Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian, pg. 12)

The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.

This philosophical problem is commonly referred to as The Euthyphro Dilemma, the origin of which is found in The Dialogues of Plato. In this particular work, Socrates and Euthyphro are having a discussion about the nature of holiness (Lt. pietas) and Socrates sets the matter before him thus: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods” (Euthyphro, 10a)—an entanglement which Euthyphro was unable to find his way out of. In a contemporary setting the question is essentially identical, framed in the context of morality and often used as an attempted indictment against the coherence of Christian theism: “Is a thing moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral?”

It is a dilemma in the sense that it forces upon someone a choice between two options, two horns that both produce an incoherence. On one horn of the dilemma—that God commands a thing because it is moral—we are faced with the problem that moral order is grounded outside God, which means that God himself is subject to a higher law and is therefore not an answer to questions about morality.

And on the other horn—that a thing is moral because God commands it—we are faced with the problem that moral order is grounded in God’s arbitrary fiat, commonly referred to as divine command theory, which falls prey to Russell’s penetrating criticism that “for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong.” Morality is reduced to a notion of might makes right, that nothing is good unless and until God commands it. Moreover, the statement “God is good” is rendered not insignificant as Russell put it but, rather, entirely meaningless.

Of the responses possible against the Euthyphro dilemma by the Christian worldview, none are so sharp as the criticism that it presents a false dilemma, which is to say that it commits the bifurcation fallacy of presenting only two alternatives when there are actually more than two. As Gregory Koukl argues, “The Christian rejects the first option, that morality is an arbitrary function of God’s power. And he rejects the second option, that God is responsible to a higher law. There is no Law over God.” This bifurcation is proved by the existence of a third alternative, which this false dilemma fails to either present or account for—namely, that moral order is grounded in the very nature of God, which is expressed prescriptively in his commands.

Under this view, what God commands is not arbitrary but, rather, necessarily consistent with his essential nature taken as a whole. And it means the statement “God is good” is not some kind of moral valuation (God has goodness) but rather an ontological statement (God is goodness); ergo, good becomes that which conforms to the nature and will of God, while evil becomes a privative term or that which does not conform to the nature and will of God.

This supplies the reason behind why “an all-loving God would never command evil.” Under the Euthyphro bifurcation, the Christian theist has no reason to believe that God would never command evil on the one horn, or that God will not change his mind about what is evil on the other. However, under a Christian theory of ethics he does have good reason for his belief; specifically, that God commanding evil would amount to a logical contradiction: God wills what he does not will, an empty nonsense statement.

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