Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Michael]

I see no reason why stable morality can't be the product of a law giver. Indeed I would expect a stable law giver to give a stable law; that makes more sense to me than capriciousness.

If the law is stable and the law giver can't change it, then the law is true independent of the law giver's proclamation on it: it isn't true because the law giver specifically selected it (if this was the case then the law is mutable depending on what the giver selects) but is true and then the law giver tells us this.

Stop examining the law giver and start examining the process by which it assembled the moral laws: if they are simply whatever it selects, then even if they never change, they are merely the opinions of the law giver and moral actions can become immoral actions just as easily as they first became moral ones. If the law giver knew what was moral out of a set of pre-existing moral laws and then handed them down, then it is irrelevant to the process of morality. There is not a third option.

I'm sorry Esquilax, but I still see no reason for thinking that a stable law giver can't give us a stable law. Your opposition would seem to rest on proposing a God who capriciously changes moral law.

As I'm sure you know, the Euthyphro dilemma starts from a premise from Greek philosophy that virtue and the gods were separate 'things', so either the gods recognised an established virtue, or the gods defined a virtue. The Christian view does not start from that presupposition of separation; we see virtue and God's character as being united, hence John the evangelist can write "God is love". So a God stable in character would produce a stable morality; the only way morality would be unstable is if God's character was unstable and that would take us outside of Judeo-Christian thought ('For I am the Lord, I change not', Malachi 3:6).