The Moral Argument for God

[Simon Moon]

Good old Euthyphro's dilemma.

"Is that which is good commanded by God because it's good, or is it good because God commands it?"

If the first horn of the dilemma is true, then the god is not the author of morality, but just the communicator of morality. And therefore, we could discover it on our own.

If the second horn is true, then morality is not objective, but subjective to the god's will. There is nothing stopping such a god from changing his mind tomorrow on what is moral and immoral. 

Some theists will state at this point, "but that would be against the god's nature".  Which does not help their argument, it only moves the problem back a step.

Well, to continue that train of thought, the theist would argue against the conclusion of the second horn by saying that God wills that which is good because he IS, as you say, by nature "good". How does this move the problem back a step?

It moves the problem back a step, because it now begs the question, where did the god get his nature from?

If he is the author of his own nature, then his "good" nature was a subjective choice he made. Could he have provided himself with another nature besides "good"? 

If he is not the author of his own nature, then where did he get his nature from? If he did not provide his own nature, then he is just communicating this "good" nature from the source where he got it from.

If God exists, then He cannot contradict his own good nature today by willing something not good nor can he do so by changing his mind tomorrow. As I wrote in a prior post, the theist claims that God IS the standard for measuring right and wrong just as the original artist is the standard against which all the cover recordings are compared.

Then this god you are describing is not omnipotent.

As for the conclusion of the first horn, if we could simply "discover" objective morality on our own, one has to wonder why this has not happened universally. Far too many people still seem to believe that raping children is acceptable for this discovery to be considered a universal truth. The fact that it still occurs seems to suggest that the process of discovering moral truths is hit and miss, at best. And some societies or cultures seem to have discovered that killing Jews or mutilating women is perfectly fine. Can we agree that the holocaust would still be considered objectively wrong even if the Nazis had won the war?

I believe we have already discovered a form of objective morality. The objective nature is measured against physical reality. 

Google "The superiority of secular morality" for an excellent lecture.

Those things you mentioned, are immoral, not because any god says they are. They are immoral because they harm the well being of other sentient beings. Just because the societies that perform them believe they are moral, does not make them so. 

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