Good Is My Shepherd: The Euthyphro Dilemma in Its Original Context

What is it about?

This is the eighth and final chapter of The Devil’s Advocate vs. God’s Honest Truth: A Dialectical Inquiry into the Rationality of Religion. It supplements the methodological and historical considerations examined in the previous two chapters with a look at the ethical dimension of the choice between theism and its rivals or alternatives. The chapter is dedicated specifically to the Euthyphro dilemma, that is, to the question whether that which is good is determined and dictated by God, or whether God himself is instead bound and influenced by the good. The challenge here for theism is that one horn of the dilemma makes God the arbitrary dictator of the universe, while the other horn makes him an irrelevant force in morality. What hangs in the balance is not the existence of God but the significance of God. The question thus represents a firmly rooted debate in moral philosophy that goes to the heart of the matter regarding the plausibility of divine command theory. It is indeed a habitual tendency of theistic philosophers to ask how there can possibly be objective moral values if there is no God. The aim of this chapter is to show, in opposition to that persistent assumption, that there is no real presumption in favor of the good being defined by God, nor therefore of morality being determined by God. The approach is historical, focusing strictly if not exclusively on the Euthyphro of Plato, where the dilemma makes its first appearance in print.

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Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash

Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash