Taking the Ethics Question Another Direction

Greg Koukl has written recently about Euthyphro's Dilemma (HT: Pressing the Antithesis). The question is whether an act is right because God says it is, or does God say it's right because it is? It relates to a point from Paul in recent comments about whether God's existence precedes his morality.

Koukl quotes from Plato and Bertrand Russell to show that neither horn of the dilemma is compatible with Christian theology. If an act is right merely on God's declaration, then what does "good" mean? If good is what God calls good, that reduces to "what God says is what God says," a useless tautology. If God looks to a source outside himself for ethics, he is not fully God in the theistic sense.

That's the problem. I suggest you read Koukl's solution. It has to do with the eternal nature of God and our moral intuitions.

One key quote:

"the atheist understands what moral terms mean. He doesn't need God in order to recognize morality. He needs God to make sense of what he recognizes."

I'll be interested to hear what you think.

Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 06:53 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Taking the Ethics Question Another Direction

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson