Tex Wrote:The answer is that there is not just two answers, but Christians choose a third. Morality is objective, but not external to God. Like with my organ example, morality is interior. This is actually required for a God, else we have the Euthyphro Dilemma. His commands are not whims, but rooted in his character. If God were to have a different character, would morality change? The scenario of "If God were to have a different character..." actually can't happen and is completely impossible. Since we're assuming God exists for the moment, we must also assume the definition of God as "perfect being". If God is perfect, any slide in any direction is less than perfect. Therefore, if God changes, he's no longer God.
God must be "perfect being" because, as unmoved mover, he cannot get his source of existence, order, goodness, truth, or beauty from outside himself. Not only that, but all of these must be present infinitely because all finite things "rely on the existence of the wholeness" (by this, I mean that if the idea "4" didn't exist, the whole system of mathematics would be chaotic).
It isn't very clear to me how his nature is altogether different from his commands. Is it not true that he commanded something to be moral because of his nature? If so, then the Euthyphro Dilemma rears its ugly head into the picture. Basically, what I think the problem is here is that "what" God actually is doesn't matter. It is the transmission -- the command to humanity -- that is in question. How God came to the conclusion that that particular thing was moral is irrelevant; whether an arbitrary choice or from his nature, doesn't matter. What matters is that when that moral code gets transmitted to us as a command, we have to ask ourselves the Euthyphro Dilemma. Unless you believe in the Deistic god like myself... then morality is a non-issue.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle