Doubting the Answers 55creates all things for his own purposes. This simply is not so.
For one thing, it is not God we are trying to judge when we
voice our moral alarm at the idea of an eternal hell, but only
the stories we are accustomed to telling about him. One does
not have to imagine God to be some finite ethical agent, sub-
ject to moral truths outside himself, to note that the good-
ness traditionally attributed to the Christian God- indeed,
that "Goodness-as-such" with which God's nature is said to
be identical- must have some analogical index in the moral
truths to which Christians are also supposedly bound. Some
Christians, even some who accept the ancient metaphysical
definitions of God as the Good in itself, often affect to obey
so exaggerated an apophatic stricture on their reasoning with
regard to God as to render all analogy impossible, and thus to
reduce all theological statements to sheer assertions emanating
from some mysterious source of authority that itself ( again, be-
cause analogical thinking has been abandoned) cannot be cer-
tified by any power of reason at all. Faith thus becomes nothing
but mindless submission to a collection of intrinsically unin -
telligible oracles arriving from an entirely hidden source. Now,
admittedly, there is a "nominalist" and "voluntarist" tradition
in some schools of Western Christian thought that, rather
than assuming God's nature to be convertible with the tran-
scendental perfections (goodness, truth, beauty, unity, being),
imagines God as a kind of abyss of pure, pre-moral will, en-
tirely hidden behind the veils of nature and history. But, for
any number of scriptural and logical reasons, that way of see-
ing things has rightly been rejected by the majority tradition
as doctrinally depraved and philosophically inane. Still, even
Christians adhering to a more orthodox and rationally rigor-
ous understanding of God sometimes find it all too convenient