As with all my other thought experiments, there is no right or wrong answer here. It is meant to spark discussion about a topic. Please keep it clean and have fun! ----------- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT 6: Good God!
And the Lord spoke unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord they God, and I am the source of all that is good. Why does they secular moral philosophy ignore me?" And the philosopher spoke unto the Lord, "To answer I must first ask you some questions, dude. You command us to do what is good, but is it good because you command it, or do you command it because it is good?" (This is known as the Euthyphro question) "Uhh..." said the Lord. "It's good because I command it...?" "The wrong answer, surely, your mightiness! If the good is only good because you say it is so, then you could, if you wished, make it so that torturing infants was good. But that would be absurd, wouldn't it?" "Of course!" replieth the Lord. "I tested thee and thou hast made me pleased. What was the other choice again?" "You choose what is good because it is good. But that shows quite clearly that goodness does not depend on you at all. So we don't need to study God to study the good." "Even so," spoke the Lord, " you've got to admit I've written some pretty good textbooks on the subject..." ----------
DISCUSSION
The idea that God is good, however, is ambiguous. It could mean that God is good int he same way that chocolate is good, or Billy Bob is good. In these cases, "is" functions to attribute a quality or property to something, such as goodness or blueness. Equally, however, "God is good" could be a sentence like "Water is H2O." Here, "is" indicates an identity between the two terms: the one thing is identical to the other. In the hymns that Christians sing at church, the "is" seemed to be one of identity, not attribution. God is not loving, but love; not beautiful but beauty. God doesn't just have the qualities, he IS them. hence, "God is good" implies that the notions of God and goodness are inextricably linked, that the essence of the good is God. So, it is no wonder that many believe that there can be no morality without God. If goodness and Godness cannot be separated, secular morality is a contradiction in terms. However, that pseudo-conversation I wrote talking to God seems to demonstrate very clearly and simply that this cannot be so. If God is good, it is because God is and chooses to do what is ALREADY good. God doesn't make something good by choosing it; he chooses it because it is good. Now, some might protest that this argument works only because it separates what cannot be separated. If God really is good, then it doesn't make sense to pose a dilemma in which the good and God are separated. But since it seems to make perfect sense to ask whether the good is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is good, this objection simply begs the questions. Even if God and the good really were one, it would still be reasonable to ask what makes this identity true. The answer would surely be that we know what good is and it is this which would enable us to say truly that God is good. If God advocated pointless torture, we would know that he was not good. This shows that we can understand the nature of goodness independently of God. And that shows that a godless morality is not an oxymoron.
So, what do you guys think? Are there holes in this argument? Can we truly know what goodness is separated from God if there was no God in the beginning? Could pointless torture have been good pre-God?
