Imagine waking up in the morning, getting out of bed and while starting your routine you discover that you have a very different view toward your fellow human than you had yesterday. You try ignoring it and go on with your day, but it keeps nagging at you. Your conscience just can’t shake the desire to do this thing you know is horrific.
It’s now clear to you that God has commanded you to start murdering your neighbors instead of loving them, and everyone else you know shares this same intuition. God now wants us to bring honor to him by taking the lives of others in an unjust manner. Wow. That’s a pretty awful thing to imagine, right? Well, this is a commonly used hypothetical scenario that skeptics enjoy challenging Christians/theists with, which involves one of the horns of the dilemma found in Plato’s legendary dialogue Euthyphro.
I am not sure how this objection continues to emerge, though, since it has been repeatedly and successfully rebutted. Again, and again. Nevertheless, it is good for you to know how to respond since you will probably run into it at some point while sharing your faith. To save you some time from having to read the story yourself, I will cut straight to the heart of the dilemma. In Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro, Socrates attempts to understand the nature of piety and holiness. Plato asks,
“Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”[1]
Although Plato was demonstrating the fickle and capricious nature of the Greek pantheon of gods, this dilemma is now applied to monotheism (belief in one supreme being, i.e. God of the Bible), and is therefore relevant to our evaluation. It is now often presented today as: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is already good? Craig A. Boyd and Don Thorsen are right when saying,
“People of faith find themselves torn between wanting to affirm an objective foundation for morality and wanting to affirm God’s sovereignty over all creation.”[2]
I was asked this question by an atheist friend years ago, and I didn’t know how to respond! Let’s break this down.
The Horns
The first horn of the dilemma (something is good because God wills it), is sometimes referred to as Voluntarism, and is a problem because it makes it a possibility that God could arbitrarily pick anything and define it as “good.” Hence, if tomorrow morning God said murdering your neighbor is a good thing, then it would be good to do it because God willed it to be done. This would be a radical form of voluntarism but still poses an issue to the nature of God. The skeptic claims that because God is sovereign and all-powerful, God can do anything and therefore, he can command us to do evil or redefine evil acts as “good” acts.
The second horn of the dilemma (God wills something because it is already good) is a Non-voluntarist view sometimes referred to as the “guided will theory” and is also a problem. Let’s look at this one a little closer. This position suggests that God has to look to a moral standard outside of himself in order to determine what is good or bad.
This would be a problem because it challenges the classical conception of God as being the Ultimate reality upon which everything else that exists is contingent and relies upon for its existence; so, God would not be completely self-sufficient nor totally sovereign because he is relying upon another ontologically[3] independent thing to guide him. On this view, some say God is basically just here to help guide us toward this independent and necessary existing source that he must also reference.
So, on this view, it seems that God believes some action is moral because it already is moral, and God just knows it because he’s omniscient. Because this action already is morally good, it somehow causes God to believe the action is moral, thereby guiding him to command the action.
This outside standard that God references is also a thing in which he is held accountable to, like some kind of handbook he must acknowledge before acting. This greatly diminishes the metaphysical supremacy of God. Some atheist philosophers have used this idea to say that God is superfluous and unnecessary because of these fixed moral principles that all of us can access ourselves.
Third Option!
As you can see from the first two horns mentioned, we would have a problem if those were our only options. However, a third option is readily available for us which is: God wills something because He is Good. Because God is the Ultimate Good, he doesn’t need to refer to an independent source of morality; rather, his very nature is that unchangeable and eternal source of Goodness.
As a Maximally Great Being, God is the Ultimate Good. Therefore, when God issues a divine command, it pertains to what is right or wrong for us to do; it doesn’t pertain to what is morally good or bad. This may seem strange at first, but there is a crucial distinction to be made between good and bad (value) and right and wrong (obligation/duty). Let me explain.
Prominent philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls clarify that
“moral value pertains to the worth of a person or action, good or bad, whereas moral duties pertain to matters of rightness and wrongness, usually of actions.”[4]
Moral goodness or value is grounded in the nature of God, and God’s nature is perfectly Good which cannot change (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8). He is Perfection! Because God is the source and grounding of all goodness, his commands must flow from his perfect nature which we are obligated to obey.
Now, stay with me for a second as I use a couple terms you may not be familiar with. Issues of the moral good are axiological matters; Axiology is the study of value and worth. However, not everything that is morally good is morally right, in the sense of being morally obligatory (what we ought to do).
For example, we are not morally obligated to do something just because it would be good to do it. For example, it would be good for me to become a veterinarian, but I am not obligated to become one. It would be good if you volunteered three days a week at the homeless shelter, but you are not morally obligated to do so, and you shouldn’t be criticized if you don’t.
Issues of moral rightness and wrongness are deontic matters; Deontology is a theory that evaluates “which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic theories).”[5] It may sound strange, but some things may be the right thing for you to do which doesn’t involve goodness, such as picking the lesser of two evils or having to kill someone in self-defense to preserve your own life.
As for rightness and what our duties or obligations are, those are grounded in God’s commands. Baggett and Walls note,
“God’s commands determine what’s morally obligatory, but not what’s morally good.”[6]
God can’t just randomly determine that murder is a good thing for us to do because his commands reflect his perfect and unchangeably good character.
So, super quick review of what is important to remember: Moral values (goodness) are objective because they’re grounded in God’s unchangeable nature who is the Ultimate Good; Moral duties (rightness) are objective because they are grounded in God’s commands which directly link to his all-good nature. In my opinion, we have the best of both worlds in this theory.
Hypothetically Speaking, What if God did Command Evil?
Some critics might claim this limits God’s ability and doesn’t make him all-powerful because he can’t do all things. On the contrary, sin or evil is a weakness and a lack of something good which is the antithesis of God. The great philosopher Thomas Aquinas explained evil the best by stating,
“But the absence of good, taken as deprivation, is called evil, as the deprivation of sight is called blindness.”[7]
Evil is not an actual substance, rather, it is a lack of a good thing. Being all-powerful does not entail the ability to do that which is logically impossible (creating a round square) or contrary to the nature of that being (all-goodness and some evil). If God is the Ultimate Good, then by definition, he can’t be or act in an evil way.
So, it’s not that God could command us to do evil but wouldn’t because he is all-good; rather, God can’t command evil. This would mean God would have to deny himself which is logically and metaphysically impossible. Counter-possibles or counterfactuals of this nature should not even be entertained because they are nonsensical. Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig states:
“On the customary understanding, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents have non-vacuous truth value. Even if we reject the customary semantics and allow that some counterfactuals with impossible antecedents may be non-vacuously true or false, how are we to assess the truth value of a statement with an antecedent like this? It is like wondering whether if there were a round square, its area would equal the square of one of its sides. And what would it matter how one answered, since what is imagined is logically incoherent?”[8]
It’s also biblically supported that God cannot do all things–he can’t sin, he can’t change his nature, he can’t lie (Hebrews 6:18; Titus 1:2). Remember, these kinds of actions are weaknesses and therefore should not be used to assert that God’s limitation in this area is some kind of deficit to his omnipotence.
Philosophers Paul Copan and Matthew Flannigan add,
“No power, however great, can produce something self-contradictory…. There is no possible state of affairs in which God commands something abhorrent. His failure to do so does not contradict his omnipotence.”[9]
So, our moral values are rooted in God’s nature and our moral obligations/duties are rooted in his commands. Distinguished philosopher C. Stephen Evans states,
“God’s commands are only regarded as the source of moral obligations, and the theory explicitly affirms that some objective theory of the good is necessary as a foundation for this account of the morally right.”[10]
And this foundation that Evans refers to is the Ultimate Good which is God’s very nature.
What I have been explaining thus far includes certain principles that stem from a Divine Command Theory (DCT) of ethics. This theory is the proper solution that circumvents and avoids the horns of Euthyphro’s dilemma, which we showed is actually a false one! In fact, the great atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie thought that if God existed, then a DCT would resolve the Euthyphro dilemma.[11] If you would like a robust and better understanding of a proper and biblical DCT of ethics, see my article on DCT here.
Be Thankful for God’s Commands!
In the same way that humans can ignore legal commands by the government, they can also ignore divine commands by God. God is the moral law giver and laws are going to be broken. God designed us with freedom of the will which means we have the ability to obey or disobey his commands.
Most people will feel the guilt and shame for breaking some of these commands when they sin or intentionally hurt someone, but either way, they are universal, and we know them through our conscience because we are made in his image (Romans 2:15).
These divine commands establish a moral guideline that encourages the individual to act appropriately and conveys that the Commander has a personal interest in the persons being commanded. Renowned Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne adds to this, stating,
“God rightly wants humans to be holy, and so he has this fourth reason of helping the process of our sanctification, for imposing obligations on us (by way of commands) for some or all of our earthly life. (That, of course, still leaves us with the casual freedom to disobey God’s commands).”[12]
We should listen to God’s commands and love him with all of our heart, soul and mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
God’s commands are not arbitrary; they’re designed for living a meaningful life with purpose. So, nothing to worry about, because the Euthyphro dilemma is not a true dilemma, and now you have an idea of what to say when you encounter it.
God not only would not, but could not, command anything evil because he is the Ultimate Good. This means he doesn’t need to reference an external moral source to guide him on goodness, therefore he remains completely sovereign and self-sufficient.
Blessings,
Andrew Drinkard
[1] Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1 translated by Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1966. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DEuthyph.%3Asection%3D10a
[2] Craig A. Boyd and Don Thorsen, Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy: An Introduction to Issues and Approaches (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 62.
[3] Generally speaking, ontology is the philosophical study of being and that which relates to being, such as existence and reality. Every existing thing has “being” (stars, horses, rocks, humans), and therefore possess an ontological status or nature. For more on this topic, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by clicking here.
[4] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 16.
[5] Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, “Deontological Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ethics-deontological/>.
[6] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47.
[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, quoted in Herbert McCabe, Brian Davies, and Terry Eagleton, God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2010), 60-61.
[8] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed (Wheaton: Crossway Publishing, 2008), 182.
[9] Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014), 172.
[10] C. Stephen Evans, God & Moral Obligation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 90.
[11] Evans, God & Moral Obligation, 122.
[12] Richard Swinburne, What Difference Does God Make to Morality? in Robert K. Garcia, and Nathan L. King, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 162.
