The Euthyphro Dilemma.
2ndRateMind
Shipmate
in Purgatory
The original version attributed to Socrates (c470-399 BC) by Plato runs as follows:
Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?
If the former, the Gods owe allegiance to some higher power than themselves that constrains them to love it, namely, the pious; if the latter the pious is a matter of their whim, and they could equally well not love the pious at all, but, perhaps, the impious, instead, which they could call pious.
In fact, this dilemma can be asked of any authority and moral absolute.
For example; is what is right, right because the party says it is right, or does the party say it is right, because it is right?
But, for me, the formulation that hits the spot, and has afforded me many happy hours of contemplation, is this one:
Is the good, good, because God wills it so, or does God will it so, because it is good?
To the best of my knowledge, this question has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
If the former, the good is merely a divine opinion, and anything that is good could conceivably be otherwise, and anything otherwise could conceivably be good. Genocide, for example, might have been good, and liberty might have been bad. If the latter, then, as before, God owes His allegiance is to something prior and more vital than Himself that constrains Him. I find neither option palatable.
This is how I currently resolve the matter. I consider the moral absolutes to be aspects of Gods nature. The Good, the Just, the Merciful, the Kind, the Right, the Fair, the Beautiful, the True, the Brave, etc, would not exist at all if He did not exist, and He makes them manifest simply by being. He would just not be God if they did not exist and He did not, by Himself being, bring them to be. Just as you would not be you without your nature and did not, by being, bring your nature to be.
The moral absolutes, and God, therefore, are mutually interdependent. To the extent that they exist partially or at all in His world, it is because they are His metaphysical shadow on His creation.
As usual, your comments and criticisms are always welcome.
Best wishes, Strivax.
Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?
If the former, the Gods owe allegiance to some higher power than themselves that constrains them to love it, namely, the pious; if the latter the pious is a matter of their whim, and they could equally well not love the pious at all, but, perhaps, the impious, instead, which they could call pious.
In fact, this dilemma can be asked of any authority and moral absolute.
For example; is what is right, right because the party says it is right, or does the party say it is right, because it is right?
But, for me, the formulation that hits the spot, and has afforded me many happy hours of contemplation, is this one:
Is the good, good, because God wills it so, or does God will it so, because it is good?
To the best of my knowledge, this question has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
If the former, the good is merely a divine opinion, and anything that is good could conceivably be otherwise, and anything otherwise could conceivably be good. Genocide, for example, might have been good, and liberty might have been bad. If the latter, then, as before, God owes His allegiance is to something prior and more vital than Himself that constrains Him. I find neither option palatable.
This is how I currently resolve the matter. I consider the moral absolutes to be aspects of Gods nature. The Good, the Just, the Merciful, the Kind, the Right, the Fair, the Beautiful, the True, the Brave, etc, would not exist at all if He did not exist, and He makes them manifest simply by being. He would just not be God if they did not exist and He did not, by Himself being, bring them to be. Just as you would not be you without your nature and did not, by being, bring your nature to be.
The moral absolutes, and God, therefore, are mutually interdependent. To the extent that they exist partially or at all in His world, it is because they are His metaphysical shadow on His creation.
As usual, your comments and criticisms are always welcome.
Best wishes, Strivax.
Comments
Best wishes, 2RM
I think the doctrine of divine simplicity, that unlike in created beings there is no real distinction in God between God's will and God's nature, is also relevant in that the question of priority between God's nature as goodness and God's desires doesn't get off the ground since they are the same thing.
Many thanks for this LC. Spot on! Essentially what Iris Murdoch's 'Sovereignity of Good' says at much greater length.
I would argue with the 'him' and sustitute 'them' i.e, implying the Trinity and also avoid the use of 'He/She'.
That sounds to me like agreeing with the "good because God says so" side of the question. At least I can't slide a fag paper between them.
Saying that goodness has no existence apart from God's nature does not imply that cruelty could be good.
Which to me seems to be the other position - that moral absolutes exist outside of God and God couldn't choose a different set because he can't change what is good.
So if God's nature were cruelty then cruelty would be "good"?
I am not sure, however, that God's nature, and God's will, can be collapsed into the same concept. As I understand the nature of an entity, it means it's way of being, it's character. As I understand the will of an entity, it means what it wants to happen, it's desire. If this is the case, then the will is caused by the nature, which implies to me the two are, though related, actually quite distinct.
Best wishes, 2RM.
The doctrine of divine simplicity stems from an argument that God exists necessarily. In order to exist necessarily God cannot be decomposed into different aspects. Therefore we cannot properly distinguish in the entity of God between nature causing will or will causing nature in the way we can distinguish between them in finite created entities.
(Basically our language and concepts only work as intended on created finite entities and on God they work only by analogy and circumlocution.)
No. "God says so" in this argument is usually taken to mean "God ordains it so"--"God designates it so," and he might have made a different choice if he had wanted to. And that's the problem. God cannot.
God can speak in two different ways, just as we do. He can make observations--"Truth is good." He can also ordain things, speak them into being. "I pronounce you married." "I hereby resign my position." "Let there be light."
But because of the brokenness in our nature, we human beings are capable of making observations that are not true--we call them lies. We are also capable of ordaining things that are bad. "Burn the heretic!" God is not broken, and cannot lie or ordain things that are evil. He cannot even ordain things that are nonsense--"From now on, two plus two will equal five." Because logic springs from his nature.
So those who claim that God could name some evil and declare it good are mistaken. He can neither lie nor will evil (or nonsense). It isn't in him. He cannot and will not act against his own nature. And there is nobody greater than he who can force him to do so.
So those who say "X is right only because God ordains it so, and he could have done differently" are just plain wrong.
Put it another way: If you have no desire to do x, and could not under any circumstances ever possibly desire to do x, and in fact the thought of it fills you with active repugnance--are you in fact "bound" by a stricture that says "Thou shalt not do X?" I'd argue that the stricture (if it exists at all in the absence of you yourself defining it!) is at worst irrelevant and at best a relief. "Thank God I don't have to eat lutefisk. Not that I would have done so anyway..."
Euclidean geometry is based on five axioms, one of which the so-called parallel postulate, states that if two lines both cross a third line and the sum of the angles between them and the third line on one side is less than two right angles, the two lines will cross each other on that side.
Using the parallel postulate and Euclid's other axioms you can prove other statements, such as if you have a line and a point not on that line there is exactly one line parallel to the original line that passes through the point.
Now if you take that statement such as the one about a line and a point as an axiom instead of the parallel postulate you can prove the parallel postulate from it (the same goes for other statements).
Now is that statement true of the Euclidean plane because of the parallel postulate, or is the parallel postulate true because of that statement? The answer is, it depends on how you look at it, or, both, or does not apply, or so on.
God being a necessary being or God being the cause of God's own being, in the same way as Euclidean geometry or any other set of logically connected statements, the question of causal priority does not apply. The answer to the question is both, or it depends on how you look at it.
They are what they are because they're God's nature. Presumably with a different God, you'd have different absolutes. The tricky thing about that is I think it very likely that no other G/god is logically possible--I think that any other nature, any other set of attributes but these, would turn out to be self-contradictory on some level, and the whole Person would go poof! in a puff of logic.
That doesn't mean that logic proves the existence of God, even in such a hazy way as I apprehend it. It means simply that it's either this God or no god. It might be an interesting mental exercise, to try to come up with a set of moral absolutes other than the ones we actually have, and see if you can mentally weld them into a single non-self-contradictory Being, so to speak. I doubt it's possible.
Oh, I agree. But to me that means the moral absolutes have an existence that defines what God is actually possible.
And yet the Bible has God both ordaining and carrying out genocide, as well as ordaining various commandments that are today considered so evil that they cannot even be agreed with on this website. Is the Bible wrong, or are those things good? And by what authority do we make that decision?
I put this down to the ancient Jews being a bunch of thugs who did not know God's Nature or Will half so well as they thought they did, and that we all have a tendency to believe in a God made in our own image. Hence Jesus, and Jesus' cross.
Best wishes, 2RM.
Ah, the voice of sanity. Praise be! These issues have been debated endlessly over the last two millenia. Again, I recommend 'The sovereignity of good', or at a lower level, a couple of chapters in CS Lewis's 'Reflections on the Psalms'.
So the Bible is wrong?
Including those who believe in individuality and inclusion?
In parts, yes. No one sensibly educated believes in the creation story(ies) in Genesis, for example.
Depends what else they believe about God. But we can be reasonably certain we know more than the ancient Jews, since we have the Gospels.
Best wishes, 2RM.
And much depends on what is meant by “believes in.” That is not necessarily the same as “interprets literally,” and “true” is not necessarily the same as “factual.” Many people, for example, do not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally, but also do not reject them as “wrong.”
Of course, in those Gospels, Jesus makes pretty clear that what he is teaching is already the message of the Torah and the prophets.
Firstly, there is what Nick Tamen says. Secondly. our interpretation is not that of Jewish person 2,500 years ago; it is (for many) an interpretation reached by much more knowledge. But who's to say what more knowledge may be acquired in the next few hundred years, and what effect that will have on the interpretation of those living then?
Exactly. That is the way science proceeds. And then we would have to admit we were wrong.
Best wishes, 2RM.
Interprets otherwise than literally just seems to me to be another way of saying 'wrong', or 'not actually factual' or 'untrue'.
Best wishes, 2RM.
Of course He does. How, given the politics and religion of the time, do you think He could have done otherwise, and expected anyone to listen to Him? But, simultaneously, He makes it quite clear that He has a very different concept of God to the hierarchy of the time - so different, one suspects He would have been crucified far more rapidly than H|e actually was, and would not have had the time to teach us what we needed to hear.
Best wishes, 2RM
Fixed quoting code. BroJames, Purgatory Host
You're not familiar with "myth" as a genre? A story can tell truths without relaying historical events. In the case of the Genesis creation narrative it tells us about God, that he made the world and loves it, that he made humanity to be like him, that we sin and thus fail in that. I'm not convinced that those writing it down would have considered it to be a historical record or necessarily considered the question to be of vital importance.
You could probably make the point better using the word 'fiction'.
I’d say your approach is quite constricted, with a dose of chronological snobbery thrown in.
Chronological snobbery is a bit of a slippery one IMV. Is it really so bad to point out that there are things we know now that weren't known then that would allow people to thing things in the past that they wouldn't reasonably conclude today? Such as, for example, that the world was in fact made in six days a matter of a few thousand years ago.
Whether they did so or not isn't really my point; what is is that three hundred years ago that wasn't an unreasonable belief, but it now is, because science.
Well, yes, I've pointed out to more than one creationist that their biblical literacy isn't actually all that literal at all.
But that's rather beside my point.
I think the chronological snobbery can be seen when modern readers point out, as was done in this thread, that the first chapters of Genesis contain two creation stories. Do we really think that the ancient Hebrews weren’t smart enough to notice that? Or that they weren’t smart enough to pick up that there were days and nights and light and dark before there was a sun and moon and stars?
Sure, but I think the companion to that is the modern assumption that ancient people did history the way we do. The chronological snobbery here may be in applying our criteria for history, or our questions about how the world came to be, to writings thousands of years old, because our criteria and our questions are presumed to be the “correct” ones.
The question of our time and culture is ”what are the origins of the universe?” But that wasn’t necessarily the question that the writers/editors of Genesis were interested in or were trying to explore. They were exploring different questions, and they were using the language and ideas of their time and culture to explore those questions.
For my money, if we look to Genesis to provide an account of the origins of the universe comparable to, say, the Big Bang, then it’s we, not the writers/editors of Genesis, who are wrong, because we’ve come to the text assuming the wrong questions. We’ve assumed our questions were their questions.
Ay, but there's the rub. There's an underlying assumption that the conservative politics and religion then were Wrong, but the liberal politics and religion now are Right.
What if it's the other way round? What if the modern liberal zeitgeist is the one that's wrong? What if the social and moral developments of the last century or so represent a falling away from God? What if what we think is loving is actually hurting people? Are you gambling everything on the assumption that morality only ever develops in a positive way, and never regresses to a baser state?
I struggle with these questions constantly, because I cannot see any way (other than Unambiguous Divine Revelation) to satisfactorily answer them. It's why I'm so keen to allow all sides of the argument to have their say, and why I'm so opposed to any side that says they have the Exclusive One True Belief.
Yeah, he clearly wanted to avoid saying anything that might challenge people or that might get him in trouble.
And he’s very clear that his “very different” concept of God is the concept presented in the Torah and the prophets, and that the hierarchy of the time has failed to grasp the teaching of the Torah or listen to the prophets.
I think you can do better than awaiting an unambiguous divine revelation - assuming that morality isn't entirely arbitrary, sort of God having a list of moral issues and making up a yea or nay for each, as if choosing a colour scheme or playlist, or even furnishing a D&D dungeon using the random contents tables.
You've already alluded to the possibility that an apparent kindness is in fact a harm and God has in fact forbidden that thing. In that case we'd expect to be able to demonstrate that harm, at least over time and at a population level, if not immediately and at the individual level. And as has been pointed out in relation to previous moral panics over sexuality, none of the imagined evils have come to pass, so empirically it does not appear that the Traditional Position if you like on sexuality is in fact protecting people from an unintended or unseen harm. Now I've heard it argued that if God has vetoed gay relationships, then what is wrong with them is that God has vetoed them, and that veto protects people from offending God, but I think we can see that that reasoning is so circular it could be used to form bike wheels on.
We can apply empathy - if I were X - gay, female, trans, black, Jewish, fleeing persecution, starving, homeless - how just and fair would moral position Y concerning me appear?
And we can look for consistency. If Jesus' teaching of the Golden Rule contradicts moral position Z, then that inconsistency points to a fault with either our understanding of Jesus' teaching or position Z.
In the abstract it's possible that we could be backtracking on some things. When it gets to specific moral issues it's somewhat harder to see how on those specific issues moral advances aren't advances. I can't imagine how we could possibly come to regard hanging people for stealing goods worth more than a pound (old money) as acceptable again.
It's almost certain that our scientific consensus will be found to be in error and revised. But that doesn't mean that we're likely to abandon Darwinian evolution for young earth creationism or the modern table of elements for phlogiston, at least not on the merits of argument.
Fundamentally if morality is a matter of objective fact regardless of what we know of it there must be certain ways of thinking about it, such as viewing the issue from the point of view of those directly affected, which reduce error. If it's not a matter of objective fact then whether we could be wrong isn't even a question.
There are, perhaps, certain areas where a change in morality has harmed some people. The relaxation of expectations of chastity, and the rise of casual sex, has probably caused harm to people in the same way that drinking or gambling has. But, we should also remember, that strict enforcement of those same expectations harmed people even more, as people used immoral means to do so (forced adoptions being a very common example, but also incarceration). There is also the question of usury, and the harm done by it. Would we be better off adhering to "neither a borrower or a lender be"? But it's hard to imagine what our society would look like without it (except perhaps if we took the Islamic finance approach, which seems a bit of a legalistic dodge to me).
But what if it is? What if some things result in eternal damnation purely because God doesn't like them, rather than because of any particular harm they might cause in this world? He's God - we can't exactly turn round and tell Him His preferences are wrong.
What if the harm is purely spiritual and primarily occurs in the afterlife? We wouldn't be able to tell it was harmful purely from observations of this life.
No more circular than any other claim that God is the foundation of morality for no other reason than that He is God.
Well, some of us can. Always been a bit of a failing of mine, that.
Or our understanding of what "love one another" actually means.
What if the only objective fact is that God wills it, regardless of our ability to understand the reason why?
What would these afterlife harms you propose be? And how would we derive them from Love God and Love Your Neighbour if we don't know about them? You seem to have a paternalistic notion of God in the sense of him telling us what to do but not giving us any indication of why, but Jesus' summary of the law and promotion of the Golden Rule rather tells against that, I think.
The circularity I was referring to is this:
1. God will punish people who do X.
2. This is because he has forbidden X.
3. He has forbidden X because he'll punish people who do X and he doesn't want to do that.
The empathy I suggest using only requires imagination; it doesn't require much more. Just imagine you're in position X - what would you consider a fair way of treating you and what unfair?
Finally, if "love one another" doesn't mean something pretty similar to what people generally mean when they say it, it's the wrong phrase to use.
If we are to concede that God is utterly arbitrary, gives words contrary meanings, and so forth then we might as well say "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die" as there would be neither rhyme nor reason to any consequences for what we might believe or do. If "love" can mean the opposite of what we understand then so can "eternal fire" and "wailing and gnashing of teeth", actually meaning an afternoon playing with puppies by a fire you don't have to put fuel on.
Arbitrary doesn’t mean it’s not unchanging, it just means it’s not based on anything other than His Will.
First principles like”God commands it”?
Damnation.
I thought the whole point of giving us the Bible was so that we’d know about them?
Isn’t the whole point of being God that you can tell everybody what to do and they have to obey?
Part 3 isn’t part of the reasoning I’m exploring. God doesn’t need to have a “because” - He’s God, He can allow or forbid whatever He wants for whatever reason He wants.
It doesn’t matter what I, you, or anyone else thinks is fair. All that matters is what God has decreed. Ours is not to reason why.
I was thinking more about the modern notion that loving someone means letting them do or be whatever they want to do or be. If doing or being certain things will in fact lead to eternal damnation then the loving thing to do might actually be to prevent people from doing or being those things.