Can God Murder?

I was browsing the other day and an atheist was arguing against the existence of God using an argument from moral intuitions. Moral intuitions are often powerfully convincing because they have rhetorical force from their emotional impact and seemingly reasonable premises.

The atheist was trying to argue that God cannot be the source of the moral order, and therefore the moral argument for God could not be sound. It was made with a pretty simple assertion:

If God told you it was OK to murder, would that make it OK? Of course not.

When you unpack the argument it suggests a few things:

  1. The source of our moral intuitions is objective apart from the directives of God
  2. God's moral rules, if He is the source of them, are entirely arbitrary
  3. God does not bind Himself to the moral order He requires His creation to abide by
  4. It is possible for God to command an immoral act to be done

So let's unpack this point by point to see which of these premises, if any, are true. And then reevaluate the conclusions.

What is the source of our moral intuitions?

The argument firstly relies on disconnecting God from our moral intuitions entirely. I'd answer on the contrary that He is the source of our moral intuitions. As St. Paul has written:

They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them1

  1. God makes moral rules that men have to abide by, which we call the natural law
  2. God provides men a conscience to promulgate these moral rules even apart from rational ethical inquiry.
  3. God provides an aversive force within man's will to influence man to follow the conscience he is provided
  4. We call this aversive force within the will "moral intuition"

In the skeptic's argument above, we are supposing that we could have a moral intuition that contradicts a moral commandment God gives us. But as we see in the above syllogism, it is God's moral rules that are the source of our conscience, which is itself the source of our moral repulsions. The argument seeks to elicit an emotional response of disgust out of you in a hypothetical way that is not actually possible.

This is what makes it different from the traditional use of hypotheticals in ethics. The context of this hypothetical is not just a reasonable "what if?" - it is impossible. So the hypothetical force of this argument fails, and so does the plausibility of the first suggestion of the argument.

Are God's moral rules arbitrary?

What grounds God's moral rules? The statement made by the skeptic above seems to suggest the grounding to be entirely arbitrary; God made them this way, but they could have been made an entirely different way. I think this understanding of the moral order discounts how intertwined we as creatures are within it.

Moral rules are purposefully made with the intention of bringing those subject to them into perfect flourishing with their nature. People often consider morality to be ascetic in nature - that it calls us to deny ourselves and what we want.

This has not historically been the way morality was understood. Morality is about having your will conform harmoniously to its proper ends. It is about ordering yourself to swim with the current of creation rather than against it. The easiest way to visibly see this is in the sin of gluttony.

The purpose of eating is to be nourished and thus continue living. But there is an accompaniment with the act of eating - taste! Good taste is a type of pleasure and bad taste is a type of pain. When we eat we must subject this pleasure of eating under its proper end of nourishment. If we eat only for pleasure, especially when we eat far beyond what we need for nourishment, we are acting in a disordered way.

If we persist in this disorder, we will gain weight and become more and more unhealthy. We may die prematurely because we did not properly subject the accompanying pleasure under the actual end of eating, which is to live and be healthy.

This term, disordered, refers to us acting against the created order (in the analogy above, this would be swimming against the current). And it presupposes that there is indeed a proper order to things! The moral fabric of creation is this created order.

So imagine we are in the exact same created world, but gluttony was not morally wrong. Well, I'd posit that the way of the world would be quite different. The world and its systems are made as they are, and the moral rules are implied by those systems.

So, are God's rules arbitrary? It depends on what you mean by arbitrary. Does God have absolute sovereignty over the world He has made, and could He have made it any possible way? Yes. Are God’s rules entirely random within the context of the creation we find ourselves inhabiting? No.

Does God bind Himself to the natural law?

So the next question to investigate is whether God Himself is bound to the same natural law we are bound to as discussed above. As an example, if God kills a person Himself, even when the person may otherwise appear to be innocent, does this constitute an interior contradiction of God against His own laws?

The question reminds me of a funny meme I saw a while back.

God kills people

The meme is a result of many Christians trying to explain away the fact that God pretty clearly both permits the death or suffering of seemingly innocent people and actively causes the deaths of some when we, as outside observers, do not find it justified.

The syllogism goes as follows:

  1. God makes moral rules that men have to abide by.
  2. These moral rules flow from God's goodness Itself
  3. The most clear of those moral rules is that it is evil to kill another
  4. God has killed people in the Bible
  5. Therefore, God has rejected His own moral rule
  6. This would make God inconsistent with Himself
  7. God being inconsistent with Himself would make Him incapable of being the foundational cause of all creation
  8. Therefore, God does not exist

In order to respond to this argument we'll need to investigate the roots of premise 3. We can already know of many different reasons why killing a person may be morally permissible:

  1. A person may kill a person in self defense
  2. One military combatant may kill another military combatant in a just war
  3. A person may kill another person to defend the innocent from imminent grave danger

If there can be exceptions to the evil of an action it means necessarily that the action is not intrinsically evil - that is, the act is not evil in and of itself.

But there are places where God seems to act even beyond these exceptions. The most "egregious" example is when Uzzah is smote by God for touching the Ark of the Covenant.

And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and he smote him because he put forth his hand to the ark; and he died there before God.2

In this passage God kills a man simply for touching the Ark. If someone touched your most precious object and you killed them for it you would probably be guilty of wrongful killing (which is called murder). So why does God get away with it? Remember when we read these passages we need to read them with intent to resolve them in our hearts like I wrote in the last article.

What is the proper end of man's life? I'd say it is to seek to please God by pursuing love and communion with the entire created order, especially with our fellow men. To be in communion with the created order requires that we are oriented to the same goal. When another is following a path that is not united, we try to bring them back into the fold of communion for their own benefit. Willing the good of another, which we are called to do by being in communion with others, is called the virtue of love.

By killing unjustly, thereby ending a person's life when they are otherwise innocent, we are, through the powers given to us by our own nature, destroying another's life for no reason grave enough to merit it. How do we pursue loving communion with all creatures by destroying another who has done nothing wrong?

Well, does this ever apply to God? God has a divine nature. While we are made in the image of God, we are not made in the nature of God. He does not share humanity in common with us (except when the Second Person of the Trinity took on a human nature in Jesus Christ), and thus when acting from His divine will, He cannot properly speaking, murder another human being. God's proper natural end is not seeking the communion of God's creatures—that's totally absurd. God is the end of that communion.

This point is driven home even further when we realize that God is not just a divine watchmaker who set the world on its course and stepped away: He is the source and subsistence of all existence. That means He does not cause us to exist in a single moment of time, but causes us to be eternally. All creation subsists on God's will willing it to continue to exist. If God for even one moment did not will that we existed, we would cease to be. Only God is in this unique position as the author and sustainer of all life.

Can God command immoral acts to be done?

Bears protect Elijah

So now to answer the last question: can God command us to do an act that is immoral? St. Paul seems to suggest no when he agrees that the condemnation of someone who does evil so that good may come of it is a just condemnation:

And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.3

If we are doing the will of God and simply acting as instrumental agents of His will, we can trust that we are never doing evil. If God, as the author of life, commands the death of another, He can decide to use any instrument He so chooses. He may choose us as human agents, a flood, annihilation, or anything else.

An instrumental agent is like the doctor's scalpel - he cannot do what he intends without it, but the culpability for the action using the instrument is nevertheless on the primary actor (the doctor) and not the scalpel. Thus, when men in history have acted by the true decree of God and carried out what He asked, resulting in the deaths of many (which could include innocents), they do not do evil.

It is also important to remember that when God chooses a person to act as His instrument, He is not using us as a means to an end but also intends for us to be bettered in the course of doing His will. Why did God ask Noah to build the ark instead of just miraculously providing one? The work itself is sanctifying for Noah, and the story is sanctifying for the rest of the faithful who read of it.

This is not to put unbounded limits on God, however. God can command the killing of another because it is not intrinsically evil to kill; but God could and would never command us to falsely worship false gods, commit heresy, etc. Those are rules of the divine law which God has revealed to us.

Likewise, I think God could never command us to commit an act of sexual violence on another. If He were to do that, He wouldn't be using us as an instrumental cause of effectuating His will that He could otherwise accomplish, but instead would be using us and the victim as a means to an end and forcing us to be the primary agent of the act (since sexual actions can only be committed by physical beings).

Lastly, all whom God decides to kill or let die, whether by His own direct intervention or through the instrument of His creation, will receive merciful and just particular judgment. And for those who were truly innocent, we have real hope that they will receive their eternal reward. It is easy for us to forget that our lives, properly speaking, are not temporary; only our time on this earth as it is now is temporary.

Conclusion

Some of this may be hard to hear, but it is important to understand God's sovereignty over creation in its fullness to fully appreciate the incarnation. God is not Himself subject to the natural law, which is about orienting a human nature toward its proper end, and working within the order of those ends. God transcends the natural law because He is purely supernatural and preexisted the natural law. Much of what calls us to treat other humans with love and respect is our common human dignity. God's dignity is absolutely infinite.

Pope Francis, in Dignitas Infinita, has discussed the infinite dignity of man, but this is a relative infinity, not an absolute infinity. This means that relative to other creatures it is unbounded. But God in His essence is absolutely infinite. There is no beginning or end, and there is an infinite chasm between man's dignity and God's.

The reason I think God's absolutely sovereignty over His creation is important to hear is to show the humility He showed in condescending Himself down to us and incarnating. Unitarians often mock the Trinity by misunderstanding passages like when Jesus prays to the Father, celebrates Jewish festivals, or is circumcised. When Jesus undertook a human nature in the incarnation it was a real human nature.

For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning.4

When Christ incarnated, He subjected Himself to the natural law - the same natural law we are subjected to. The Divine Person of Christ humbled Himself. He prayed as we ought to, He was treated with the simple dignity of a man, and He didn't put Himself above others even though He is God. In His charity, He laid down His life - one of absolutely infinite value - for the sake of ours. And He called us friends.

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.5

Footnotes

  1. Romans 2:15 ↩

  2. 1 Chronicles 13:10 ↩

  3. Romans 3:8 ↩

  4. Hebrews 4:15 ↩

  5. John 15:13 ↩

Stay up to date

Subscribe to get notified when I post a new article about Theology.

Loading...