God's will determines morality

The argument

Needless to say, morality is a convoluted topic. Countless theories, from consequentialism to utilitarianism to deontology, try to define "good" and "bad," but each theory has its own logical shortcomings. The argument's first move is therefore not a claim about God but an observation about the field: disagreement among moral philosophies is not a passing state of research but a persistent one, and each proposed foundation has been shown to fail in some case or other. For this reason, some people, especially Christian fundamentalists, have realized that our human attempts to grasp and define morality will always fall short. The inference drawn is that the failure is structural rather than accidental, since a limited mind attempting to fix an absolute standard will keep producing standards that break. Because of this, on this view, we must turn to one whose mind is far more powerful than our own: God. According to Divine Command Theory, also referred to as theological voluntarism, an action is good if it follows God's will, and bad if it doesn't. In this view, intentions and consequences don't matter, which is what distinguishes it from the theories already found wanting: those that fail are the ones that make goodness depend on something a person must calculate, and this one does not. As long as we follow God's will, proponents hold, our way forward in any moral dilemma will become clear. The practical advantage claimed is access as much as authority. After all, the answers to difficult moral questions are clearly written in the Bible, not just guessed at by flawed human beings. In this way, the Divine Command Theory makes individuals' moral lives easier by giving them absolute, eternal guidelines, as scripted in the Bible, and a standard that is absolute and eternal is by definition not relative.

Context

Christian doctrine states that the Bible is the word of God, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator of the universe. While humans are flawed, God is perfect, so only he can truly understand morality.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This argument implies that morality is no more than God arbitrarily assigning values to actions. After all, an action is not good because God believes it to be good; it is merely good because he wills it, a seemingly arbitrary determination. According to this view, even if the Bible encouraged murder, Christians would be expected to blindly follow "God's will." Moreover, this argument implies that the Bible explicitly defines right and wrong in every situation, making moral decisions clear-cut and contradiction-free. This is patently untrue. Even if a person attempts to follow the God's word to the letter, moral inconsistencies will abound. For example, two of the most well-known commandments are "thou shalt not lie" and "thou shalt not kill;" but would it be acceptable to lie to save a life? If so, is there a hierarchy of sins? How do we define "lie" and "kill" in the first place? For such questions, the Bible suggests no answer. Finally, if God is not all-knowing or all-loving, we cannot trust his will to reflect true morality. If God does not exist at all, the entire argument is irrelevant.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That existing theories face difficulties does not establish that any particular alternative succeeds. Divine command theory has objections of its own, at least as severe, and the premise argues from the problems of the rivals to the truth of a view whose problems it never examines. [Rejecting P2] The counter-argument on record raises the objection this view has faced since Plato's Euthyphro: if an act is good solely because it is willed, then goodness is arbitrary and anything at all could have been made right by decree; if it is willed because it is good, then the standard is independent of the will and the theory does no work. The argument does not choose between these, and each destroys the position in a different way. [Rejecting P3] The claim that the answers are 'clearly written' is contradicted by two thousand years of interpretive disagreement among people committed to the text. The counter presses this with cases the text does not adjudicate — whether one may lie to save a life, whether there is a hierarchy among prohibitions, how the terms are to be defined — and every application requires the human judgement the argument set out to replace. [Rejecting C] The position also secures absoluteness only for those who accept the theology, which makes it hostage to a further claim: the counter notes that if the deity is not wholly good, or does not exist, the account supplies no morality at all. Grounding morality in an unchanging authority also fits awkwardly with the record of doctrinal change on slavery, usury and religious toleration.