56 The Question of an Eternal Hell
to invoke "divine transcendence" or "divine incomprehensi-
bility" as a dissembling euphemism for the unresolved logical
contradictions in their own systems of belief.
More than one captious critic of that lecture of mine
from 2015 that I mentioned above in my introduction cited
a book by the Dominican philosopher Brian Davies called
The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (2006), and spe-
cifically the claim Davies repeatedly makes therein that God is
not an ethical agent, and so we cannot draw any conclusions
about how he should act toward his creatures in any particular
situation. Whether those who invoked the book were always
quite as cognizant of Davies's point as they thought they were
I will not bother to argue, one way or the other, since it is a
book toward which I have distinctly mixed feelings. I happen
to agree with most of the basic metaphysical principles that
Davies presumes or propounds, while disagreeing entirely
with a whole host of the conclusions he draws from them. On
this one issue, however, he is obviously correct: If God is God,
in any philosophically coherent sense of the word, then clearly
God is not, like one of us, an ethical agent. He is not a finite,
psychologically limited, individual rational being, navigating
successive moral situations, required to make deliberative ethi-
cal decisions in submission to some standard of goodness or to
some deontological code of immediate obligations that stands
higher in the scale of reality than himself. But so what? To be
honest, this is little other than a banal truism of metaphysical
reasoning. It is no more startling an insight, from the perspec-
tive of traditional Christian thought, than the equally undeni-
able assertion that God is not good in the way a finite being
might or might not be good, but is instead infinite Goodness
as such; or that he is not merely something true, but is rather
Truth in its transcendent fullness; or that he is not something