Five Dialogues

"Unlike earlier Greek philosophers, such as Diagoras and Democritus, Plato believed in the divine, and much of his philosophy flowed from his concept of a transcendental reality. He provided the resources for the later Christian view of goodness as a transcendental quality. But in his dialogue Euthyphro he also provides the classic argument against looking to God as the source of moral values, an argument that still resonates 2,000 years later. In Euthyphro , Plato sets up a discussion between Socrates and Euthyphro, who is about to prosecute his father for the murder of one of his servants. Socrates is shocked by Euthyphro’s action and wants to know how Euthyphro distinguishes between the pious and the impious, the good and the bad. Well, Euthyphro provides a series of definitions, each of which Socrates knocks down. Socrates’s key question is this: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Unless the gods love something for no good reason, then they must love something as pious because it inherently possesses value. But if it inherently possesses value, then it does so independently of the gods. Or, as Leibniz asked at the beginning of the 18th century, if it is the case that whatever God thinks, wants or does is good by definition, then “what cause could one have to praise him for what he does if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?” If, on the other hand, God recognises what is good and promotes it because of its inherent goodness, then goodness must exist independently of God. But God is no longer the source of that goodness, nor do we need to look to God to discover that which is good. Yes, a believer might argue that by definition God cannot choose anything but the good. God cannot but be good, so the Euthyphro dilemma is ill formed. If God and the good are one and the same, then we cannot ask whether God chooses good, because it is good – the very question separates that which is inseparable. But we can restate the Euthyphro dilemma in a different way, to meet such an objection. We can ask: “Is God good because to be good is to be whatever God is; or is God good because He has all the properties of goodness?” If it is the former, then we find once more that goodness is arbitrary, since it would be whatever God happened to be. If, on the other hand, God is good because He has all the properties of goodness, then it means that such properties can be specified independently of God. And so the idea of goodness does not depend upon the existence of God. That’s true. History reveals that God has in the past deemed to be morally acceptable many practices that we now regard as immoral – torture, slavery, the burning of witches, the murder of Jews. Or rather, in the past believers insisted that God had sanctified such practices. Today few believe that. That’s not because God had changed his mind, but because society has. We have come to recognise the moral wrongness of these practices. We live in a very different moral universe from that of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And as the moral universe has changed, so have believers’ moral codes. All of us, believers and non-believers, have to define for ourselves, not just individually but collectively, what is good and bad. Believers then attach such moral claims to a God, insisting that he is the source of moral values. Atheists accept that those values are human-created."