How can we trust that God is truly good if he is the “ultimate” source telling us he is good? What if he is evil, and there are many gods, but he decided to make a universe and tell his creation that he is The One True God?
It is often we get caught up in doubts at our ability to ever truly know something. It’s especially difficult to take God's word for truth when we realize our own finitude in comparison to his grandiose. Not one of us is all knowing, leaving the one who created us our chief informant over all aspects of life: who God is, who man is, morality, etc. So how are we to trust that this creator is good simply because he told us so? You could say he demonstrated that he is good in his creation and by all that he’s done for us, but even so, isn’t he the one who has defined what we see is good?
The question at hand is scrutinous and logically based. It requires we throw out all our assumptions about the world; even more, it requires we throw out the Bible as a source of truth. Now, this is not to say that we do this in a disrespectful way, but in a pursuit of a hopefully resolidified trust in our God and his word.
Let’s start by assuming the hypothesized God in the question is our reality. Firstly, if he created the world with the purpose of lying about his being the “The One True God,” you would think he would have done a better job of it. There are a multitude of religions competing for the attention of mankind, so if he wanted to trick the world into his being the “One True One,” he failed, as there is much argument over who or what God is. It would have been a whole lot simpler to force feed the lie to every person if the end goal was to receive praise from a bunch of misinformed humans. This evil god would have no reason to allow man a will in the matter of following him; he’s evil in this theoretical scenario after all. He may as well gain more followers by altogether omitting consent in order to convince us to follow that which is undesirable and wicked. At this point in the hypothetical, we can’t even trust our rationality if god has distorted what we see as “truth”. We basically self-implode into skepticism without due cause, only to spiral further into fear tinged doubt.
No matter what doubts and hypotheticals we configure about the nature of our creator, we can never truly be sure that the theoretical situation at hand is true. Ultimately this question leads to more paranoid, fearful questions, but never any answers because of our own unreliability as brainwashed creatures. Still, it can be hard to quiet these thoughts, and they are often detrimental to a relationship with God when left to fester in the back of our heads. So when these ideas come creeping in, it is prudent we realize the reality of them. This idea and those similar to it ultimately lead nowhere. It leaves you with doubt for what you once thought true without convincing evidence that something else could be. It essentially births agnosticism. Rather than picking a side, the skeptic chooses to live in a world of uncertainty that yields indecision. At this point, it seems picking the worldview with the most evidence for it is our best bet. Consider Pascal’s wager. This was formulated originally in the context of atheism versus theism, however the same concept applies to our question, dealing with the separate camps of agnosticism and Christianity. If there is a god, and you in faith choose to believe and follow the things he says, your eternal outcome is looking a lot better than the guy who never picked a side. It is unwise to throw our hands up in looking for an answer, at least with regards to looking out for one’s own well being, and it would be very unfortunate to believe nothing and then be incorrect about it. Knowing this, we should probably investigate thoroughly for the truth because after all there are, quite probably, no do-overs post-mortem.
In light of all this, there is a likely possibility you could still struggle with these doubts. There will be no shortage of alternative theories for any given truth claim, leaving faith the only faith to turn to as an answer. Faith is required to be a believer of anything whether you’re a devout Christian or an ardent atheist (See Hebrews 11:6 (ESV)). Trusting in the Bible as the word of God is not any greater of a leap than trusting in your history textbook. Faith is not a cop-out; it is simply a prerequisite of any belief system. Let us then say like the man in Mark 9:23-25, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!”