Plato, through a
conversation that Socrates has with Euthyphro demonstrates that morality based
on God and his commandments can run into problems beyond unraveling whether God
exists or not. In Euthyphro, Socrates does not take on the task of arguing against
the existence of God at all; he poses questions regarding piety and its
relation with the nature of God. In
order to respond to Socrates’ challenge, we must first take a look at the
challenge that is posed, and then take a deeper look at the nature of God and
what it entails.
The
conversation takes place when Euthyphro decides to report his father to the
authorities for killing his slave, and Socrates asks him questions about being
pious – being moral. Euthyphro gives him
an answer that being pious is about following what Gods love. Socrates jumps on this after making some
clarification to the statement by asking the following: do the gods love
holiness because it is holy or is it holy because they love it? This dichotomy brings about a challenge to
how morality would come about with regards to it coming from God. If we were to pick the former, then it is not
God who decides what morality is: God is aware of it and he merely conveys it
to us his knowledge. This would imply
that there is something beyond God – holiness that is not from him. In this case, we would have to ask if there
is another god who created this order.
If we choose the latter, then we have to question the definition of what
holiness is. What does it mean to be
holy and how can we be certain of the morality that God decided. In such a case, if God were to command that
we ought to torture a baby for fun, it would be true just because of his
command. Holiness and the moral command
almost become moot points as it was simply his whim that decided what good and
evil is for us. It simply becomes his
preference and there is an element of randomness to what we ought to follow.
To
wrestle with such a question, we need to know more about God. We shall look at Judeo-Christian God as that
is what is familiar to the writer. Among
other natures of God, three of the defining characteristics of God are as
follows: He is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. In other words, he is all knowing, all
powerful and perfectly good, respectively.
Omniscience can often be read as all seeing as his knowledge is
understood as transcending the boundaries of time – he sees all that has been,
is and will be. Does this entail that he
obtains knowledge just as he may have obtained the knowledge of holiness, or
good and evil? It can, yes, but this
seems inconsistent with how he is portrayed in the bible, or rather how he
portrays himself if we want to be technical.
There are some parts of the bible (Christian) that gives some
description of God and they describe him as being the beginning and the
end. When God addresses himself, he
simply says, “I am”. He seems to
emphasize over and over that there is nothing beyond him. I would argue that the problem of accepting
that “holiness simply comes from his command” derives from the uncertainty of
the nature of God. It seems odd to us to
call him “perfectly good” if what is good simply came from whatever he deemed
to be good. It would be completely
circular in nature. However, we have to
consider the nature of knowledge and morality themselves. If we were to consider that there is absolutely
nothing outside of God, it would seem that even a notion of knowledge and
morality would not exist in such an order.
We must carefully contemplate this absolute void and what it
entails. Something as fundamental as
what we consider consciousness must be created. If we can imagine that these things had to
be created, we can see how it is almost irrelevant to talk about morality or
knowledge outside of God. The way we
reason and the way we judge what is good and evil along with the concept of
morality were all set in order by God.
On top of that, if we consider him being perfectly good by the standard
that he set as being “good”, there isn’t anything inconsistent – it almost
seems necessary for him to be leading by example.
One
might ask, if this were true, would I torture a baby for fun if God commanded
it? I would ask whether he created a
universe and the order of the universe to ensure that torturing a baby for fun
is morally permissible. It is asking
whether I would follow the command if God commanded what is clearly evil. However, this goes against the very nature of
God – perfectly good. The circularity of
his nature prevents command of an “evil” thing.
He would only command what he deemed to be good and what he created to
be good. As unimaginable and abhorrent
as it is, the only way that God would command torturing a baby for fun is to
create a universe, the way of the universe, and the behavioral order of our rationality
that would somehow deem such an act to be good.
It
is hard to imagine with accuracy what God is like. We speak of such a thing as being infinitely
powerful but that is not something we can put into our calculation. We can have a general idea through our
imagination what this might be like but I am unsure how I would put into words
to describe such a being. Perhaps that
is why he addresses himself with “I am” since there is nothing outside of his
existence – a sort of pantheistic notion but only when we think of physical
matter. When we consider our thought
processes and intuition being something that was created, it seems to address
some issues that Socrates points out in Euthyphro.
