God's Immorality

So there was that debate I was participating in, and my friend Rob spent almost all of his round with the visiting rock-star apologist talking about having a hard time believing Christians' fantasic claims, even after long and hard work. His point was that, if the Evangelicals are to be believed, God is setting him up to eternally suffer for his sincere efforts, a notion he considers patently unjust -- contradicting their idea that God is just.

(Talking with him beforehand, I predicted they were not likely to see it as a slam-dunk contradiction and would simply tell him that his puny human idea of justice is irrelevant and he needs to know his place. Who does he think he is? God made him and everyhing else and can damned well call anything he wants "justice." Didn't Abraham grab the knife and try to kill his kid when ordered? Didn't Job get the difference between God and man and take whatever was dealt? Those lessons are there for a reason and he should study them, 'nuff said. So they would say something like that, and then a much longer and more interesting discussion would follow: the basis of morality.)

Strangely, it turned out that the visiting expert never really heard the question despite a bunch of people in the audience trying for quite some time to clarify what Rob meant. The flailing spilled over into an email thread in the following weeks, and several rounds later I jumped in to try to help by recasting Rob's beef:

Belief per-se is an act subject to moral evaluation: you may believe for good reasons, or bad; you may withhold that assent for good reasons, or bad. Those four combinations are good, bad, good, and bad, respectively, because you are in fact being moral or immoral, furthering your life or degrading it. You are either practicing the virtue of rationality or blowing it. Acting on your understanding is likewise subject to moral evaluation: you are either acting on what you know will further your life, or degrading it by not acting or even acting contrary what you know. You are either practicing the virtue of integrity or blowing it. Now, when people talk about their faith as being more than mere assent, I imagine they are giving a nod to the fact that all the virtues go hand in hand. Looking at how just these two play together: what good is acting on your beliefs if they are wrong or arbitrary, and what good is knowledge if you won't use it? Integrity isn't a virtue for the irrational, and rationality isn't a virtue for hypocrites.

While they go hand in hand, it is still valid and useful to focus our attention on particular aspects of the situation. I think Rob is focusing on the virtue of rationality in this case (rather than integrity or both), and it is sufficient for making his point.

I would frame it this way: The idea of God being just is incompatible with His creating a situation where immorality brings reward and virtue brings suffering. It is immoral to believe when not convinced -- yet doing so (and sure, acting integrously on that belief) is rewarded. It is moral to withhold assent when not convinced (and of course good to be integrous and not act contrary to what you know) -- yet doing so is punished. Punishing virtue and rewarding vice isn't just. It is the opposite.

Come to think of it, the next time someone lobs Pascal's Wager my way, maybe I'll skip talking about how pathetic it is as an argument and simply denounce them for encouraging immorality (and their god for rewarding it, and their religion for sending adherents out to corrupt peoples' character).