Euthyphro dilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

Is god great because he is great, or
is he great because he is god?

[SteveII]

Is god great because he is great, or
is he great because he is god?

Since part of the definition of God is "greatest conceivable being" the question really does not make sense.

[The Grand Nudger]

Pages of obfuscation over the inane belief that the greatness of an imaginary being is relevant to a morality, objective or otherwise..and we -still- can't decide how we want to answer the dilemma today?

Seems like alot of wasted breath to me.

[Angrboda]

This is another lie.  The question which you yourself raised was whether moral perfection was objectively better than moral imperfection.  As such, my complaint that it makes no difference to the universe is exactly on point.  It is you, not I, who is evading addressing the issue.

Okay, from a moral nihilistic worldview, you are right. Congrats, morality is subjective and has no ultimate meaning.  However if God exists, at least some sort of morality outside ourselves and outside the universe exists. Invoking a Godless universe when arguing about whether God's moral perfection is better than moral imperfection makes no sense whatsoever.  

The question is whether there is any objective basis for grounding qualitative assessments in order to be able to conceive of a being that is in some objective sense "the greatest." You've given me no objective reason why moral perfection is qualitatively better than moral imperfection, simply the ipse dixit arguments of "it's obvious" and "it's the only reasonable position to hold." The claim is that God is the greatest conceivable being. The greatest anything is not merely what one person or another desires or wants to be, it must be grounded in something that isn't wholly subjective. The only alternative is objective values. However, you claim these don't exist (without God).

Bollocks, this does not  in any sense demonstrate that your claim is objectively true.  In fact you make a strong prima facie case that it is nothing but a subjective position.  And although I don't cotton to your stupid Toulminesque epistemological pretensions, I did in fact provide the defeater in pointing out that it makes no difference to the universe whether you are morally perfect or not.  Therefore it is not an objective fact that moral perfection is 'better' than moral imperfection.

Tell me why you are not just begging the question: There is no objective morality in the universe therefore God is not a source of objective morality. 

Because that's neither the question at issue, nor my position on the matter. You keep confusing the two matters.

Whether or not God is coherent as a morally perfect being, or even whether he avoids the dilemma, were not the issue at point.  That you're now trying to turn the discussion back to other matters is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to avoid capitulation on the issue.  The concept of a 'greatest conceivable being' is incoherent, as I have shown, and your claim that moral perfection is objectively better than moral imperfection has been shown to be without any merit whatsoever.  Your attempt to defuse the disproof of your claim with lies and misdirection is noted.

No, you have not shown the concept of the GCB to be incoherent. You asserted that GCB Theology is all about having "good" qualities. You are conflating the moral word "good" with the non-moral meaning "better than" and then hiding behind the question how do we know what "goodness" is. It is better to be morally perfect than morally imperfect. That is not a difficult concept. We actually don't even need to know what morally perfect fully entails to know that one is better than the other.

No, Steve, the word good can be used in a moral sense or a qualitative sense. That you chose the one interpretation over the other is a folly of your own. Since these issues have been addressed in the other thread, and that thread is more tightly focused on the question at issue, I suggest we take it up there.

[Amarok]

Okay, from a moral nihilistic worldview, you are right.

Sigh that is not nihilism 

 Congrats, morality is subjective and has no ultimate meaning.

Baseless assertion 

However if God exists, at least some sort of morality outside ourselves and outside the universe exists. 

False god cannot provide objective morality or values that matter in any form . It's just wishful thinking .


You have nothing steve nothing

[ignoramus]

Okay, from a moral nihilistic worldview, you are right. Congrats, morality is subjective and has no ultimate meaning.

Correct. All meaning is subjective. We don't have a hive mind.
We think for ourselves as Tiz said.

[Ignorant]

A universe with a gawd is a meaningless as 

CVCUTDRTDJTCGJV<CFGFGJCFGJFTCFGJFC M VGJC<IDFIVCJG

That was supposed to be a secret!

[Angrboda]

Does morality require a foundation outside itself?

Why are love and justice and generosity and kindness and faithfulness good? What is there in the depths of reality to make them good? My own preferred answer is: Nothing further. If you like, you may say that they are the ultimate standard of goodness. What makes them the standard? Nothing further. Possessing these characteristics just is good-making. Full stop. Is there some problem with this? Some reason to press on, looking for a ‘deeper’ answer that only theism can provide?

It’s not obvious that there is. No matter what story you tell about the ontological ground of moral value, you must at some point come to your own full stop. If you say that love is necessarily good because God necessarily exists and loves and because God’s moral nature is the ultimate standard of goodness, then we can ask what makes God’s moral nature the ultimate standard. It would be unwise to respond, ‘because it includes love and justice and the rest’, since that would confine us to a small and entirely unenlightening circle of ‘explanations’. 22 At some point, you are simply going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘That’s just how it is’. 23

So which is the correct stopping point? The non-theological one, according to which goodness supervenes directly on love and justice and the rest, rendering the detour through theology entirely unnecessary, has at least the virtue of simplicity. However, Craig gives what he takes to be a decisive reason for rejecting such a view in the following passage.

Atheistic moral realists affirm that moral values and duties do exist in reality …, but they insist that they are not grounded in God. Indeed, moral values have no further foundation. They just exist.

I must confess that this alternative strikes me as incomprehensible, an example of trying to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value Justice simply exists? I don’t know what that means. I understand what it is for a person to be just; but I draw a complete blank when it is said that, in the absence of any people, Justice itself exists. Moral values seem to exist as properties of persons, not as abstractions – or at any rate, I don’t know what it is for a moral value to exist as an abstraction. Atheistic moral realists seem to lack any adequate foundation in reality for moral values, but just leave them floating in an unintelligible way. (Craig & Sinnott-Armstrong (2004), 19)

Let’s get one small point out of the way quickly. There is nothing ‘atheistic’ about the view to which I am attracted – it is available to atheists, but it is equally available to theists. A theist can say that God is good because, among other things, he possesses the good-making property of being loving. Indeed, I believe this is what theists should say. It is by far the simplest and most straightforward way to give content and significance to the claim – central to traditional theism – that God is good.

So what is Craig’s argument against ‘atheistic moral realism’? In the passage just quoted, he makes it clear that there is no room in his ontology for abstract moral properties. Values like love or justice can exist only as properties of individual persons. Otherwise, Craig says, they would be groundless, ‘floating in an unintelligible way’. It seems clear to me that this objection misses its intended target. The pertinent issue here isn’t whether uninstantiated moral properties can exist. It is whether – in a Godless universe – goodness is present in whatever instances of love and justice might exist in that universe. So far, then, Craig has done nothing to show either (a) that love and justice could not be instantiated in a Godless universe or (b) that goodness would not be present if they were.

That’s not quite the end of the matter, however. While pressing his ‘speciesist’ charge (critically discussed above), Craig asks, ‘How do these strange non-natural moral properties come to supervene on the members and actions of our species?’ (Craig & Antony (2008) ). Craig here appears to be gesturing in the direction of a ‘queerness argument’ specifically directed against the view that moral properties supervene upon, without being reducible to, non-moral ones. Unfortunately, Craig does not elaborate the point; so my response will be brief.

However the natural/non-natural distinction gets made, it’s clear that on Craig’s own view the goodness of creatures is non-natural. It consists in resemblance (in relevant respects) to God, who is himself a paradigmatically non-natural being. Which respects are relevant is fixed by God’s moral attributes, which themselves must be non-natural. So the problem Craig means to be raising here can hardly be that he objects to the non-natural. Instead it has to do with the way in which goodness ‘supervenes’ on non-moral properties. The moral realist has failed to tell us how goodness supervenes on love and justice and the rest.

It may be said that God’s moral attributes just are the ultimate standard of goodness. But how is this is any more satisfying than saying that love (for example) just is good-making? As far as I can see, building God and God’s attributes into the account of moral values merely complicates things and replaces one set of puzzles with another. 24

Even if I am right in thinking that we don’t need to ground moral values in God, it may still be thought that we need God to account for moral duty. Moral duties (it may be said) must be constituted by commands in order to have imperative force, and a perfectly good God is the only adequate source of such commands. However, it seems to me that a non-theist who embraces moral realism is not without resources at this point. There are many options, of which I’ll mention just two.

The first is simply to deny that duties must be constituted by commands in order to have imperative force. There are, after all, lots of normative laws that do not require a lawmaker. If, for example, you know that two propositions are inconsistent with one another, and you also know that one of them is true, then you should not accept the other. 25 Nobody thinks we need a ‘divine command’ to back up this rule. I see no reason why it should be different for moral rules. If this is right, then the way is open for the non-theist to say that basic moral duties are fundamental moral facts and (like moral values) require no further foundation or ground.

But suppose something further is desired. Here is another option. It is a variant of the ideal spectator theory. Even an atheist might consistently identify duties with commands that would be given by a perfect being. That might not settle every question we’d like have settled; but it would certainly make it a duty not to kill or steal or practise cruelty. Interestingly, such an account fits nicely with Craig’s claim that God’s commands ‘flow necessarily from’ his perfect moral nature. Even by his lights, there must be a fact of the matter about what a being possessing a perfect moral nature would command if there were such a being. Once again, it turns out that the actual existence of God makes no difference to the ontological foundation of morality.

"God and the ontological foundation of morality."    Wes Morriston.

[bennyboy]

Is god great because he is great, or
is he great because he is god?

Since part of the definition of God is "greatest conceivable being" the question really does not make sense.

That's dumb.  If you think God is not beyond our ability to conceive, then you have a pretty low opinion of God.