What is the Euthyphro's Dilemma?
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Matt Slick of www.carm.org gives the answer to the age old dilemma.
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- So, what is the Euthyphro Dilemma? The Euthyphro Dilemma comes from Plato's Euthyphro Dialogue, which has had different forms over the centuries.
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- Basically, it is the question, are moral acts willed by God because they are good, or are they good because they are willed by God?
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- Another way of asking this is, does God say that things are moral because they are by nature moral, or do they become moral because God declares them to be?
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- The dilemma is that if the acts are morally good because they are good by nature, then they are independent of God, and God would have to answer to these morals, and that would not be a good thing, because they would be good in and of themselves, apart from God, to which
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- God must then appeal. On the other hand, if something is good because God commands that it is good, then goodness is arbitrary and God could have called murder good, and honesty as being not good.
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- The Euthyphro Dilemma is actually, in Christianity, a false dichotomy. It proposes only two options when another is possible.
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- The third option is that good is based on God's nature, on His character, on His essence.
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- God appeals to nothing other than His own character for the standard of what is good, and then reveals to us what that good is.
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- It is wrong to lie because God cannot lie, not because God had to discover lying was wrong or had to arbitrarily declare that it was wrong.
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- Therefore, for the Christian, there is no dilemma, since neither position in Euthyphro's Dilemma represents