A review of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, by David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls. Oxford, 2011.
As our political debates become less and less logical and irenic, as they rely more and more on spin, name calling, and a refusal to concede any points to the opposition, Thomas Aquinas’s method of argumentation appears increasingly attractive. In his Summa, Aquinas begins each section by listing the reasons against the proposition he will defend. He even does this for the proposition that God exists (Part I, Question 2, Article 3)—though, significantly, he is only able to identify two rational reasons for denying God’s existence: the ubiquitous presence of pain and suffering and the belief that everything can be explained by natural processes.
The ever-mounting controversy over Intelligent Design attests to the latter argument’s still being alive and well. Meanwhile, the problem of pain—the argument that human suffering suggests that God is either too powerless to stop it or too apathetic to care to—continues to be the strongest and most frequently-used argument against the existence of the all-powerful, all-loving God of the Bible. New atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have made particularly effective use of it in their anti-theistic crusade. Indeed, they, along with other critics of God (that is, the Judeo-Christian God), have aggressively pushed the problem of pain from its negative formulation into its positive. The problem is not just that God allows evil; he actively promotes it when, for example, he commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac or orders the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites from the Holy Land.
Behind this positive formulation lies a much deeper critique of theism that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Euthyphro. In the dialogue, Socrates engages his titular interlocutor in a debate over the foundation of morality. Is a thing moral because the gods say it is? If so, what if the gods command something impious? The debate is better known to us today in terms of a question often asked by the medieval scholastics: Is a thing just because God does it, or does God do a thing because it is just?
This may at first sound like a frivolous question, like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but the dilemma it raises is far from frivolous. If we say that a thing is just because God says it is, then we are saying that whatever God commands is thereby just, moral, and good. But what if God commanded us to do something morally repugnant: like performing medical experiments on unwilling patients (as Hitler commanded the Nazis to do to “undesirables”), or murdering the members of a socio-economic class (as Stalin commanded the Soviets to do to the Kulaks). Would the mere fact that God commanded such actions make them good? If so, then we risk worshipping an arbitrary, tyrannical deity and giving up the possibility of fixed moral standards.
If, on the other hand, we say that God does a thing because it is just, we run into the problem of making God irrelevant to morality. True, God may take on the role of enforcer of morality, but his sovereignty is thereby severely compromised. God becomes answerable to something outside of himself over which he has no control. Indeed, if we press the issue further, we risk falling into a scenario where morality becomes an eternal, transcendent standard separate from God: a violation of the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”). “In the beginning,” Genesis 1:1 tells us, “God”—period! That is why the Nicene Creed asserts that God is the maker of “all things visible and invisible.” And that “all” includes any and all standards of goodness, truth, and beauty.
In a sense, the Euthyphro dilemma throws us back on to the horns of the problem of pain. Either God is not intrinsically loving and just and merciful (morality is only what he says it is), or he lacks the power, primacy, and sovereignty that define him as God (he is only, as it were, a divine policeman).
