The Euthyphro Dilemma

The Dilemma

The question comes from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates presses a confident young man on what makes an act holy. Transposed into the key of monotheism, it is put to the Christian as a trap with two horns:

First horn, “good because God commands it.” If a thing is good simply because God wills it, then goodness is arbitrary. Had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good. To call God good would say nothing more than that God does whatever God happens to do. Morality becomes the flip of a divine coin.

Second horn, “God commands it because it is good.” If God commands a thing because it is already good, then there is a standard of goodness sitting above God, independent of Him. God becomes a herald reporting a moral law He did not author and to which He Himself is answerable. His sovereignty and self-existence are compromised.

So the unbeliever offers a choice: a God whose will is groundless, or a God who is not ultimate. Either way, it is claimed, grounding morality in God fails.

Position

I hold that the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma. It presents two options as though they were exhaustive, when in fact there is a third, and the third is the historic Christian answer: goodness is grounded in the nature of God Himself, neither in His bare will (the first horn) nor in a standard outside Him (the second horn).

God commands what is good because He is good. His commands are not arbitrary decrees that could just as well have gone the other way; they flow necessarily from His unchanging character: His holiness, His justice, His faithfulness, His love. Nor do they answer to any law beyond Him, because there is nothing beyond Him. The standard is God. He does not consult goodness; He is its living measure.

This dissolves both horns at once. Against the charge of arbitrariness: God could not have commanded cruelty as good, because cruelty contradicts what He is, and God cannot deny Himself (2 Tim. 2:13). His will is not random; it is the expression of His nature. Against the charge that He is not ultimate: the standard of goodness is not above Him, because the standard is His own being. There is no appeal court higher than God to which His goodness must be referred.

Divine simplicity is the deep ground here. God is not a being who has goodness as one property among many, conforming to a goodness He could in principle lack. In God there is no composition: His attributes are not parts. God does not have goodness; God is goodness, just as He is life and light and love. This is why the two questions, “Why is what God commands good?” and “Why is God good?” collapse into a single answer. To reach God is to reach the end of the line. There is nothing more ultimate to point to, and nothing needs to be.

A note on method. The dilemma is often pressed as though both parties were standing on neutral ground, weighing whether the theist's account of morality measures up. But the unbeliever who raises it is already helping himself to real moral distinctions, to the very category of “good” as something binding, which his own worldview cannot supply. The Christian need not accept the framing. The better question is which account of reality makes moral obligation intelligible at all, and only the God who is goodness itself can. See Presuppositionalism.

Key Scripture

God's goodness is bound up with His name, with who He is. To know His goodness is to know Him, not to compare Him against an external rule.

Jesus does not deny His own goodness; He locates goodness itself in God. God is not merely a good being among others but the singular source from which all goodness derives.

God's will is not free to contradict His nature. He cannot command what is contrary to Himself, which is precisely why His commands are not arbitrary.

Not that God obeys the light, but that He is light. The predicate names His essence. Goodness is not a code He keeps but the radiance of what He is.

Confession Reference

The 1689 LBC, Chapter 2, §1, confesses God as “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions” who is “most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute,” “working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will.” The phrase without parts is the doctrine of divine simplicity, the ground on which the dilemma dissolves: God's goodness is not a component of God but God Himself. And because His will is His own (not borrowed from any higher law) yet righteous by necessity (not arbitrary), the Confession already holds together the two things the dilemma says cannot be held together.

See also Divine Impassibility, which depends on the same classical account of God's unchanging nature.

Resources

• Euthyphro by Plato

  The source dialogue. Short and worth reading directly to see the question in its original form before it was ever aimed at the God of Scripture.

• Finite and Infinite Goods by Robert Merrihew Adams

  The major modern defense of a divine-nature account of goodness (a modified divine command theory), grounding the good in the character of God rather than in bare will.

• The Doctrine of God by John Frame

  Frame treats God's goodness, will, and the relation between them with care, and addresses the Euthyphro question directly from a Reformed vantage.

• None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God by Matthew Barrett

  An accessible introduction to classical theism and divine simplicity, the doctrines that do the real work in answering the dilemma.