Let’s start by looking at a passage quoted in the book (The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten), drawn from Plato’s Euthyphro, a dialogue between God and a philosopher.

God said to the philosopher: “I am God, I am divine, I am the source of all that is good. So why do those worldly philosophers pay me no heed?”

The philosopher said to God, “Before I answer you, I must ask you a few questions first. You command us to do good things. But is it good because you command it, or do you command it because it is good?” (What an impressive philosopher)

“Well,” said God, “it is good because I have told you to do it.” (This is what God originally meant)

“Honorable God, that is clearly the wrong answer! If something is good merely because you say so, then if you wished it, torturing infants could also be good. But that would be even more absurd, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course,” God replied. “This was a test for you, and you have satisfied me well. So what is the other option?” (The clever God hastily changed his tone)

“You choose good things because they are good. But this clearly means that good does not depend on you. So we have no need to study God in order to learn what is good.”

“Even so,” God said, somewhat embarrassed, “you must admit that I have already set quite a number of examples on this matter…”

From this dialogue, we can see that God, swept along by the philosopher’s reasoning, hastily changed his tune and ultimately found himself in an awkward position. Of course, the philosopher here weakens God’s intelligence somewhat, but there’s one point within theism that we cannot deny (even as atheists): humanity’s understanding of goodness can exist independently of God or any other deity (or anything resembling one).

This reminds me of a story from when I first learned to roller skate as a child. At first I simply couldn’t skate very fast. A classmate who was very good at it played a joke on me — he touched my skates with his hand and said that now, under the touch of his divine hand, my skates had become “magic skates,” and that if I just kept skating in them for a while, I’d become fast. So I skated and skated, day after day, until one day the wheels had worn down to nearly half their size — and to my amazement, I discovered I could skate just as fast as he could.

Looking back on it now, the reason I could skate fast clearly wasn’t because he’d actually turned my skates into magic skates, but because of all my practice.

The lesson from roller skating applies just as well to analyzing the concept of “God.” Some people feel that the “goodness” God speaks of, or simply the guidance religion offers, is good, and so they convert, bow piously, and ultimately go on to do good deeds and accumulate virtue. In this, the role God plays is much like my “magic skates” — serving as a kind of suggestive prompt, inspiring people to act. Some people have grasped this key point and gone on to exploit this psychological effect by loudly proclaiming its miraculous effects — the elixirs and magic pills of ancient China are exactly this kind of thing. Surely the alchemists themselves knew it was they, as mere “people,” who had concocted these things?

But before criticizing any of this, it seems we’ve gotten something mixed up. In other words, we seem to have conflated two entirely distinct concepts — God and goodness. To put it another way, God finds himself in a rather awkward position: if he represents “goodness,” then we wouldn’t need the word “goodness” at all; and if he merely guides us toward goodness, then clearly we must already have known what goodness was before him — so what use would he be?

Think about our own organs for a moment. Our limbs are good — they let us move freely; our genitals are good — they give us pleasure and allow us to reproduce; our intestines, all the way down to the anus, are good — they help us absorb nutrients and expel waste. Following the theistic logic of the dialogue above, then, limbs, genitals, intestines, and anus are all good, and ought to stand on equal footing with God. But that’s clearly not how things actually work — hardly anyone treats the intestines or the anus as “good,” or worships them the way they worship God (though genital worship certainly does exist). Not only that, but things like feces have become taboo. Christians once made a great fuss over whether God had intestines at all, and in the second century, a certain church father went so far as to declare that Christ “only ate and drank, but never excreted.”

It seems, then, that we’re actually quite clear-headed after all, capable of distinguishing good from evil. In truth, the problem still lies within the person. There’s a saying that the moment you resolve to do evil, you become a devil — I suspect the same holds true for doing good.