ABSTRACT
The traditional view of the goodness of God began with the affirmation that, in a non-moral sense of ‘good’, God is infinitely good because he alone can be said in the fullest sense to exist. The assumption, going back to Aristotle, is that since goodness is a perfection, belonging to what is actual rather than to what is merely potential, any thing or state of affairs can be described as good only if it exists, and indeed only because it exists. To exist is to have some perfection. It was similarly the Aristotelian view that the Prime Mover is the final cause of all other things, and for that reason must be the highest good.’ In this chapter, I shall not consider this position in any detail. Instead, I shall concentrate on the issues surrounding the claim that God is morally good.
