See here and here for reference.
1. Inference (2): “If (i) morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good, then they are morally good independent of God’s will.” – Possibly true, but irrelevant, since there’s other things besides God’s will that morality could rest upon: i.e., God’s power or omniscience.
2. Inference (5): “If (ii) morally good acts are morally good because they are willed by God, then there is no reason either to care about God’s moral goodness or to worship him.” – Again, if all we’re talking about is morals, then this is possibly true, but again irrelevant. There could be plenty of other reasons to worship God that don’t involve Him as the source of goodness or morality.
3. C.S. Lewis’ quote referenced on the Wikipedia page is odd (i.e., wrong): “[I]f good is to be defined as what God commands, then the goodness of God Himself is emptied of meaning and the commands of an omnipotent fiend would have the same claim on us as those of the ‘righteous Lord.'” – Why is the focus on “emptying” the goodness of God’s meaning, when the greater offense would be to place God under the command of an object, like morality? If anything, Lewis should be considering God as axiomatic, not something to be concluded by his material logic or his personal preferences. That Lewis may find a divine command distasteful is irrelevant.
4. The dilemma, interestingly, is a false one, since it considers only a narrow scope of who God is and not His entire being. Josef Pieper, I think, comes close to the explaining it correctly with few words, also from the Wikipedia page: “Only the will [i.e., God’s] can be the right standard of its own willing and must will what is right necessarily, from within itself, and always. A deviation from the norm would not even be thinkable. And obviously only the absolute divine will is the right standard of its own act.”
5. Even better is Katherin A. Rogers’ quote: “Anselm, like Augustine before him and Aquinas later, rejects both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order. Rather His very nature is the standard for value.”
6. God can do whatever He damn well pleases, as I’ve mentioned this many times before on this blog.
2 Comments
Quite so; you hint at it but don’t use the term: Category Error. God as a concept is not something subject to human reason, nor is morality.
Yeah, that’s why I liked the Rogers quote, especially the last line: “Rather His very nature is the standard for value.” I don’t know the full context of her thought on it but it sounds good on the surface.
I did have the category error in mind but never actually used it. To be fair to Plato/Euthyphro…it was originally a dilemma for the Greek mythology gods, who didn’t seem all that…transcendent?