Goodness and God are a result of essentially the same processes. That is why they coincide, although God is more specific than the good.
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Phenomenon explained : "There is goodness". The vast majority of mankind has a fairly strong conception of what goodness is, and apply this conception as a standard which they use categorize moral phenomena as being more or less good. Admittedly, men differ in the results of such categorizations, but we can conceive, at least as a thought experiment, that in a process in which parties that differ learn to understand the context in which the other arrives at his or her judgement, each of them could conclude that they too would make the same categorization, given the same context. In other words, goodness is in essence a shared conception. |
In QO, the One - that is, God - started off as a single quantum, and developed by means of processes in which quanta either split to create child quanta, or get together to create a quantum system that is more than the sum of the parts, or both. In each of these cases, the new state persists if it resonates. The process of resonance ensures that the new state adds something to what was already there. Typically, the new states supports higher purposes than the old. Resonance is a constructive principle. We perceive it as good. So the process by means of which God develops automatically produces goodness.
In this way, goodness exists independently of the One, and the One exists independently of goodness, yet they coincide. The coincidence is not, however, an identity. The development of the One is subject to contingency, and on many steps of the way the One just happened to develop along one of multiple good paths. God is good, but not all good is God.
That the One is good permits us to appeal to that goodness, as Abraham did when he tried to persuade God not to destroy Sodom, and Moses did when he asked God not to destroy the people of Israel after the incident with the golden calf.
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Credibility: This explanation follows from the QO conception of God as the original quantum, from which all subsequent quanta emanate and in which all subsequent quanta are present. But it is only credible if there is a credible account for the existence of evil, given God's goodness. We shall therefore suspend judgement, pending the analysis of the following lemmas. |