Euthyphro-in-Revolt: God, Morality, and Some Crusty-Ass Philosophy

Dig if you will this picture: You are The Supreme Creator of the Universe. You are mulling over the possibility of creating other, albeit lesser, sentient beings. But you have some things to figure out: What do you want these beings to look like? How do they function? What do they eat, if they even need to eat? How available do you make yourself to help them with their inevitable problems? What rules do you put in place for how they live? What, if anything, do you do if they break those rules? Would the invention of an art form so creepy and lame as ventriloquism invalidate the entire existence of these creatures?

I don’t actually care about your answers to those questions. The point is, as Creator you would be relying on some sort of principles to make those decisions. Take this as an example: God could have woven into the fabric of the Universe that anytime a Priest tried to sexually assault a kid, his dick would fall off and he would bleed out of the fresh gaping hole where his penis used to be. But for whatever reason, God decided not to do that. Why did God decide allowing priests to sexually assault children was the correct choice, morally?

These first two paragraphs are a cockamamie way of setting up “Euthyphro’s Dilemma,” a concept gleaned from one of the Socratic Dialogues written by Plato a couple of millennia ago. Here is a summary of that dialogue as told by two Twitter users:

Euthyphro: “Yo, my guy Socrates. Piety is dope as shit, isn’t it?”

Socrates: “I dunno man. What even is piety anyway?”

Euthyphro: “That which is loved by the Gods, my dude.”

Socrates: “Bruh, ain’t there like 30 different gods, all bickering about shit? Like I’m pretty sure Zeus is pro-rape.”

Euthyphro: “Bruh, why you gotta be like that? Obviously only the stuff that all the Gods love is pious.”

Socrates: “OK cool. So is piety loved by the gods because it is dope or is piety dope because it is loved by the gods?”

Euthyphro: “What you mean?”

Socrates: “Do the gods loving anything make it pious? Like if they all loved snorting cat piss, would snorting cat piss become dope?”

Euthyphro: “That is nasty as shit.”

Socrates: “Yeah, but would gods loving snorting cat piss make snorting cat piss dope?”

Euthyphro: “Naw man. I think snorting cat piss would still be gross as Hell.”

Socrates: “I got you. Then the Gods love piety because piety is dope.”

Euthyphro: “I guess?”

Socrates: “So the love of the god’s got nothing to do with why piety is good. Piety is good for some other reason then, yeah?”

Euthyphro: “Bruh, you suck. It ain’t that deep. Imma get me a smoothie.”

While Plato was talking about piety, you have the same problem when you talk about God’s relationship to Morality. You are stuck with those two options: 1.) God is the source of all morality, meaning literally whatever God says is moral, is moral or 2.) God is articulating, describing, elucidating morality from some other source that is independent from God. Almost no one that believes in God goes for option one for the obvious reason that the only moral standard is God’s whim. If this were in fact true, God could proclaim anything moral, like beheading toddlers. Lo and behold, beheading toddlers would be moral, just because it is like, God’s opinion, man.

If any part of your brain heard that last sentence and responded with some version of “yeah, well, God would never ask people to do something so obviously horrible,” congratulations! You are in in the second camp, because the moment you are convinced that there are some things God would never ask you do because God’s a stand-up guy, you are suggesting God is beholden to some kind of standard. And truth be told, almost everyone is in this camp, at least in the U.S. Most religious folks believe God is good in some form or another: Good-natured, Goodness personified, or generally wanting things that are Good or Good for us, the humans. (God is all over the place with other species, so let’s ignore non-humans to avoid messy topics like consciousness.) All of these are different ways of saying God is measuring and determining moral good through some mechanism. Some metric. Some principle.

Let’s take the old standard, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Maybe this rule exists because depriving another person of their right to exist is immoral. (It is the restriction of rights that is immoral.) Maybe society cannot function if murder is tolerated. (A sort of utilitarian approach to morality.) Maybe murder fucks with the Universe’s equilibrium or something. (Karma, maybe?) Or killing other humans is bad not only for the victim, but it makes the perpetrator deeply unhappy too. (Human well-being is the metric.) Whatever it is, God has his reasons that the Commandment isn’t “Thou Shalt Kill as Frequently as Possible.” (Although if God is the source of morality, he certainly could make that a new commandment and it would be moral.)

I bring all this up because there is a current vein of Christian apologetics which makes an assertion roughly like this:

”Oh, so you think that there is no God huh? Well guess what asshole, that means there is no morality either. Without God, there is no objective morality. Morality simply doesn’t exist in your nihilistic piece-of-shit worldview. If someone blows your head off, it’s all the same to the universe. If this sounds awful to you, don’t worry, we Christians have you covered. You are a good person. You know what is right and wrong. Why not accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? Church is every Sunday at 10:00!”

This is a nice sales tactics, but the trouble is that no Deistic religion can actually deliver the goods. Let’s assume that without God, there is no objective Morality. Fine. There is no objective Morality with God either. All that Euthyphro’s dilemma business, you see. If God is deciding whatever he wants is moral, the standard isn’t objective. It’s divine subjectivity. And if God is some sort of Morality-seeking missile that is able to use his super-duper knowledge to make perfect moral judgments, God is just the messenger for eternal moral concepts that are good regardless of how God feels about them.

There are at least some modern Christian apologists that sense this problem and instead define objective Morality as transcending human perception or something comparable. I respect the dodge, but this re-framing of objective morality is just marketing puffery. It is the intellectual equivalent of saying “don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” But ignoring this problem doesn’t resolve it. God either makes the rules up or simply transcribes them. Take your pick.

Morality is complicated and weird. And what’s more, it is impossible to understand outside of goals and consequences in respect of those goals. This is true God or no God. While punting moral assessments to God sounds nice, every god ever has been at best a sporadic and cryptic communicator. (And whatever Gods there may be are free to reveal themselves to clarify whatever they want whenever they want.) Humans are on our own with moral assessments. If you are a person, Deist or not, and generally want what is best for humans, that is more than enough. Whether we are God’s most special creation or deterministic nodes drifting in a soup of sense data, that should be more than enough of a starting point.

-B.S. Lewis

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