Objection · Case 09 · Atheism
The Euthyphro dilemma: either God commands things because they are good, so goodness is independent of him, or things are good because he commands them, so morality is arbitrary. Either way God doesn’t ground morality.
One objection from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Response
Every philosophy student will raise this, and it deserves a direct reply. The standard theistic answer is that goodness is grounded in God’s nature rather than his will: God commands what is good because he is good, so the commands are neither arbitrary nor derived from a standard above him. Critics ask what makes God’s nature good, and defenders reply that on every view the buck stops with some ultimate good, and a perfect person is a better stopping point than a Platonic abstraction. The second half of this claim is a live debate, and this exchange is the center of it.
About this exhibit
This objection is to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” and the 2020 PhilPapers Survey.
Discussions of the moral argument begin from a shared starting point. Acts like torturing children for amusement strike almost everyone as wrong regardless of opinion or culture. Surveys of…
Under Claim 04: People across cultures treat some acts as truly wrong, and this objective moral law points to a moral lawgiver.