Is Something Good Because God Says So?
In Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, Socrates asks just this questions:
“Do the gods love holiness [the good] because it is holy [good], or is it holy [good] because the gods love it?”
The Divine Command Theory
The first position is known in Ethics as “Natural Law Theory” and the second is known as “The Divine Command Theory”
If your answer is the second one, (it is holy because the gods love it) then you relegate morality to the whim of the gods. It’s a kind of moral relativism, depending on what God thinks is good at the moment. So whatever the gods love is automatically good, no matter what it is. So conceivably God could think murder is okay on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but not on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, leaving Sunday up to the individual’s choice. The next week he could change it to the opposite.
Ethicist Judith Boss, in her book, Ethics for Life, defines the Divine Command Theory as,
“Divine command theory is a type of ethical relativism. According to this theory, morality is dependent on or relative to God. Morality does not exist independently of…