I would argue that inserting God into the question of "what is good" actually confuses the issue, for two reasons:
- The standards of goodness have to be objective and non-relative for us to use the phrase meaningfully, and thus not contingent on God's nature
- Attempting to solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by invoking "God's nature" as non-arbitrary fails, and does not elucidate the meaning of "goodness"
He is a theist who is arguing that atheists have no ultimate justification, or grounds, for morality. This is a common claim, and has been replied to extensively by philosophers and scholars (myself being neither). This should not be confused with a weaker claim: that atheists cannot behave morally. Instead, the claim is that they can behave morally, but that their rationality and justification for doing so may be flawed. The idea is that atheists have an inconsistency in their moral argument by virtue of the claim that all morality is contingent upon God's nature in some way. The capitalized quotes come from an email he sent me, and I have italicized the relevant portion:
...BUT WHAT DOES WRONG MEAN? WHAT DOES RIGHT MEAN? WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOMETHING BEING RIGHT OR WRONG? AND WHY DOES THAT OR OUGHT THAT COMPELL TO ACT THIS OR THAT? FROM A THEISTIC PERSPECTIVE, IT MAKES SENSE. THERE IS A GOD WHO HAS THIS CHARACTER OF GOOD...Morality is typically taken as a sort of system, or set of rational principles, by which we recognize or render behaviors and actions as “good” or “evil”, where good means, “things that we (humans) ought to do” and evil means, “things that we (humans) ought not do.” Will you agree? To avoid circularity, it is usually helpful to try to use context in defining good and evil. That is, can we develop concrete examples of and definitions for the terms "good" and "evil" for the purpose of argument?
The concrete example of an immoral action I will use throughout is: drowning an otherwise healthy infant is immoral. This is an arbitrary choice, as I could substitute shooting for drowning, or an eleven-year-old child for an infant, and the moral value of the statement has not changed.
Developing concrete examples of morality and immorality is something of a problem for a theist who wants to rely on nothing more than “God’s nature” as the ultimate foundation/basis/ontology of goodness. For example, in my asking the question, “Is action X good?” it may be difficult, if not impossible, for you to answer if you only want to lean upon recourse to God’s nature, because God's nature is not self-evident and is therefore an unknown quantity. Simply by defining God's nature as the good does not help me to further elaborate on just what that means! If X = going to a baseball game today, what would your answer to, "Is action X good?" be? Is it morally neutral? How would you know that? Does God like baseball? Would you say that God's nature is baseball? Of course not...
Do all moral actions reflect something that God would do? If so, then I can mount a counter-argument that the absence of moral action on God's part makes your assertions dubious: e.g., if you say that I am morally obligated to feed my baby, but God is not obligated to feed the human race (God's children), then we have a bit of a double standard. This seems to be an approach that Willam Alston takes, in that he argues that God does not have the sort of moral obligations that we humans have. If this is true, then there is a semantic non-trivial error in calling God "good" if by "good" this does not entail and connote the same things for God as it does in all other circumstances. If God's version of "good" is substantively different than any other, then a separate moral standard has been introduced which should not be equivocated with the objective moral standard we usually pick out with that word; relativity is now in play, because there is more than one moral standard being used. In other words, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander.
If one cannot reliably give objective, non-God-related examples of morality, without recourse to Scripture or divine commandments, it may be difficult to have a dialog in the first place. If I asked you to define "what is good/evil?" and the answer is "whatever God is" then I can simply ask, "and what is that?" You must be able to give me a working definition, or else the statement, "God is good," is a tautology, as viciously circular and useless as the statement, "God is that which God is," or "God is wgoweigwe," or "goodness is wegoeiwgwe" -- none of these are meaningfully veridical. In addition, there are many properties of God that have no moral bearing: power, knowledge, presence...
In part three of the Craig-Nielsen debate, we see this raise its ugly head, as Craig is posed with a fundamental question of how he knows that God is good:
Here I think he is clearly confusing the order of knowing with the order of being. In order to recognize that God is good, I may have to have some prior knowledge of what the good is in order to see that God is good. But that does not affect the fact that in the order of being, values derive their source from God’s being. He’s confused the order of knowing with the order of being. Simply because you can recognize moral values without belief in God, you cannot infer from this that therefore objective moral values can exist without God. So I would say that we have fundamental moral intuitions. In fact, the Bible says that God has planted these on the heart of every human person so that we intuitively recognize objective moral values. These values are rooted ontologically in the being and nature of God himself.Craig admits here that humans have "fundamental moral intuitions" that give us the ability to "intuitively recognize objective moral values" -- that certainly addresses the question of how humans could "know" God's goodness. That is, we have the faculties (reason) to evaluate goodness in the first place. A follow-up question for Craig that would get to the definition would be, "Okay, Dr. Craig, since you know God's goodness, tell me exactly what it is about God (or about God's nature) that makes God good?" In fact, I might be tempted to probe Craig's response further: if objective moral values exist, then we are saying that principles and standards exist against which we could assess God's own moral nature -- but in what way could we do this, to know that God is good, besides recourse to revelation/Scripture? How else could God's nature be known, except to suppose it? Indeed, it cannot, and Craig and other theists simply suppose and define God's nature to be good without bothering to further elaborate on what this means and how it would constrain or limit God and God's moral agency or freedom.
Does Craig's response get to the heart of what it means to say that God (or God's nature) is good? Not at all, and I'll revisit this again frequently to hammer home this point. It does not bother to address the issue of how and whether goodness is (or can be) defined by the theist in such a fashion. Craig claims that objective moral values are "rooted ontologically in the being and nature of God" but as I'll show below, metaphysical ultimacy and logical contingency refute this claim.
So, I would say that the following things are true about saying, "God's nature is goodness," or a similar sentiment:
- The phrase "God's nature" must be refined to exclude those characteristics and properties that are amoral: power, knowledge, &c.; in so doing some approximation of morality may emerge, but this clarification is integral to making any sort of philosophical progress
- The term "goodness" may convey veracity only if it is given context or a non-circular and non-tautological definition; "God's nature" fails to do this
- To say that we know God's nature depends on revelation or Scripture, both of which require significant human liability in establishing the veracity thereof; then, to say God's nature is goodness must mean we simply suppose this
- What it means to say that morality is not contingent on God's nature
- zero meaning or value, like "God is qegfoqeif"
- or is merely a tautology
In modal logic, there is a classification known as "logically necessary" such that logical necessity can be applied to X when X must be true in any and all possible worlds. It is the heart of the issue involving the Euthyphro Dilemma: are moral standards and properties logically necessary, or are they contingent upon some other aspect of reality? The proposition: "All red carpets are red," is an a priori logical necessity -- it is true by definition and must be true in any and all possible worlds. Ditto with the idea of conclusions drawn from correct premises in a syllogistic mode of logic. The idea here is that God could not even make this proposition false.
The same would be true using false propositions that are logically necessary: "All completely round objects are completely square objects," is necessarily false. Something cannot simultaneously be fully round and fully square, and even God could not make this proposition true. God cannot change such logical principles, so they are not contingent.
On the other hand, the proposition: "There exists a red carpet," is a synthetic, or a posteriori logical possibility, whether or not the predicate is physically real -- this means that it may or may not be true in any one possible world, but it does not have to be true in all possible worlds. This is contingency. If a state of affairs, like me having a red carpet, is possible but not actual, then we would say that it doesn't obtain in this world, although it could in any possible world. The existence of the carpet is contingent, not necessary, and so God could control whether or not the proposition is true. As I have just shown, God cannot "change" logic in order to make a false statement true, nor a true statement false, because logic is not contingent upon God. Is morality any different?
What I would argue is that theists want to have their cake, and eat it too, by saying that morality depends upon God in some fashion (contingency), but they also want to have morality fixed to certain standards, and so they confine and limit the possibilities of God's character to fix the problem. This is theistic essentialism, and it's the trick up their sleeve: argue that God's nature must be good, such that possible worlds arguments do not hold because there can be no possible world without a morally perfect God. I'll challenge that in a moment, but for now, let's say it's true. What does this entail?
If theists contend that moral statements, such as, "Drowning an otherwise-healthy infant is wrong," are logically and therefore necessarily true in all possible worlds, then they accord to morality the metaphysical ultimacy which will undercut their argument that it can be contingent upon God's nature. That is to say, God cannot make drowning an otherwise-healthy infant moral by decree or will or command. Now, they qualify this further by saying that the reason for this moral truth is God's nature, but the important part is that God cannot change the moral truth: it is a logical necessity that drowning infants is a priori immoral.
Now, if theists do not accord such transcendent status to morality, then things get a little more complicated. This would be a theist who says that moral propositions must be evaluated as contingencies, where "drowning an infant is morally wrong," may or may not be true, given other facts and circumstances. Theists who assert such claims undermine the idea that truth in morality is an objective and transcendent affair, such as truth in mathematics. Therefore, it is important to nail down the terms of the debate before we even begin. Most theists would agree that God cannot change moral values, and they would argue this is because God cannot change God's own nature. This is an interesting argument, as it implies a few things about God's freedom and moral agency.
William Alston might argue at this point that God could drown an infant because God's moral perfection is different than moral values that humans apply because God cannot be morally obligated to act in a way consistent with an external standard. This is slippery, because some theists will try to "get away with" something here, but really they are still trapped: if we agree that it is wrong in all possible worlds for humans to do X, but not God, then we have undercut the justification for using the same terms of "goodness" and "evil" in application to God as we do for ourselves. In other words, if what is good for us is not good for God, or if what is evil for us is not evil for God, then to say, "God is good," is an equivocation. Thus theists who claim that there are different standards of morality undercut their claim that morality is objective and also render the phrase, "God is good," meaningless, as God's goodness may have little to nothing resembling our form of goodness. This flows logically into part (2) below, where I ask the question if it is intelligible for us to use God as a standard of goodness when it does not seem that God's nature can comport with goodness per se.
If theists do agree with my proposition about the transcendent moral wrongness of drowning an otherwise-healthy infant, then I would ask them if drowning the entire world, including children and infants, in the Noachian Flood was thus morally wrong, and they then have a bit of a dilemma if they believe this event is an actual historical event. If it is true that God's nature is the basis of goodness, but if God has committed acts which contradict moral standards of goodness, then there is an incoherence. Therefore, even theists recognize that a moral standard cannot be compromised in order to make it congruent with God's own character. Somehow, God's goodness must be salvaged because they know that the standard itself is ultimate, therefore there must be an excuse or apologetic to explain away any deviations from this standard, such that it does not appear to have been transgressed.
Now, this problem should not exist in the first place if goodness is that which God is. If goodness is that which God is, then there is no way that drowning infants is anything except good, since that is what God has done.
Really, all we've done here is pushed back the Euthyphro Dilemma by one step: while the Euthyphro Dilemma's original phrasing involves God's commands, which are assumed to be arbitrary, the use of "God's nature" in substitution is assumed not to be arbitrary. However, if indeed God's nature defines and ontologically roots goodness, is it by virtue of fact that it belongs to God, or is it by virtue of the fact that drowning infants is not in God's nature? If anything that belongs to God is automatically assigned the status of moral perfection, then it is obvious that morality is contingent upon the person to whom it refers, and is relative. This is what I will develop on in the next section. If God's nature defines and ontologically roots goodness by virtue of the fact that God's nature already corresponds to the objective standards of goodness, then the absolute, non-relative and non-tautological status of morality is preserved. The Euthyphro Dilemma is still alive and well, you see.
- Does invoking God's nature give any adequacy of explanation to "goodness"?
What would be implied if morality is contingent upon God's character simply because it is God's is that if the theist said that anything that was God's nature is defined as "the good", then if God's character qualities included the drowning of infants, the theist would have to say it is good to drown infants. Most theists would, understandably, not want to claim that God's nature includes anything we all already accept as immoral. And so what they are doing is, from the outset, limiting God's nature to mutually-agreed-upon objective moral standards of goodness.
This belies any claim that they make that God's nature supercedes morality, because there is no theist who will honestly say that if God's nature was one of meanness and jealousy and selfishness, that the moral value of these things would suddenly become positive. And thus they concede the metaphysical primacy of morality: it is not contingent upon God's nature. What they may argue instead is that it is logically necessary for God's nature to be morally perfect. Supposing this is one thing, supporting it is quite another.
After all, why could there not be an all-powerful and all-knowing being whose nature was such that it relished the suffering of its creations? Why could there not be an evil God? It is only paring down logical possibilities that the theist is capable of trying to define a morally perfect God. However, there is absolutely no substantive refutation of the existence of an evil God (it is a logical possibility), and thus it is not logically necessary for God's nature to conform to the objective standards of goodness that Craig admits humans have intuitions and knowledge of. Instead, Craig and other theists are admitting to us, up front, that the objective moral standards and values we all agree represent "goodness" are the logical necessities, and that only in supposing that God's nature conforms to these values makes God truly "good".
The reply that God is defined a priori as "all good" is not an objection or refutation to my claim, because it is not logically necessary that God's nature be thus, as there is no argument that could be presented that God's nature is somehow determined by metaphysical principles; and so to say, "God is good, and goodness is that which God is" is tautological and conflicts with the existence of objective moral standards. One way to prove this is to investigate as to what God (and therefore goodness) is: does God's nature permit, or even incite God to perform, actions such as the drowning of an infant? If yes, then theists have just asserted the moral goodness of drowning infants. If not, then they admit that God's nature is a reflection of objective moral standards. The circularity of "Goodness is that which God is" undercuts any ability to make philosophical progress or define the terms independently of one another, because the primacy of objective moral standards is undermined.
So in effect, they must admit that in all possible worlds, God's nature must be such that it is limited to the things that we all agree are standards of moral goodness. Thus the real issue is exposed: they define God's nature as good because they assign to it all of the virtues. It is not the other way around. What "God is good" really means is that "God is good because God's nature conforms to the objective standards of goodness that we all already agree exist."For example , God's nature is good because God's nature opposes the drowning of infants, and logically would not be good if it did not.
They don't really mean what they say when they claim goodness and evil are in some way dependent upon or contingent upon God's nature, because if "morality is whatever God is," then by definition, morality is contingent upon the character of God, which necessitates that God's nature conforms to objective standards of morality. There is no explanation as to why, at a metaphysical level, God's character must be that which corresponds to our sense of good: it is not logically necessary that God's nature be opposed to the drowning of infants. And in that sense, God's nature defines goodness, goodness is that which God is, yet that which God is becomes presupposed...a viciously circular logic and tautology at the same time.
By this contingency, it is possible that any attribute belonging to God defines goodness, and yet there are many logically possible attributes of God that would be immoral (such as enjoying the drowning of infants), as well as those which obviously have nothing to do with morality: God's omnipotence, omniscience, &c...
Here’s something from a debate between Drs. W. L. Craig and K. Nielsen:
"But God is all-knowing; he has perfect knowledge [whereas] we do not," which is true by definition. If there is such a God, this doesn’t give you any reason for doing it because perfect knowledge is compatible with perfect evil. "Well, it’s because God is all-good." Now I ask you Christians, "How do you know that God is all-good?" I know you believe it, you accept it, but how do you know it? Probably, the most common answer is this: "Well, you read the Scriptures, and you see the kind of exemplar that Jesus was ... and there are plenty of passages in which Jesus shows himself to be an incredible exemplar." But notice that to see that he is an exemplar already presupposes that you have a prior understanding of what is good and bad. Because you have an understanding of what is good and bad, you see Jesus to be a desirable exemplar. So you have an independent moral understanding and knowledge which doesn’t rest on your belief in God.This last part is especially useful when I hear theists say, “the Euthyphro dilemma doesn’t apply/work because goodness is not contingent upon God’s commands, and thus arbitrary, nor is it an objective standard by which God judges actions, and thus supersedes God entirely, but instead goodness is God’s nature.” What does this mean? What does it explain? Furthermore, is God's nature not simply the collective assembly of God's will and commands and actions? And in that sense, is it not just as arbitrary as the individual series of God's commands? If not, what determines (or determined) God's nature?
Suppose somebody says, "Look, God is the perfect Good by definition." Some philosophers used to call this an analytic truth--like "Puppies are young dogs." But if you didn’t know what "young" meant, you couldn’t even know what "puppy" meant. If you didn’t know what "good" meant, you couldn’t even know what "God" meant. You have to have some understanding of "good" to judge that God is the perfect Good. So again, you need a moral criterion that is your own and doesn’t come from God. It may come causally from God, but it doesn’t come in a justificatory sense, which is the relevant thing in arguing about morality. [emphasis mine]
That is to say, the theist's reply that God's nature "solves" the Euthyphro Dilemma must purport to show how God's nature is non-arbitrary. Some theists, including Robert Adams, and along a different line, William Alston, have tried to do just that, but in so doing, have revealed its impossibility. Adams admits that God's nature is good in virtue of the fact that God's nature is loving towards God's creatures. Adams thus admits that the standard of "being loving towards other creatures" is the virtue that makes God good. Ergo, if someone is not loving towards other creatures, then that person is not good, which is the transcendent moral principle that is not contingent upon whom the being or Being is. It isn't that "being loving towards other creatures" could be good or bad, and simply is good because that's God's nature, versus nsfl's. So Richard Adams is impaled on the second horn of the dilemma.
Alston removes moral obligation from the definition and thus equivocates on the meaning of goodness. This impales Alston on the first horn of the dilemma -- in attempting to make sense of God's goodness, the definition of goodness itself becomes relative to the person to whom it refers. This is, admittedly, a logical escape from the implications of the Euthyphro Dilemma. But it may be an escape from the frying pan into the fire: now using the phrase, "God is good," connotes entirely different concepts from the phrase, "nsfl is good," and so while in the latter case it means, roughly, "nsfl is good, thus he does not drown infants," no such logical connotation is made by the former.
What should immediately follow from the claim "God is good" is, as Dr. Nelson pointed out, that theists are pressed to explain the claim they make: what does "God is good" mean? We all understand that the concept "young" is not contingent on puppies, and so it is non-circular to say, "puppies are young dogs" in pointing out a vital distinction in the nature of puppies v. dogs. When the theist says, "God is good," however, without recourse to an external standard against which we can evaluate God's goodness, it is a circular reference if all this means is "God is that which God is" because "Good is that which God is, and God is good." To avoid circularity or tautology, theists must make recourse to using the objective standards of morality that we all agree on, and thus define goodness in terms of these standards.
Theists claim that God's nature, as Craig said in the quote above, serves to "ontologically root" moral values, which appears to be the same as to claim that moral values exist as (part of) God's nature. But have we made any progress? Are all these things virtuous because they relate to God, or is God good exactly because these virtues are God's nature? It must be the latter, because otherwise we make morality contingent upon God's nature.
Some theists believe that God's authority or omnipotence somehow give a logical foundation to morality, but philosophers have refuted these notions long ago. Simply because someone has authority over you does not mean that they will use their authority/power in a moral fashion, and this has been shown by human rulers in history. The quantity, or degree, of authority does not have any bearing on the quality of how it is used. Simply because God has more authority does not entail that God will/must use this authority in a moral fashion. The Euthyphro Dilemma is as clear here as ever: is something good because God's authority demands it, or does God use its authority to demand those things that are good because they are good?
The exact same points can be made about any other attribute of God's nature/character, be it God's power or authority or knowledge: none of those attributes logically necessitates morality in how they are used, nor can morality be contingent upon any of them. The idea that God has a determined nature/character brings up questions. While human nature is determined by DNA and environment/development, what could God's nature be determined by? If God's nature is not determined, then God's nature could freely change, and if God's nature is the basis for morality, then morality itself is arbitrary: contingent upon a relative standard.
One way to think about how God's nature is arbitrary, but morality cannot be, is the following possible worlds thought experiment:
Suppose that there is a world in which a god named Booblefrip exists, and so do humans, almost exactly like our world. Booblefrip created all that we see and experience as humans in a physical world. Booblefrip is "all powerful" in the sense that any logical possibility (contingency) can be accomplished by his will. Booblefrip is also omniscient. The only significant difference between our world and the world of Booblefrip is that Booblefrip takes pleasure in the suffering of humans. In point of fact, Booblefrip so enjoys our suffering that It (gender neutral) introduced pathogens and parasites and genetic defects into this world in order to elevate human suffering. And, Booblefrip enjoys flooding the world so as to drown infants. The question I would have to ask a theist is this -- is morality contingent upon the nature of Booblefrip in this world, in the same way that you claim that morality is contingent upon the nature of YHWH in ours?
Those who are interested in more extensive debates of this sort, especially with respect to questions about whether "God's nature" is a sufficient reply/solution to philosophical problems like the Euthyphro Dilemma and other presuppositional apologetics, should see the Martin-Frame written dialog. as well as some other articles at infidels.org. In it, the heart of the question is laid bare: is it possible to say that morality is contingent upon some aspect of God's character?
They would argue vociferously that "taking pleasure in the suffering of others" is not a character quality that is morally good. This is a standard we agree on.
The sorts of people who make these arguments include, but are not limited to, presuppositionalists. The problem is that if they leave "God is good" as an undefended and unexplained presupposition, then they have no more philosophical economy than if I simply say, "Doing harm without cause is evil." Or if I say, "Contributing to the physical or mental well-being of others is good." If you can’t give me a reasonable explanation of God’s nature, or why it good, then you’ve no more explained why something is good than if you said, “Goodness is awvpoweigfnqwe.” (nonsense) And if I can't go further with my meta-ethical justification, then we're on equal footing, if that. Also, these presuppositionalists have to be careful in making claims like, "drowning an infant is morally evil," because they will immediately be confronted with things like the Genesis Noachian Flood, and they will have to try to reconcile the notion that when God does an action, it is morally good, while when humans do it, it is morally evil. This is clear moral relativism.
I think that most theists would jump at the opportunity to correct me if I said, "God has a nature whereby God causes harm without justification, and this is the definition of evil." What they would correct is not likely that my definition of evil (causing harm without justification) is wrong, but that this evil is not what God's nature is. So in a sense, we agree on the foundational principles, like that causing harm for fun is morally evil. And they would probably agree that the principle is metaphysically ultimate -- it would be just as wrong for God to do it as for us, and this would apply in any and all possible worlds. Therefore it cannot be contingent upon God's nature, as there are possible worlds in which God's nature obtains differently. QED
Conclusion: Saying "God is good" has little to no explanatory value. Either moral propositions are logically necessary or they are contingent. If morality is contingent, then we can come up with possible worlds in which moral standards are defined by a god's nature, but that this god's nature does not conform to the same moral standards accorded to YHWH. That is, it is completely logically possible that a god can exist with a different defined character/nature, and thus God's nature is contingent but not moral standards. If theists make morality contingent upon a god's nature, while nothing determines god's nature, then to say, "God is good," is tautological and conflicts with the existence of objective moral standards. This is incoherent, and therefore God's nature cannot "determine" morality when it is, itself, indeterminate (nothing transcends God in this view).
See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.
