I would like to address the second paragraph of your’s and add that sometimes these interpreters change things for their own benefits and misrepresents the whole idea of religion, I am sure that this is already of your knowledge as this (unfortunately) happens everywhere, and they use faith to manipulate people, I am talking less millionaire pastors and more masonic cults
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I think this just falls into the standard criticism of religion which is tried and true. But I don’t know of any Masonic cults. What are those?
God’s will defines what is good for God. There is no goodness separate from what is willed, whether that will is God’s, or yours, or mine.
Therefore suffering is typically evil from our perspective, but not from God’s. From his point of view, evil is conceptually impossible, because God is omnipotent, therefore nothing can exist against his will. And if good just is what is willed, then everything is good from God’s perspective.
Does God’s goodness survive this analysis? Not from our point of view it doesn’t, from our POV God must be a total dick for allowing us to suffer, but it does from his perspective.
yeah… i know this is pretty shallow and the go-to-attack.
and sorry, i had made a mistake as i meant ‘extremist religious groups’ rather than masonic cults which are a bit differnet
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But i feel like that ‘God has greater reasons’ (which is what i interpreted from your text) has several probs:
- If God (in this case i dont know if you would agree but i am assuming) was the three omni-s, then he wouldnt have made it easier for us to live in his perfectly good world, i.e made it good in our own perspective.
- ‘Appeal to Ignorance’: “We can’t see a good reason for suffering, Therefore, God might have one we can’t understand.”
- This pov will deteriorate our day-to-day ability to distinguish Good from Evil, if all is good to god, who is greatest, then why…
That’s not really what I meant, sorry, I may not have been clear. I’m saying goodness is reducible to will. So murder is good from the murderer’s point of view. It really is good. There’s no further meaning to the word ‘good’ other than what is willed. So God doesn’t have any ‘greater reasons’, because reasons are irrelevant. All we need to look at to know what is good from God’s point of view, is what he is willing to allow.
To answer your numbered points:
- I’m not sure God could make the world good from our perspective despite his omnipotence. It’s a trade off, making it good for us bacon-lovers would make it really bad for pigs. Making it good for non-murderers would make it bad for murderers. Heck, making it good for one murderer will make it bad for another. While there is a plurality of wills, someone’s not going to be happy.
- I don’t think reason is relevant - goodness is about will, what we value, not about reason, which is always instrumental. We only start to think when we stop getting what we want.
- We are free to disagree with God. If he wills everything, we can still work to change the world according to our own will, regardless of God.
I am sorry, but very interesting points;
If there is no further meaning of the word ‘good’ than that which is willed(by god?) then it implies a lack of a framework of morality (objective morality), then it will be as such “Whatever is willed(loved) by god is good” - even if WE dont think it to be as such as reasons are irrelevant.
all your points seem valid but;
- But his inability to dissolve our plurality of will suggests his impotence doesnt it, maybe could have made us all carrot eaters (sounds irrational to us but he is god, of whom we dont even ask for reason).
- Reason sometimes seem relevant especially when there is a supreme commander, who we say is ‘goodness embodied’ and always perfectly right, but his actions seem unlike to us (i have inputed reason in this argument).
- But whose will prevails.
please forgive me if i have misrepresented your argument 
Here’s a different way of looking at the problem.
The Euthyphro dilemma assumes that the relationship between God and goodness must be one of grounding. Either God’s will grounds goodness, in which case goodness is arbitrary because God could have willed otherwise. Or goodness is independent of God and grounds God’s commands, in which case God is subordinate to a standard outside himself. Both horns presuppose that there must be a ground, that the question “what makes good things good?” has an answer that points to something beneath goodness on which goodness rests.
There’s an insight from Witt that could apply, i.e., at some point grounds give out and what remains is acting. Apply that here. The moral certainty that torturing children is wrong, that cruelty is bad, that kindness matters, these aren’t conclusions derived from either divine command or an independent moral reality we’ve discovered through investigation. They function as moral hinges, shown in how we act, how we respond to suffering, how we raise children, how we judge conduct. They’re the conditions under which moral reasoning operates rather than products of moral reasoning.
On this picture, asking “is it good because God wills it or does God will it because it’s good?” is like asking “is the earth’s persistence true because we believe it or do we believe it because it’s true?” The question assumes a grounding relationship where there isn’t one. The moral certainty is the ungrounded way of acting within which questions about grounds have their life. It’s the moral framework, and the framework isn’t grounded in something beneath it. It’s the ground.
This doesn’t eliminate God from the picture. It relocates the question. Instead of asking whether God grounds goodness or goodness grounds God, you’d ask how the moral framework relates to the divine. And that’s a different question, one that doesn’t generate a dilemma because it doesn’t assume that the relationship must be one of propositional grounding.
Good for god, yes, but not necessarily for us. Saying something is good without specifying a point of view, a will, is literally meaningless, it seems to me. I think you understand that is my claim, I’m just adding in the explicit mention of the point of view.
- God doesn’t want to dissolve our plurality of will. We know that because God is omnipotent (assumption) and we still exist.
- That’s interesting. Need to think about that more. What I’m saying doesn’t imply that God is commanding anything. Why would he - he doesn’t need to, he can just make it so, like Picard. Nevertheless traditionally there are commands, ten of them or love. So you are right here, there may be a reason God commands love, but doesn’t force it. It’s not clear what forcing people to love would look like, sexual exploitation aside. We can reject tradition of course, this is philosophy not dogma.
Or we might say the nature of Being itself, since it is in God “that we live and move and have our being,” (Saint Paul, Acts 17:28). So then, in terms of the good of a cat, tree, or man, we would say that these relate to what things are. Whereas a thoroughgoing voluntarist divine command theory is in a sense anti-realist because it says that nothing in the being of things is revelatory of value.
As to the rest of the thread, two things worth pointing out:
A. To the point above, the problem is later moved “into God” by this pivot. If what things are determines their ends, but thing’s preexist as paradigmatic causes in the “divine mind,” then we have to ask whether God’s intellect or will is prior. If the former, the risk is that all of creation becomes strictly necessary, since paradigmatic causes are “part” of the divine essence, and God comes to seem unfree and mechanistic. If the latter, all value comes to seem arbitrary. This shows up clearly in Avicenna and his critics for instance.
However, it’s worth noting that this problem seems more acute today because “necessity” tends to be deflated into mere frequency in contemporary analytic thought due to the metaphysical assumptions underpinning the framework of extensional possible worlds modality. Something is necessary just in case it is in every world (validity comes to be defined much the same way). This is a hallmark of nominalism, that one is led to frequency as definition. Whereas previously there were delineations between many different kinds of necessity.
Still, the problem is acute, and was one of the main inspirations for the voluntarist and nominalist revolutions of early-modernity. Personally, I think the East retained some better resources for dealing with this because it continued to distinguish between God’s essence and energies, although I think this difference is overplayed when one compares it to pre-modern Western theology and plenty of contemporary Western theology.
B. Today the Euthyphro Dilemma is often presented as some sort of refutation of theism. Historically it wasn’t. It just presented two horns. Plato was happy to grab one, others grabbed the other horn. It’s a bit of a historical curiosity that just as Western society became thoroughly voluntarist in terms of man’s will (“we are free because we create all value and meaning according to our choice”), divine voluntarism became problematic. On reflection though, this makes perfect sense.
Historically, divine voluntarism comes first. Then comes humanism, which still follows the dictum that man is in the image of God, and so man’s freedom becomes defined in terms of voluntarism. But it follows that if one grants a voluntaristic notion of freedom the voluntarist God must simply be a tyrant if He imposes any values at all, for man is only free when he “creates his own.” (Whether this doesn’t just render choice arbitrary, and so unfree, is another issue).
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It’s weird to present that as a problem for the ‘God has greater reasons’ explanation because appeal to ignorance is usually thought to be a fallacy, i.e. bad reasoning. Because you can’t imagine God having a different conception of good from yours doesn’t mean God can’t be benevolent and allow the suffering you find to be wrong.
Anyway, I like this relevant comment on reddit (not mine, I personally don’t know anything about the dilemma). I’ll paste it below:
[…] Well, it’s not clear that the Euthyphro Dilemma needs any answer other than “I pick the first horn” or “I pick the second horn.” Somewhere along the line people, mostly but not only in apologetics circles (I include atheists under this rubric, for the popular avowal and defense of their views about religion certainly counts as apologetics), started thinking that the Euthyphro Dilemma is an argument for atheism rather than a choice between two horns, and expecting some kind of response to it other than “I pick the first horn” or “I pick the second horn.” I don’t know why people started thinking this, but it’s wrong, and these people should go read Plato’s Euthyphro and the historically important reassertions of the problem like the debate between Pufendorf and Leibniz, so that they can have a better understanding of what they’re talking about. (That this reading of the Euthyphro Dilemma is bizarre is perhaps most clearly indicated by the fact that Plato, who wrote the Euthyphro, is a theist who clearly prefers one horn of the dilemma.)
For those unaware the Euthyphro dilemma is often brought up because Apologists then to demand an explanation from atheists/agnostics how there could be objective moral values without a god.
This doesn’t really have much to do with the Euthyphro Dilemma. Most philosophers, theists included, think objective morality is possible without God, and this doesn’t undermine the point made by the Euthyphro Dilemma. And those who think objective morality is grounded in God don’t face any evident threat from the Euthyphro Dilemma, to which they can easily respond by just indicating which horn they pick.
The dilemma dates back to the time of Socrates and leaves us with two prongs or questions:
-if God commands something because it is good or moral, then that goodness or morality exists independent of god
-if things are good because God commands them, that leads us down towards divine command theory which carries some grave ethical repercussions since it is basically a form of “might makes right”
The Euthyphro Dilemma does not quite say this. The actual Euthyphro Dilemma is posed as the question, “Is the pious beloved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” We can apply this style of analysis to a wide variety of other cases where a value is related to valuation, since all that’s going on here is a request for clarification about the exact nature of the relation proposed between a value (here, piety) and a valuation (here, being loved by the gods).
There’s nothing in the dilemma about grave ethical repercussions. In the long history of reflection on the relation of God to morality that comes after the Euthyphro, many proponents of the one horn have thought that the other horn will have such grave ethical repercussions. But this is nowhere mentioned in the Euthyphro, which has quite different concerns – principally, the determination of the meaning of a value in the practice of dialectic. And neither is it a given: notably, proponents of this horn don’t think these ethical consequences are grave at all, but rather avowedly endorse them. An interaction with them on this point would go like this: “Wait, you’re saying that the good is whatever God commands?” “Yes, that is what I saying.” “But wait, that means whatever God commands would then be good.” “Yes, that is what I am saying.” “So God could command anything and that would make it good!” “Yes, that is what I am saying.” “Anything!” “Yes, that is what I am saying.” “He could command us to kill our first born child and that would imply a moral duty to do it!” “Yes, that is what I am saying.”
There’s no reductio ad absurdum of their position available down this line of analysis, since the consequence we would wish to indict them with is not only one they’re willing to accept, moreover it’s the very thing they wish to say in the first place. All this line of analysis permits is a clarification of their position. While there is a reductio ad absurdum in Plato’s Euthyphro, it is produced by the very different route of leading Euthyphro to profess first the first horn of the dilemma and then the second, and then indicting him with self-contradiction. The implication is not that the one and the other horn are untenable, but rather that the self-contradiction of a man who doesn’t know how to coherently explain the meaning of his own claims is untenable. (Again, the central concern of the Euthyphro is with the practice of dialectic.)
Neither is there any implication in the Euthyphro Dilemma of morality existing independent of God. If the gods love the pious because it is pious, that doesn’t mean that piety is independent of the gods, it just means that piety is not consequent upon a free choice of the gods as to what to love. There’s all sorts of others ways that piety can be dependent on the gods other than by way of being consequent upon a free choices of the gods as to what to love. Again, the peculiarity of this reading is underscored by remembering that Plato is writing this: Plato doesn’t think that piety is independent of the gods! (And this not by virtue of thinking that it is, rather, consequent upon a free choice of theirs as to what to love.)
Neither does a translation of the dilemma into the context of divine command theory carry such an implication. Notably, the main alternative to the divine command theoretic position, found paradigmatically in Leibniz’s response to Pufendorf, is that the good is not consequent upon a free choice of God as to what to command because it is instead a truth found eternally in his understanding, like those truths of mathematics. Here, the good is by no means consequent upon a free choice of God as to what to command, but neither is it independent of God – the idea that these are what the horns are, aside from not being accurate to what we find in the text of the Euthyphro, is simply untenable on logical grounds.
So there’s a kind of disconnect here between what we actually find in the Euthyphro (and in sources like Pufendorf v Leibniz, etc.) and what apologists say about these things. This is not unusual: apologetics often involves strange ideas that don’t represent the sources or scholarship.