FIRST
Why we might need a God as a moral agent and moral example -
Objective moral standard: A morally perfect God provides an ultimate reference point for right and wrong, independent of human opinion.
Moral guidance: God as a moral example shows humans how to live ethically and make virtuous choices.
Inspiration for moral behavior: Belief in a morally good God encourages people to emulate those virtues (compassion, justice, honesty).
Accountability: A moral God can hold humans accountable for their actions, giving weight to ethical behavior.
Source of hope and justice: In a world with suffering and injustice, a morally perfect God assures that wrongs will ultimately be addressed.
Moral coherence: If God is both the creator and a moral agent, morality is consistent with the design of the universe.
Why God might not be a moral agent or example (or why some argue we don’t need one)
Divine actions may be morally ambiguous: Scriptural narratives sometimes describe God commanding acts that conflict with human moral intuitions (e.g., violence or punishment).
Morality may be independent of God: Ethical systems can be developed through reason, empathy, and societal norms without requiring a divine moral agent.
Human interpretation is fallible: Even if God is morally perfect, humans may misunderstand or misapply divine moral teachings - yet the doctrine that we are in the image of God implies that he may not be a moral agent but lives like one through us!
God as transcendent, not bound by human morality: Some argue God operates on a level beyond human concepts of right and wrong; moral rules may apply to humans, not necessarily to God.
Moral motivation without divine example: People can cultivate virtue through philosophical reasoning, education, and social cooperation, without needing a divine exemplar.
So - there is tension between God being "good" for this good might not be relevant to us as humans. We will learn that if he is not a moral agent, we should not want him to be one. He cannot even represent anything like morality to us at all.
THE ARGUMENT
Suppose you are God Incarnate. You can stop a train killing two innocent people on the rail by grabbing a big criminal and throwing them on the track. The criminal dies but the others are spared.
Religion says it is wrong to treat even the criminal as an object. It says one life matters as much as several for life is life. So it is not a weighing game. You let the train go on its course. And yet the number of lives matters - to turn that instinct off completely would be terrible. Even God Incarnate would have to turn it off for it threatens to lead you or even compel you to react and push.
This train argument may seem like an interesting thought about an extreme dilemma. It is not. It is critical to what morality is about. It shows what it means by value. If we never meet an event like the train, the principle this shows is still about what comes first for us. Morality just exposes how it is about doing harm for the sake of a principle. It shows that morality has a terrible side and thus is not really something to celebrate. It is best seen as something solemn that we need and leave it there. It should not be glorified by saying, "God and morality amount to the one thing. I love and find joy in God so much!"
Human nature celebrates its own moralism and virtue! Incessantly! This shows that even when it is being moral, it will not do it without genuflecting to evil. It shows how much a person's slamming of evil means they have evil within themselves.
And that is the theme of this piece. Religious moralists are more about protecting their god theory and using morality as a prop to do that than your wellbeing. Moralists lie about how separate good and evil are. Morality itself lies about it. Morality is a word, a useful one perhaps, but it is nothing wonderful.