Is God All-Good? An Ethical Examination

I have no beef with religion, but my interest in ethics leads me to an exploration of the virtues of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament God.   

The Judeo-Christian God is presumed to be all-good, a moral agent who does no evil even if He permits it to happen when He otherwise could have averted it.  Let us assume that the Bible is a literal account of God's actions.

It has often been observed that the God of the Old Testament has a short temper and often kills needlessly.  For example, God is guilty of infanticide in the Book of Exodus when he carries out the Tenth Plague, which kills all first-born Egyptian children, most if not all of whom have no moral responsibility in the enslavement of the Jews.God is clearly not following one of the cardinal commandments that He expects humans to abide by: "Thou shalt not kill."  As the lawmaker and lawgiver, is God above his own commandments?  How could God still be a moral agent and not follow his own commandments?  Let us give Him the benefit of the doubt and assume that He is a consequentialist.


The idea of consequentialism is that an action is moral if and only if it produces consequences that maximize some conception of the good.  When God caused the Great Flood, He wiped out the vast majority of humanity, the wicked 99.9%, so that the virtuous would remain and propagate their own kind.  I will grant that this action could be viewed through a consequentialist prism and deemed morally acceptable.  Perhaps it was necessary to smite the wicked in order to maximize overall utility?   Maybe everyone else at the time was simply bad to the bone.


It's much harder to give God the benefit of the doubt knowing that He killed innocent or morally neutral agents in order to punish an unjust regime.  Again, perhaps the liberation of the Jews had such a powerful knock-on effect that it maximized utility throughout the entire Levant, but this is doubtful.If God does not abide by His own rule-based ethic and can scarcely be called a consequentialist,  then is He really all-Good?