Does God command things because they are right? Or are the things he commands right because he commanded them?
If they’re right because he commands them, then he would still be all powerful, but I think it would take something away. I mean, on a whim He could decide to make something like adultery (or murder, or disrespecting your parents, etc.) OK. What’s stopping him? It’s not like He needs to answer to anybody.
If He commands them because they are right, then there must be something that is more powerful than Him. Regardless of His commands, they would be right. In this case He would not be all powerful.
(For the sake of discussion, this assumes God exists, of course.)
You’re intro to Phil exam is approaching, isn’t it? (Mine is. This Friday, in fact.)
And there is a fairly easy way out of this dilemma. Posit that right and wrong, rather than being either writ in stone or just completely subjective, are situational-dependant. I.e.: The fact that it’s right to kill people in war doesn’t mean that it’s right to kill people in peacetime, because they are different situations.
Now, you can posit that there is right and wrong that is unchangable even by God, but also posit that since God can change any situations at will, He can still effectively arbitrate morality by changing the situation.
It’s no longer the Divine Commad theory at this point, but it does aviod the classic dilemma.
Heh. Nope. I did learn about it in a philosophy class, but that was three years ago. It was in a lecture hall so there wasn’t much discussion. I know it’s kind of a chicken and egg question, but I was wondering mostly what believers thought about this question.
I don’t think that escapes the dilemma. The example still assumes there is a right or wrong for a given situation–which very few people would deny–so, could God change that (in which case morality is ultimately a matter of “might makes right”) or is there a morality by which even God could be judged (in which case, where does this morality come from? And could there be objective standards of morality even if there is no God?)
In the Bible, God repeatedly condemns infant sacrifice as a form of religious worship. (Of course, he commands it in the story of Abraham and Isaac, but he doesn’t actually permit the sacrifice to go through.) If God had hypothetically commanded that infant sacrifice be made central to his worship, would that make infant sacrifice morally acceptable, or would that make God evil?
Note that bringing up some situation where it might be morally acceptable to kill infants (say an evil dictator has put his weapons labs under an orphanage, and he’s hours away from deploying some super-weapon which can destroy humanity) simply dodges the point.
The bible has a clear answer in Genesis (at least to my unindocrinated mind).
That is, god is aware and answers to some sort of absolute of what is good and what is evil. Moreover, since mankind was given the knowledge only at the point of eating the apple and isn’t constantly re-eating apples to update itself on the newest changes, the criteria for what is good and what is evil can no longer be altered. And yes, that means god isn’t both omnipotent and benevolent. Then again, one can prove the same thing in trying to figure out why there’s evil in the world.
I, however, am an athiest and think that religion and theology are all complete bullshit. The infinite number of logical contradictions and fallacies is the clearest evidence to me of that. If any of you more adventurous religious souls would like to wriggle out of this one, go ahead, i’d love to see your responses.
I believe there is a story in the Bible (sorry i can’t remember where or whom it was written about) where God shows this man all these unclean or forbiden animals to eat and tells him to eat them. The man says “but Lord I have never polluted my body with these things”. God tells him when he* says to eat them he should eat them. The man eats them.
Also I believe it says before the flood people only at fruits and herbs but afterward he* gave them permmision to eat clean animals.with no I think the resolution would be, assuming we are talking about the God and belief system of the Bible (or even maybe the tora), would be a combination of the two possibilities. God made the law, but is able to change it if he* desires to. However he desgined the law to make the best ot the universe he set up. So in one sense he* controls the law in another sense the laws were sort of decided by chance. However God is also supposed to be above time so cause (creation) and effect (the law being the way it is) gets really murky. the more i think about it the more i realize i need an asprine.
ultimately I don’t really know I guess. however this my best guess so far.
*[size=1]darn lack of genderless pronouns. I need to upgrade to a new langauge. does english 2.1 have genderless pronouns?
Since I’m pretty sure that the Garden of Eden was supposed to be a symbolic story, I think we can safely put apple consumption aside. IMHO sometime after God kicked the evolutionary ball into motion, quite some time, that he gave us the morals lesson. He “planted” the knowledge of right and wrong, when man reached a stage of understanding. We of course rebelled about some things. That knowledge has been passed down as a kind of byproduct of evolution in that morals are instilled because of maternal instinct. It starts with smiles and frowns when we’re infants and words and consequences later. I’m not sure God could have originally told us something wrong, because his was the only definition of right and wrong; and would have been correct no matter what. If he changed the rules now, we generally wouldn’t accept a new standard and we would rebel, as we already do anyway.
Imagine how many people there have been since man evolved into a creature with morals and a conscious. A very small amount of these people actually received any direct instructions from God and then it was passed down through billions of people. Enter power, greed, coruption, pride, arrogance and self-righteousness. To be fair, throw in good things too. But even without the negative influences, just the fact of “God’s word” being passed through that many people makes for massive fallacies and contradictions. If you believe in Jesus(I know you don’t), then we received something of a brush up course a couple thousand years ago. That message and all of the old information went through millions more. And there you have it. Most of religion probably is bullshit. God is non-denominational. You need him to help sift through the rubble. I do believe in God, sometimes in spite of religion, not because of it. Too bad we didn’t have the internet back then. Oh and I made part of this up, but who doesn’t? It sounds reasonable to me.
I don’t see how. It changes the subject, certainly, but it doesn’t seem to deal with the actual question of whether things are right because god says so, or god says so because they are right (assuming god cares about accuracy)
Hey, Diogenes, I missed you too. For the sake of this discussion we were supposed to assume God exists. I guess I just got carried away when I answered the other question Alex_Dubinsky posed. I obviously can’t prove that there were people in contact with God and you’re not compelled to prove a negative. I believe it happened and know it still happens. Provable cases of this happening are still at 0, in fact. You are correct.
That’s a good, but unfortunately worded question. I was fed lots of smelly cultural information about God and eventually figured out that any religion who gave a multitude of “facts” was suspect. As I stepped back and studied each belief I had held for years, I had to decide if that was my belief or my “indoctrination”. If it didn’t hurt to toss it, it wasn’t mine and I did. I have almost nothing left of my “religious” beliefs, but am still positive about God. I’ve only really went through this “belief purging” in the last 2 months and I’m still feeling a little bare. I guess you have to just use your judgement and if it doesn’t sound right, if it’s exclusionary in any way, limits you in ways you know you shouldn’t be or just doesn’t feel right; it’s not right. I’d say that faith helps, but hard to muster if you doubt God and are trying to find answers. I also think it’s okay to be an Atheist, unless you find a reason not to be.
How is the OP a dilemma? Of course if there is an omnipotent god, then morality is entirely subject to its whim.
Keep in mind that morality to this hypothetical god is different than human morality. Destroying the entire human race is not immoral if god does it, but if this god commanded people not to kill, then it would be wrong for a person to do the same, simply because god commanded it.
By defining morality as something that is both dependant on a situation and unchangable within that situation, the question of whether or not morality is contingent on God becomes as interesting as whether or not pi is contingent on God. God could have created a universe in which pi is a different number (positing universe-creating and all those other things), but He can’t change it without changing a basic property of the universe present in every circle and a bunch of other really wierd places as well, to the point that changing pi would be very much like making the universe anew. Similarly, God could change the situations of the universe such that it was usually moral to drop-kick infants, but such a universe would be similarly dissimilar to our own.
The problem, I think, lies from attempting to define morality in the absence of situations. If theft is wrong even in the absence of any acts of theft, than you have a problem. If theft is not universally wrong, but only wrong in every examined scenario, then the issue does not come up.