Is god good?

Is god good?

Christians the world over fall over themselves professing the "love of god" repeating the expression from the gospel of John that "God is love". Other cultures frequently use the expression "god is good" in day to day greetings.

I was contemplating this expression whilst hauling my 25kg of paragliding kit up the side of a very steep hill the other day and wondering how anyone could actually believe this without serious amounts of credulity.

First of all, it is my assertion that God does not exists at all, and that if he does he most certainly is not good. In order to back up that assertion lets examine the evidence:

The bible:

I was a student of the bible for well over 30 years and whilst I wasn't the most diligent student quite a bit of it has stuck. As a result I feel I'm adequately qualified to make the following summary.

God starts off OK, creating everything and all (good I guess), 1 but things start to go downhill pretty quickly. Even though he created them and raised them exclusively as their only parent and only sentient company (and thus was responsible for their entire world view) when they fall for his carefully set trap he condemns the entire future human race to thousands of years of misery and death.  If god was so good, would he have made it so easy to transgress? Why have any temptation at all, I mean, was it really necessary to have the forbidden tree so easily accessible? Knowing as he must have the consequences of his creations failing his test, why didn't he postpone this test till there was a suitable pool of people so that those who didn't fail could see the differences and make an informed decision? It seems God wanted Adam and Eve to fail so that thousands of years of humans would have to suffer to prove that God was right after all. I'm only an imperfect human but I could probably think of a hundred ways for God to prove his sovereignty that didn't involve the murderous torture of so many people.

The flood. 2 

Whilst the bible documents many examples of god approved genocide, this is the only place where it documents god committing xenocide. No matter how bad the people of the time might have been, could god in all his power not manage to spare the children and babies of his victims? Was it really possible for Noah to give a credible warning to the entire worlds population? The flood is also a great example of god failing to live up to his own standards/laws and being a general hypocrite. ("A child will not be punished for the sins of its parents").

The history of his people.

This history is literally littered with countless tales of god both commanding his people to commit genocide (when they were in his good books), and him then sitting back and allowing other peoples to commit genocide against them (when they'd pissed him off). These accounts are not a record of a loving caring benevolent deity, instead they are accounts of a bloodthirsty violent vindictive monster. On some of the occasions god actually commands his people to rape and murder the women and children of the victims. Nice.

God claims credit for the good and blames others for the bad.

We only have the bible and thus gods word that the devil exists and that everything bad is his (the devils) fault. But if god wrote the bible he would say that wouldn't he. Apart from gods testimony, we have no evidence that the devil even exists. Maybe god made the devil up as a proxy for his own failures?

None biblical:

The world we see around us with our eyes is not a good world. Sure there are lots of example of love, kindness and compassion, but there are also countless examples of hate, violence, repression, injustice etc. If god really existed and he was really good would he ignore the impassioned pleas of  suffering mothers as their babies died in their arms from malnutrition whilst hearing and answering the prayers of relatively wealthy westerners as they ask for help with their rent, housing, or other trivial issues? I'm sick of hearing of "proof of gods existence" from Christians who then go on to cite some example of where god provided some miracle or other. (See: the awesome Tim Minchin puts it better than I could). I (and the entire scientifically inclined population of the world) have never yet heard (or read credible documentation) of an account that couldn't also be explained by coincidence or other earthly event.

In short our current scientifically verifiable experience of the world leads us to no evidence of the goodness of some omnipotent all powerful overlord. 

Conclusion:

Neither by the bibles testimony nor the evidence available to our eyes does a good god exist. 

NB:

1)  

God wasn't very honest about Adam being the first man. Whilst science may have plenty of gaps in its knowledge about evolution (learn some facts about evolution) and mankind's history (true of all scientific subjects), it is very very clear on a number of things, an important one being that humankind has existed unchanged (genetically) for well over 30,000 years, almost certainly 100,000 years and quite possibly double that. There were other creatures very similar to modern humans that also coexisted with us for a large amount of that time, like the Neanderthals, Denisovans and others who existed even further back. Maybe you think these were humans without souls or justify the lie some other way, but the evidence is clear that these people thought like us, acted like us, loved like us and wondered about their place in the universe like us. They buried their dead like us, made music like us and engaged in other forms of art like us. In short, they were just like us, they were human. The only thing that changed 6000 years ago, the date the bible gives of Adams creation, is that that is roughly the time period (+- a few thousand years) that someone invented farming. Maybe when god says he created Adam he really meant that he chose Adam to learn about farming? Either way the teaching that Adam was the first man is a lie.

2) 

The teaching of a global flood any time in the last 6000 years is so implausibly laughable that I find it incredible that any organisation is still teaching this in our modern age. There are so many scientific disciplines that have advanced so far that any kind of flooding event can easily be traced in the geologic record, and a flood that affected the entire world would leave such an enormous record that geologists would not have to go looking for it, it would out scream at them. It would be unmissable. 

In addition to geologic records genetics has advanced so far that we can now trace with accuracy the movement of peoples across continents, not just by the changes to their DNA but also by the changes to the DNA of their parasites such as hair lice: new scientist link. A global flood 4000 years ago that wiped out all but 8 humans would not be something scientists would have missed.  In addition to these scientifically verifiable testimonies that would clearly indicate the validity of the world-flood account there are also the human histories from around the world that seem to miss out the flood bit. I was in a museum in Egypt a few years back and walking down a corridor full of exhibits that dated progressively back in time. Amazingly they seemed to completely ignore the flood date and extended some thousands of years prior. It seems that if the globe did flood, the Egyptians (and countless other civilizations) completely failed to notice it.

In short, if a global flood did occur in the last 4-6 thousand years (or even the past million years) then the miracle is not that the flood happened, but that we are not surrounded by clear unambiguous evidence of it.