Power and Good

I have started on van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil.  Lecture 2 (the book is based on his Gifford Lectures) is about the meaning of God.  van Inwagen is interested in the traditional Abrahamic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims.  Two of the properties of this God are omnipotence and good.  What omnipotence means is pretty hard sorting, which is not going to be done in this book.  God can do anything possible means such stuff as he can lie, which seems an odd ting to say.  I am fine with that decision, as it is certainly a book in itself trying to describe and sort the notions of possibility necessary to make sense of the claim.  God is also good, that is, morally perfect.  That is also weird.  It is weird because it seems to mean that God does and can do only good.  But certainly the world is not under that description.  Van Inwagen tells us that

Suppose, for example, that a human being inflicts pain on others--without consulting them--to produce what is, in his judgment, a greater good.  Many of us would regard this as morally wrong, even if the person happens ot be right about the longterm consequences of the pain he inflicts.  Let us suppose that judgment is correct.  My point is that it does not follow from the correctness of this judgment that it would be wrong of God to inflict pain on human beings -- or angels or beasts-- to produce some greater good.

Is it that the wrongness depends on some property of the actor?  That is very odd thing for a theist of his sort to say I think.  It cannot be that A is good because done by God.  That makes the property of moral perfection vacuous.  Moral assessment must be tied to something about the conduct or the effects.  Why then would it matter who did the act?  Surely it is not like some institutional authorization (that leads to A is good because God did it or says so, which cannot be, at least not in this context).  So it looks like it is a claim to the effect that there is (at least) one morality or good for folk like us and a different morality or good for other things.  God is under a different set of rules, so to speak.  That won't work either.  There is no sense to the claim that God is morally perfect but we have no idea what morality he is perfect in.  If it is not the morality we work under, then the property of moral perfection is useless.  It really is like saying God is not subject to morality.  I suppose van Inwagen is saying that there is no formal entailment from the claim that state of affairs or conduct A is immoral for human beings to A is immoral with respect to God.  Maybe.  Why is that any help?  If the entailment conditions are tight, one can get the same result by changing the person involved, and there is no God part at all.  If the entailment is weak enough to do some work in this world, it seems to be a commitment to the view that morality is different for different kinds of things.  That is a view that would seem to be very difficult to square up with theological context.

So it is a fun book so far.