ABSTRACT

In a celebrated passage in An Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, John Stuart Mill argues that while we 'cannot know God as he is in himself, we can judge actions attributed to him by his followers. After all, we judge human actions without knowing human beings as they are in themselves, and why should God be different? He grants that attributes such as 'goodness, knowledge, power, are relative', and that God is supposed to be Absolute, but, he contends, to argue that 'the Relative attributes of an Absolute Being are unknowable', and that divine goodness 'is not the goodness which we know and love in our fellow-creatures' is an abuse of language. There can only be one set of moral standards, and one kind of moral language, for God and for us, even if God is all-knowing, all-powerful, 'infinite' and 'absolute', and his creatures not so. It follows that if God's actions are incompatible with 'the best human attributes', Mill will not worship him. 'I will call no being good,' he declares, 'who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell will I go' (An Examination, pp. 119-24).