Euthyphro dilemma

[Angrboda]

You let loose with a barrage of bare assertions that don't even begin to approach the question.  I gave reasons for why considering God as the sole standard for good results in arbitrary morals.  You give me dogma.

You did indeed give reasons. I don’t fault your reasoning. Maybe the problem is not your reasoning; but rather, the first principles from which you are reasoning. I don’t know where you are at philosophically at the moment, but my assessment of your past positions was that they were along the lines of not trusting reason and that there can be no certainties about the world as-it-is. If that is accurate and still the case then your reasoning from first principles that ultimately devolve into intellectual and moral nihilism. No wonder, you cannot resolve the dilemma!

Your back-handed ad hominem is noted. You believe that because you are unable intellectually to connect meaning and purpose to a godless world, nobody else is either, and therefore a godless world is meaningless and any worldview based upon it is necessarily nihilistic. I hate to burst your bubble, but your inability to conjure up a naturalistic answer to the question of meaning doesn't settle the matter. All you're doing is pointing out the limits of your intellect. That's an argument from ignorance, plain and simple. That you failed to reconcile your convictions that the world was godless and that there is meaning says nothing about the world and everything about you. And here we have you resorting to intellectual smears because you're face to face with another question which you can't answer. It seems a familiar theme.

And yes, I have my own set of dogmas (I call them self-evident first principles like the intelligibility of the world and the efficacy of reason). I accept them because they avoid intellectual and moral nihilism, and provide a rational framework for the acquisition of knowledge. You can choose otherwise, many do, but don’t be surprised when it leads you to paradox and absurdity.

Sigh. Oh no! The bogeyman! No, you haven't avoided nihilism with your "first principles", you've simply bogged yourself down in a dilemma you can't resolve rationally so you resort to faith based statements, arguments from ignorance, and ad hominems.

The fact of the matter is that saying God is good is meaningless if God is both the standard and source for good.   All you're saying is that "God is God."  How would things be different if God's nature were any different?  You'd still be saying that he's good, and necessarily so.  Your words don't pick out a particular reality, but rather whatever the case happens to be, that's what your words describe.

You’re assuming that God’s nature couldbe different. There is not a possible world in which the God of Classical Theism could be other that what He is any more than the value of pi could vary in different possible worlds. Saying that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter does indeed pick out a particular reality…not just what happens to be, but also something that could not be otherwise. What goes for pi can be applied to God. It can only be what it is and nothing else. That’s not dogma so much as the logical conclusion of multiple demonstrations (5 to be exact) based on common observations about the world.

You're ignoring the fact that God's character, whatever it is, is completely arbitrary. You haven't evaded the consequences of the dilemma. The dilemma points out that God cannot be a foundation for morals if his nature is unconstrained by any fact or law. You might as well say that God's character is blue, as you've deprived the word 'good' of any actual meaning. God is whatever God is. That's great! How exactly does that make his arbitrary morals significant? It doesn't. You like Steve are failing to engage the dilemma. It does no good to say God is really, really, really, really good, if his character isn't bound by anything. And the worst part of it is, you have no reasons for your surety that God couldn't be different. That's just the way you made him up, so by golly that's the way he is. It's tautological reasoning based only on the product of your imagination. I have an imagination, too, I just don't rely upon it for supplying me with the facts of the world.