Day Three: God is Good

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis opens with the first question that goes straight to the root of the issue of human nature: What is Good and where did we get the idea of it? Initially, we just naturally assume things are "good" or "bad" according to our own measured tastes; an apple is "good" to me because I like its flavor, or breathing fresh air is "good" because it helps stimulate blood flow, and so on. But what is the ultimate "Good" and where does it come from?

We could point back to natural evolution and the drive to improve, adapt, and evolve, but that doesn't answer the question because that only labels those things as "good" themselves, not as the "ultimate good." If the "ultimate" good were merely evolving and surviving, we only need look back at human history to see that there are so many things humans have done in direct opposition to that standard; sacrificing your life for your friends or loved ones might be considered an attempt to preserve stronger life, but suicide as an escape from life's problems doesn't exactly fit that standard. Now, instead of answering one question, we have ended up with two separate ones: "What is the ultimate Good?" and "Why aren't people ultimately good?"

To fall back on Descartes for a minute, we can't be the highest being at the top of the scale; not only because we are very small in contrast to the material cosmos, but because our moral compasses are all flawed in some way. We have an awareness of there being some kind of state of what is called "perfection"; we just can't ever get to it. Every human individual is both a good person and a bad person; there is no in between because we are the in-between.

Imagine a yin-yang symbol; you have a black side with a white dot in it and a white side with a black dot in it. If we take this idea as a measure of purity, with the white being "goodness" and the black being "evil" or "chaos," it describes human nature very well. On the white side, no matter how much effort we put into sculpting our characters into being "good" people, we all still make mistakes; it's inevitable to our nature. On the other hand, no matter how much evil and corruption humans cause, contain, and perform, things that are "good" still grow out of them; as horrific and traumatic as war can be, we still bring great beauty, knowledge, and understanding out of the experience. Now, take that yin-yang symbol and spin it at a billion miles an hour; can you even imagine trying to extract the black and white from each other to get just the "good" parts out? That's essentially the condition of human nature. But why is that?

In order for us to have at least a partial understanding of a moral standard or code of any kind, there has to be some sort of absolute Good; and in order to have an absolute Good that conscious beings are at least partially aware of and/or must somehow try to adhere to, there has to be a conscious being to set that standard. Scientific life operates on the basis of adaptation; life forms adapt to their surroundings in order to continue. As living organisms, humans have done this plenty, too, but not in the same way most life forms do it; in fact, based on certain elements like time-and-labor-saving mechanics and inventions, which many humans have now come to be dependent on, much if not most of human activity might actually be considered a step down. What if, instead of creating vaccines and medicines for diseases, we just adapted to them and evolved past them? If we were cognitively developed enough do that, why would we need to create vaccines in the first place?

We could go on for a while about scientific factors and nature and all the various components of the physical reality we can confirm, but to keep it short, what we can get the idea of in all of that is that there are both "good" and "bad" components in all of it. Every twist and turn throughout all of life is double-sided; both "good" and "bad" ripples out of and radiates from every event, decision, evolutionary step, and any kind of movement, forward or backward. But none of that can explain why both are there or what this overarching "Law of Good" actually is. We know what it looks like tainted, and we know that humans can never fully 100% achieve perfect "goodness," but no human has yet been able to explain a scientifically verifiable source of "good" itself.

We are now at a crossroads: Either "good" and "bad" are based on feelings alone, meaning life is nothing more than dog-eat-dog, child molesters and rapists are okay, and for practical purposes life is really not worth surviving in anyway, or there's something outside of physical reality dictating what the Law of Good is, which we are now unconsciously, irredeemably, and inevitably in violation of without even being fully aware of life in general.

"Irredeemably?" you may ask. "But don't most people do okay most of the time?"

This may be true; setting aside the factors of mental health, trauma from abuse or neglect, and generic selfishness, most people can probably be said to do pretty okay most of the time. We wouldn't necessarily be able to get a straight statistic on what percentage that is, but we could probably get a statistic with the required effort, which would probably tell us that most people do mostly okay most of the time.

To put it a different way, imagine life as kind of like an American standardized test (basically, the simplest format out there). If most people could only make an effort to do their best when they felt like it and had no inhibiting factors, but the inhibiting factors show up half of the needed time to perform, emotional, physical, and mental factors are only productively functional half of the time, and a few unprecedented events, both helpful and unhelpful, are thrown into the mix, then the result would likely be that most people could manage approximately 50% of the test with ease. Just for clarity's sake, you can't not put an effort into life if you're alive, so we're just going to assume the people who achieve 0% are the ones who never took the test to begin with; so essentially, the unborn. Once we have these factors clarified, we can assume, with reason, that the very hardest working people could probably get a 75% score because no one is ever really prepared for everything, the most intentionally depraved are somewhere in the single digits, and most people probably get around 50% right in life without strenuous effort, so the average is probably closest to about 50%.

What happens when you score 50% on a test?

You get an F.

For FAIL.

Doing something we know to be wrong on purpose is one thing, but mistakes are accidental. We are not capable of shaking our innately selfish nature of self-preservation for longer than a moment at a time; outside of a moral code, and often inside of one, it is our nature. And that's just imagining the test as American standardized, which is just the most efficient way of getting a good score on a test, not of memorizing and retaining information or developing new skills. The fact is, we were born on a sinking ship that there is no physical way of salvaging. Everything in the physical universe is dying; all of us will die one day, political powers change every century, the human race probably has a time limit, and there's nothing we can do about any of it. We'd better hope there's an ultimately Good supernatural force because if this world is all we get, everything just sucks and really isn't worth the effort anyway.

But now we have to face the problem of human nature itself. Purity demands ultimate perfection; it's its own nature. It literally cannot be anything else. How unlucky are we to be destined to be born on the wrong side of a problem too big to fix!? If there is a conscious being who is completely pure, are we just going to get cut off like mold on bread? Is the entire loaf unsalvageable and will just get thrown away? If this God power is the ultimate Good from which all moral constructs originate and there's no way it can keep anything impure around, we're all toast; worse than toast, because this power has the ability to unmake us. Which is more preferable: an eternity of existence in nothing but pain and suffering, or no eternity at all? The lurking suspicion of something horrible after death, or completely nothing after death? Like the End end; nill; just un-ness?

Fortunately, there is one reason to breathe a huge sigh of relief: a truly Good supreme deity uses everything and wastes nothing. We're still directly in the middle; there is still a seed of Good in us. Whatever this God is, it can only be the ultimate power on top if it is also the ultimate Good because good things like life, love, and light can only come from an absolute Good; they can be altered or tainted afterward, but what they are in themselves is still solely from Good. We understand and have a lot of those things; therefore, this God made us too, which means He wouldn't sit around waiting for us to figure it out if there was no way we could. As a supernatural being, this God would have the ability to interact with the natural universe and speak to it in a language and it would understand using a sensory path it has.

Which establishes the foothold for the first really unnerving question: What does this God want with us?