Doubting the Answers 61
to us. So it is no error of reason for a believer to refuse to assent
to a supposedly complete narrative of God and creation if that
narrative severs every analogical connection between good-
ness among creatures and the goodness of God. In fact, reason
and faith alike forbid such assent; to believe solely because one
thinks faith demands it, in despite of all the counsels of reason,
is actually a form of disbelief, of faithlessness. Submission to a
morally unintelligible narrative of God's dealings with his crea-
tures would be a kind of epistemic nihilism, reducing the act
of fidelity to God to a brutishly obstinate infidelity to reason
(whose substance, again, is God himself). Submission of that
kind could not be sincere, because it would make "true faith"
and "bad faith" -devotion to truth and betrayal of truth- one
and the same thing. So we can in fact know that, for instance,
the unsavory assertions made about God in Book III of the In-
stitutes are false, not because God is an ethical agent, but pre-
cisely because he is not. We know that, logically speaking, he
is not merely obliged to do good things; rather, he is himself
transcendent goodness, and so cannot be the source of injus-
tice. He does not flit capriciously between isolated expressions
of his true nature and isolated departures from it. He is the
ground and substance and end of every moral action. And, as
we have some very real knowledge of what moral action is, we
know something also of who God therefore is. So we should
really stop telling such sordid lies about him.
IVThere is little more that needs to be said at this point. I have
posed the questions that I have always found the most trou-
bling with regard to talk of hell, and I have rejected the an-
swers typically advanced against the doubts I have raised. So