Euthyphro dilemma
May. 29th, 2007 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIntroduction
Is it good or bad when you discover something you thought of is a famous thing?
I used to think I was soooo clever for hitting Christian evangelizers with the Euthyphro dilemma. And I discovered Plato had it four hundred years before Christianity was even invented.
For those following along at home, the question is (as I phrased it) "Is God subject to morality, or did he create morality?" or (as Plato phrased it) "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
the little list
I mean, not nice, but it did work beautifully. When I chatted with friends, we were generally on the same page, but anyone trying to convert my out of the blue was generally incapable of *understanding* the question, let alone familiar with it, let alone having an answer, let alone having an answer that would satisfy me.
To make everything fair I made a little list of questions I wanted to ask anyone before they could convert me. But this was #1, and I never got any further because everything stalled perfectly well here.
I mean, seriously. Before asking someone to do whatever person X says, you better have thought of "what if I disagree with it", right? But that did not seem to be the case.
The dilemma
Leaving aside the fact that at a minimum I'd like to know which, regardless of which you actually settle upon. And the fact that the answer depends on whether or not there's an absolute morality, which is an unsolved dilemma in itself.
The dilemma is that if God is by definition good, then I'm abrogating my moral sense to someone else. What if he tells me to do something I think is wrong? I don't think I can.
And if God is independent of good, he might in theory do something that wasn't good, even if he never does. Well, that seems ok, but most people have difficulty articulating it.
Resolutions
Of course, old famous dilemmas are generally still up in the air. There are a variety of conceptions of God that avoid this dilemma, that obviously other people are more familiar with than me, but for the sake of balance I'll try to describe.
1. The trust-father metaphor. God if father. I don't necessarily understand everything, but I trust him, because I love him, and he's always come through in the past, so I do what he says, even if it seems wrong at the time.
2. The higher-order-of-being metaphor. Imagine *you* created and ran a universe. What would morality be inside that? Well, whatever it is, maybe our universe is like that to God.
3. Good has an independent existence, that God chooses to conform to.
4. Good is by definition what God wants. I know this makes sense to some people, but I'm afraid not to me. I know I'm not very good myself, but if God said "kill everyone in that city" (unless I believed there was some overwhelming reason it was good in the long run) I'd still think it was very wrong.
Is it good or bad when you discover something you thought of is a famous thing?
I used to think I was soooo clever for hitting Christian evangelizers with the Euthyphro dilemma. And I discovered Plato had it four hundred years before Christianity was even invented.
For those following along at home, the question is (as I phrased it) "Is God subject to morality, or did he create morality?" or (as Plato phrased it) "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
the little list
I mean, not nice, but it did work beautifully. When I chatted with friends, we were generally on the same page, but anyone trying to convert my out of the blue was generally incapable of *understanding* the question, let alone familiar with it, let alone having an answer, let alone having an answer that would satisfy me.
To make everything fair I made a little list of questions I wanted to ask anyone before they could convert me. But this was #1, and I never got any further because everything stalled perfectly well here.
I mean, seriously. Before asking someone to do whatever person X says, you better have thought of "what if I disagree with it", right? But that did not seem to be the case.
The dilemma
Leaving aside the fact that at a minimum I'd like to know which, regardless of which you actually settle upon. And the fact that the answer depends on whether or not there's an absolute morality, which is an unsolved dilemma in itself.
The dilemma is that if God is by definition good, then I'm abrogating my moral sense to someone else. What if he tells me to do something I think is wrong? I don't think I can.
And if God is independent of good, he might in theory do something that wasn't good, even if he never does. Well, that seems ok, but most people have difficulty articulating it.
Resolutions
Of course, old famous dilemmas are generally still up in the air. There are a variety of conceptions of God that avoid this dilemma, that obviously other people are more familiar with than me, but for the sake of balance I'll try to describe.
1. The trust-father metaphor. God if father. I don't necessarily understand everything, but I trust him, because I love him, and he's always come through in the past, so I do what he says, even if it seems wrong at the time.
2. The higher-order-of-being metaphor. Imagine *you* created and ran a universe. What would morality be inside that? Well, whatever it is, maybe our universe is like that to God.
3. Good has an independent existence, that God chooses to conform to.
4. Good is by definition what God wants. I know this makes sense to some people, but I'm afraid not to me. I know I'm not very good myself, but if God said "kill everyone in that city" (unless I believed there was some overwhelming reason it was good in the long run) I'd still think it was very wrong.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 03:22 pm (UTC)I remember when I was at school, must have been 16 or 17, and there was one very devout Christian girl. Someone asked her "Can God build a wall so high he can't jump over it?" and she burst into tears and accused people of undermining her faith.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 03:53 pm (UTC)How about "God can build a wall so high he can't jump over it, and jump over it"?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 03:53 pm (UTC)How about "God can build a wall so high he can't jump over it, and can jump over it"?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 06:25 pm (UTC)In the school was this taken to be a bad thing? What happened afterwards?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 03:23 pm (UTC)Well, the word 'morality' comes from the Latin moralis - think of the English word 'mores'. So my answer would be neither of the above - human cultures created morality, and God is not subject to it.
"The dilemma is that if God is by definition good, then I'm abrogating my moral sense to someone else. What if he tells me to do something I think is wrong? I don't think I can."
A Christian answer to this is that the thing you're calling your 'moral sense' is either wrong, or it's what we would call the third person of the Trinity. Most probably, it's a mixture of the two.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 05:04 pm (UTC)ObPedantry: IANAChristian, but surely even from a Christian worldview that's a bit extreme? Firstly, there's the prospect of being right by chance, of doing the right thing (or knowing the right thing to do) for the wrong reasons - the moral[1] sense is still correct in that case. Secondly (possibly covering the "mixture of the two" case), given a set of cases and knowledge of what was right and wrong in those cases, it should be possible to make better-than-random-guesswork judgments about future cases. I'm not saying that human moral reason is perfect (it's not perfectly consistent, for a start), but you have to give it some credit...
[1] I regard all arguments by etymology as categorically invalid. The meanings of words change.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 06:11 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that anything we do is 'purely' for the right reasons, so it's only ever a matter of degree...
(I wasn't really arguing from etymology, just mentioning it. I understand the current meaning of the term to be primarily culturally based (and thereby distinguished from ethics.))
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 03:32 pm (UTC)If God is the eternal being, that set the universe in motion, then God in some sense set evolution tumbling such that morality eventually comes about.
Why would morality come about? to govern the interactions between human beings. That which promotes love, peace and harmony should by definition be "Of God" - manners are not manners because someone says so, they have evolved out of altruism, which evolves out of enlightened self-interest.
So Morality is "Of the universe", and to some extent is thus "Of God."
But it doesn't entirely work. We do not have a perpetual motion machine. We need some Court of Appeal, some sort of sense check. So Christ chooses to live as human, created by God. We are therefore paradoxical in it - Out of God comes morality, not by creation specifically, but evolution of ideas. Morality is an efficient way of living, at some level, as long as we keep sense-checking it against the universe.
In order to provide some sort of benchmark, we then have Christ who chooses to live in the evolved system. Being human, however, he chooses, as we all choose - No one is compelled to be moral, no one is subject to morality.
Asking 'either/or' is a false dichotomy - why can't it be both? I create a society, and rules emerge from within that society. In order to have a relationship with that society, thus I choose to engage with their rules. I cannot compel them to be a certain way, however I can make it that if they act in the slipstream, then I will be more deeply involved - gradation rather binary.
Good is not by definition what God wants, unless there are serious caveats. That which we worship is in some sense some idea of what we hold dear. Whether or not that conforms to the reality of the Creator of the universe is slightly different. We can't simply conform, we have to use the whole of self, to look critically at that which we value, if that makes sense?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 06:32 pm (UTC)Ooh. What is the whole list? :-D
Good is by definition what God wants.
Which is clearly not what people mean when they say "X is good". Christians (at least Evangelicals) are clearly guilty of doublethink here, or if not that then intentional deception. I've been in a number of discussions with Evangelicals where when you boil away what they say it comes down to this, when I've pointed out that this is not what is normally meant by "good" (so if you want to use the word in that way you ought to declare at the beginning that you're using it in a non standard way) I've got the response "Well, the word good was originally Christian anyway so it's everyone else that should change their definition" !!
C. S. Lewis recognised the problems with this kind of thinking (I think) when he wrote:
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on so many things, and not least on good and evil. … On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our “black” may be his “white”, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; … if He is not (in our sense) “good” we shall obey, if at all, only through fear — and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity — when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing — may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.
...
You might want to read / merge your thoughts with the entry on the anti-apologetics wiki Iron Chariots
no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 12:27 am (UTC)Er, in what sense was it originally Christian? I hope they weren't imagining "good" is derived from "God" (it's not). I once had a long discussion on a newsgroup with some people who initially believed this, and even that "evil" was related to "devil" (d'evil - of evil!).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 12:52 am (UTC)Ooh. What is the whole list? :-D
Date: 2007-05-30 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 02:44 pm (UTC)(my head's not currently capable of more reasoned thought than that, sorry, but I can manage a squee in Plato's direction)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 11:14 am (UTC)Plato's phrasing (well, the translation) makes the problem more explicit, but I think it underlies your formulation too: the question assumes that God and goodness need to be causally related to be identified. Christianity gives an account of the universe where goodness is a property of God ex hypothesi. Goodness might exist independent of God, but in this world their relation is fixed.
Suppose one were to ask "are photons massless because of the properties of the electromagnetic force, or does the electromagnetic force behave that way because photons are massless?". There's no way of answering this question, but it does not invalidate anything we know about either.
We could ask "what if a photon had (rest) mass?", but it doesn't make a lot of sense - is such a particle a photon? And similarly with the Christian deity and evil acts. Evangelicals who say that if God asked you murder someone it would be right have completely missed the point.
"The dilemma is that if God is by definition good, then I'm abrogating my moral sense to someone else. What if he tells me to do something I think is wrong? I don't think I can."
It's true that you do need to be a fairly, um, 'trusting' for this account not to conflict with your intuitions. This is CS Lewis' point, but I think I am right in saying that Christianity provides some assurance that our intuitions of goodness are at least partly reliable. And you can always pray for guidance or check with a priest or give yourself over to Jesus or whatever else it is that your particular sect does.
"And if God is independent of good, he might in theory do something that wasn't good, even if he never does."
Not exactly, I think. There is a (logically) possible world in which an entity that otherwise resembled God did something evil, but we don't live in that world, and Christians wouldn't be happy to label that entity "God".
That this account stretches credulity in light of Yahwe's antics prior to 0BC is a fairly large problem for convincing anyone not already a believer; but does not, I think, make it inconsistent.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 05:19 pm (UTC)-God is not (always, and as much as possible) good. This would be like greek/roman gods(to my understanding). Gods are not good, merely powerful. This is not widely accepted by many people at the moment, to the best of my knowledge.
-God is always, has always been, and will always be good. If this is true, then god would seem to lack free-will. Even if you say he *could* be bad, but chooses not to, if he is intrinsically good (as well as omniscient & omnipotent), then he must only have one possible course of action, without losing his goodness (which would be a defining god-quality). This seems to reduce God to a goodness-computer, which (to my mind) is less than human, rather than more so (depending on what you look for in a god).
-God always has been good, and tries to be good, but will not necessarily be so in the future. This seems (to me) the most sensible answer, and like the Jesus part of God in Christianity (he was tempted, and could have fallen, but didn't). This does provide some uncertainty about the future of the world, however.