The argument from power.

[Angrboda]

I think before one proceeds too far along this track, a basic question needs to be answered.

When we look at things like wants and desires, the things we value and the things we don't, there exists a material explanation in our origin as biological beings. We evolved to have wants and desires and goals and values. We hunger for food when it is necessary that we eat because if we didn't eat, we would die. Evolution only preserves those solutions which are self-justifying. Those animals that didn't get hungry and eat, they died, leaving the world to those that did. Our wants and desires exist in us and other animals because if they didn't, those animals would be replaced in the gene pool by those that did. So evolution provides a material explanation for both why we have wants, generally, and also why we have the specific wants and values that we do. What explains why God has these specific wants, desires, goals, and values?

. . . .

I will also share with you that my concern is not solely motivated by LadyForCamus' question, the subject of God's values has been on my mind for some time. The typical explanation for why God has the moral values he does is that there exists a right set of moral values, and a wrong set, and it's just a brute fact that God has only the right set of moral values (what these moral values are right with respect to, or in relation to, is never fully explained). But fine. It's an article of faith that God is good, and no deviation from that mantra will be tolerated. Fine, fair enough. But then we come to the question of God's values. Surely he has some, any being without values must be forced to depend upon reflex actions to motivate them to do anything, but then God isn't a biological being, so the concept of reflexes doesn't apply. So there are two questions here. Why does God have values at all, as they seem to be an artifact of a biological nature, and not something an immaterial spirit would have? And secondly, if God's specific values are simply a brute fact of his existence, they "just are," doesn't that make them essentially arbitrary and therefore meaningless? Unlike moral values, there does not appear to be a right and a wrong set of normal values. Their "rightness" is a consequence of the context, namely what processes and behaviors they facilitate, and in our case, a consequence of evolution that we have them. So, again; why?

This has prompted me to reformulate the Euthyphro dilemma into a form which seems to target a lacuna in Christian theology. Namely, what is the foundation of God's values, their explanation, so to speak. This leads to a new and different dilemma:

"Does God value certain thing because those things are valuable of their own accord, or are certain things valuable because God values them?"

Ultimately, I see this as related to the questions of meaning and purpose. Our values are the building blocks out of which we create meaning and purpose in our life. We value having a loving, nurturing relationship with another human being, so we find having and raising children meaningful. If God's values likewise are the foundation of the meaning and purpose he provides for people's lives, it is essential that we provide some foundation for those values, otherwise they are arbitrary, vacuous, and meaningless. How can a set of values that are themselves just brute, arbitrary facts of his existence ever serve as the building blocks for truly meaningful lives? To my view, unless an explanation for God's values is given, it's impossible to derive any meaning based simply on "what he wants and values." Maybe I've overlooked something, but it appears to me that life under God is as essentially meaningless and without purpose as the supposed lives of non-believers.

What is the foundation for God's values?