Earlier this year, I commented on a movie, God on Trial, based on a book by Elie Wiesel.  Today, I return to it, as a recent conversation I had about it brought one more thought to mind.  At one point in the movie, one of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz makes the point that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.
     The man makes a good point.  Is God not therefore on the side of those who do not believe in him?  Are those who do not believe in him simply doomed to lives of misery and pain?  If this is the case, and if God supposedly loves all of his creation, is he really in fact good after all?
     Let's look at this from another angle.  If there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, where do we get off asserting that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can assert certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.
     Whether God is good, however, does not matter nearly as much as whether he is there.  Indeed, if we experience any sort of goodness at all, we cannot say that God, if he indeed exists, is altogether bad.  But if God is not there, we cannot explain why we experience good or bad other than to say that they just happen and therefore mean nothing.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.
     Better--and more logical, as we are reasoning beings--to say that God is there and is good than to say that he is not and not even know what good is.