#65 Christianity Today Article
July 14, 2008After reading your CT article about the existence of God, I sent it to an atheist friend. here is his reply. Please help.
I still haven't found a good response to this dilemma:
Nontheists will typically counter the moral argument with a dilemma: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good? The first alternative makes good and evil arbitrary, whereas the second makes the good independent of God. Fortunately, the dilemma is a false one. Theists have traditionally taken a third alternative: God wills something because he is good. That is to say, what Plato called "the Good" is the moral nature of God himself. God is by nature loving, kind, impartial, and so on. He is the paradigm of goodness. Therefore, the good is not independent of God.
It's not a false dilemma because God did not choose his nature. His nature is whatever his nature happens to be. It could have been an evil nature. I'm sure apologists assert that, no, it HAS to be a good nature. But, that's simply an assertion with no evidence for it. Craig defines God as perfect and then says God must be perfect because that's the definition of God. That's circular logic.
Roger
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Thanks for passing the article on to your friend, Roger! I hope that it will be the stimulus to many good conversations with unbelieving friends or family members.
Your friend doesn't understand the nature of a dilemma. Someone pushing a dilemma has to prove that there are only two alternatives. This is easily done if the dilemma has the form "A or not-A." Here one horn of the dilemma is the contradictory or negation of the other. So you have to choose one horn or the other. There are no other alternatives.
But as I explain in my debate with Louise Antony, the Euthyphro dilemma isn't like this. Just look at it: Either something is good because God wills it or God wills something because it is good. The second horn is not the negation of the first. The negation of the first horn of the dilemma is "It is not the case that something is good because God wills it." So stated, the dilemma is no problem at all. Theists do not typically think that something is good just because God wills it. When the dilemma is so stated, we unhesitatingly choose not-A.
So what the atheist would have to show is that not-A, so understood, entails that God wills something because it is good. But what argument will he offer for that entailment? What argument will your friend offer? Remember: it's the atheist who claims that the theist has only two choices here. So the burden of proof lies on the atheist to show that there is a true dilemma.
By contrast, the theist can subvert the dilemma just by offering another alternative. Here's my alternative: God wills something because He is good. That is a third option different from either of the alternatives offered by the original dilemma.
So now the atheist has to show why that option isn't an acceptable alternative. Contrary to your friend's claim, the theist is under no obligation to prove that God has His moral character essentially. Rather that just is the classical theistic alternative. There's no circularity involved because the theist isn't trying to prove his alternative. Rather he's simply offering an alternative to the two horns of the atheist's false dilemma. He's saying, "Suppose God has His character essentially and His character serves as the paradigm for what is good. What's wrong with that alternative?" Now it's up to the atheist to show why that alternative won't work.
Your friend needs to show why moral values cannot be grounded in the nature of God as maintained by the classical theist, otherwise his objection fails to defeat classical theism. It may defeat other straw men, but it says nothing, by his own admission, against classical theism and so fails as an objection to it.
- William Lane Craig