Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Apology of Martiro: Part 7 of 10

Sixth, your acceptance of the Euthyphro dilemma really shows how insincere or superficial your study of apologetics really was. Countless Christian philosophers have pointed out that this is a false dilemma. It is not the case that the good is good independently of God, as a standard to which he is subject. It is also not the case that whatever God wills is good simply by divine fiat, which would make the good arbitrary. Rather, God is the good—God is goodness. Goodness is neither arbitrary nor a standard independent of God's nature. God is the standard.
                                               
Personal attacks have once again reared their ugly heads. My insincerity notwithstanding, perhaps we can debate the problem of Euthyphro's dilemma on its own merits rather than mine. I simply disagree with your contention that this is a false dilemma. Asserting that "God is goodness" seems like a esoteric way of averting the question at hand, yet it also suffers the same  problems of any other faith-based claim. Namely, you have made an assertion without evidence. "Good" is not personified in anything but is instead a concept we use to determine how we are to behave towards one another. It is completely dependent on the human experience. If all humans ceased to exist, so too would the concepts of good and evil since there would be no one to experience these things.

Attempting to make the argument that God is the good and this goodness is thereby a part of his nature also suffers from the same problem of the Cosmological argument. The most obvious question to ask is "Did God choose His nature?". If so, we are once again confronted  with the first horn in Euthyphro's Dilemma. If not, the second. All we have managed to do is once again push the question back a single step without getting any closer to an answer.

However, I have a more primal objection to your claim that "God is goodness" that relates to the Moral Argument for God's existence. If God is truly the standard of good, why does he advocate so many things in the Bible that are simply not good? One has only to turn to the Old Testament to find countless stories of God advocating murder, infanticide, rape, and slavery. In the New Testament we do not see this side of God as much, but we still have stories of Paul advocating slavery when he commands slaves to "obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" Eph 6:5. Would this not have been a perfect opportunity to condemn slavery as being wrong in all times, in all places, for all people? Some Christians will attempt to make exceptions for these verses by claiming that read in the proper context, God is not advocating slavery but rather making some other point. This is patently absurd. There is no context. There is no context in which the owning of another human being is ever considered permissible. And when someone starts attempting to justify atrocities out of an unwavering belief that God's commands are somehow justified by His inherent nature, they are on a slippery slope of moral ambiguity.

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