Objective Morality

William Lane Craig is fond of saying, “If there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist.” And that, this “divine command theory”, is supposed to answer the alleged shortcomings of atheism; atheism, the divine command theorists would have it, cannot be the right view of whether or not there’s a God, because there simply must be objective morality, an the only way to have that, by way of Christianity’s own “theory”, is for there to be a God.

But isn’t the Christian God the supposed to be the same as the god of Judaism? Yet Christians use the moral edicts of the Bible as a buffet from which they pick and choose which ones suit their tastes.

Of course, William Lane Craig is not the first divine command theorist. The most notable, perhaps, was a pagan by the name of Euthyphro, introduced to us by Plato in dialogue with Socrates. From Euthyphro comes a famous dilemma: Things are either right because God (more accurately gods in the plural for Euthyphro) commands them, or God commands them because they are right.

A problem with the first case is that if some of the moral commandments from the Old Testament were changed by the New Commandment, then it would seem that God can change his mind about what he’s decided is right, and therefore Craig’s “objective right and wrong” are subject to change.

In the second case, God would lose the omnipotence that Christians tend to attribute to him, because it implies that God is bound to some source of morality that is independent of him, which means that he can’t be all-powerful, and to Craig’s chagrin, we could bypass God in finding morality.

It should not be too much to ask for theologians to at least be logically consistent, and they often are, but Craig doesn’t even get that far, so it might be superfluous of me to fault him for not going so far as to test his logic against empirical data, but if he had gone that far, he would again have come up short. Anthropologist have long documented moral relativism by which what is right and wrong differs in different places. But not only does morality differ by place, but it differs even by time. Our forefathers owned slaves, for instance, and I think (and should hope!) that Craig would not agree that slavery is morally permissible (and if he does, it goes some way towards showing that his God is not a sound source of morality).

I think that a lot of use want something absolute in your lives, something unchanging, but God does not offer it by way of morality. We are social animals who come into moral systems based on what is best for our survival, happiness, and well-being.