Isn't God's goodness arbitrary?
Either something is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is good. If the first, morality is arbitrary: God could have commanded cruelty and it would be good. If the second, goodness is a standard independent of God, and we don't need God for morality at all.
— The 'Euthyphro dilemma', adapted from Plato, Euthyphro 10a
The dilemma offers only two options, but there is a third. Goodness is neither an arbitrary decree of God nor a standard above him; it is grounded in God's own unchanging nature. God's commands flow from who he is: perfectly loving, just and true. So they are not arbitrary, and God could not command cruelty for its own sake, any more than he could lie. Every moral theory has to stop somewhere; the Christian stops at a supremely good person.
What Scripture says
68You are good, and You do what is good; teach me Your statutes.
'You are good and do good': God's actions flow from his good character.
18“Why do you call Me good?” Jesus replied. “No one is good except God alone.
Jesus says 'No one is good except God alone': God is the standard of goodness, not just its enforcer.
17Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, with whom there is no change or shifting shadow.
Every good gift comes from the Father, 'with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change'.
18Thus by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be strongly encouraged.
It is impossible for God to lie: there are things God cannot do because of his character.
13if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
God remains faithful, 'for he cannot deny himself'.
25Far be it from You to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from You! Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?”
Abraham appeals to God's own justice: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?'
8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
'God is love': love is not merely something God does but what he is.
2“Speak to the whole congregation of Israel and tell them: Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.
God's commands to his people are rooted in his own holiness.
The case
Where the dilemma comes from
In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates meets a man who claims to know exactly what piety is. When Euthyphro defines it as what all the gods love (9e), Socrates asks his famous question (10a): is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy?
Modern skeptics apply this to the God of the Bible. If goodness is whatever God commands, it seems arbitrary; if God commands things because they are good, goodness seems independent of God. Either way, the moral argument for God appears to fail.
This is one of the most famous objections in philosophy. It is worth answering carefully, but it turns out to be a false dilemma.
The two horns
| Horn | Claim | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Goodness is whatever God commands | God's will alone makes things right | God could have commanded cruelty; calling God "good" becomes empty |
| 2. God commands what is good | Goodness is a standard outside God | God is subject to a higher law; God is not needed to ground morality |
Note that Plato was writing about the gods of Greek mythology: many gods, often in conflict, with very human passions and whims. The dilemma bites hard against such gods. It fits the God of the Bible much less well.
The third option: goodness is God's nature
The classical Christian answer, developed by thinkers from Augustine and Anselm to Aquinas and recent philosophers like Robert Adams and William Alston, is that God himself is the standard of goodness.
- Goodness is not arbitrary, because it is rooted in God's eternal, unchanging character (James 1:17; Malachi 3:6). God did not decide one day that love would be good; he is love (1 John 4:8).
- Goodness is not external to God, because there is no standard above him. He is the measure. Jesus said, "No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18).
- God's commands are expressions of his nature. He commands us to be holy "for I am holy" (Leviticus 19:2), to love because he is love, to tell the truth because he cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18).
So the question "Could God command cruelty for its own sake?" has a clear answer: no. Not because something outside God prevents him, but because it would contradict his own nature. Scripture says plainly that there are things God cannot do: he cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and "cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13). That is not a limit on his power. It is the perfection of his character.
Is this a cheat?
A skeptic might say: "You've just redefined good as 'God's nature'. Isn't that arbitrary too?"
Every theory of objective morality has to end somewhere. The Platonist ends with an abstract Form of the Good. The secular moral realist ends with brute moral facts that just exist. The Christian ends with a supremely good, personal God. None of these is "arbitrary" in the sense that matters: none is a whim that could have been otherwise.
The Christian view has some advantages:
- It explains obligations. We owe duties to persons, and God is personal. Abstract facts don't command anyone.
- It explains moral knowledge. God made us in his image, with consciences able to recognize the good.
- It unites goodness and reality. The source of all that exists is also the standard of what is good, so the moral order and the physical order are not strangers.
Why it matters
The answer to Euthyphro is not merely clever philosophy. It means God's commands are never cold rules handed down by a distant ruler. They come from the heart of a God who is love and who wants our good. When God commands, he is describing the kind of life that fits the way he made us and reflects his character. And when we fail, the same good God has acted in Christ to forgive and restore us. As the psalmist says, "You are good and do good; teach me your statutes" (Psalm 119:68).
Word study
hebrew · “good, pleasant, beneficial” · Psalm 119:68
The ordinary Hebrew word for 'good', used of creation (Genesis 1:31) and above all of God himself. Psalm 119:68 uses it both of who God is and of what he does. In the Bible, God's goodness is not a rule he follows but a description of his character, from which his deeds and commands flow.
greek · “good (intrinsically)” · Mark 10:18
Jesus' reply to the man who called him 'good teacher' identifies God as the one who is good in the fullest sense. Goodness in creatures is derived; in God it is original.
“But what about…?”
Isn't this just moving the dilemma back a step? Is God's nature good because it is good, or is it 'good' by definition?
God's nature is the ultimate standard of goodness. Every theory of morality has to have some ultimate standard that is not measured by anything further. The atheist who believes in objective morality also has to stop at basic moral facts. The question is which stopping point explains morality better: impersonal facts or a supremely good, loving person.
What about God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?
This is a hard text. Notice that God stops the sacrifice (Genesis 22:12), and the narrative was read in Israel as a rejection of child sacrifice, which God elsewhere calls detestable (Jeremiah 7:31). Hebrews 11:17–19 says Abraham trusted God could raise Isaac from the dead. The passage tests trust in God's promise, not a command to do evil for its own sake. (See the Hard Passages category.)
Couldn't God have had a different nature?
Classical theism holds that God exists necessarily, with his nature, in every possible world. Asking whether God could have been cruel is like asking whether a triangle could have had four sides: then it would not be God.
If goodness is based on God's nature, how can we know what is good without believing in God?
How we *know* something and what *grounds* it are different questions. God has made all people in his image and written his law on their hearts (Romans 2:14–15), so people can recognize much of the good without acknowledging its source.
Where Christians differ
Go deeper
- book · 1999Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for EthicsRobert Merrihew Adams
- article · 1990Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists, in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (ed. Michael D. Beaty)William P. Alston
- book · 2011Good God: The Theistic Foundations of MoralityDavid Baggett & Jerry L. Walls
- ancientEuthyphroPlato
- ancientSumma Theologiae I, q. 6 (On the goodness of God)Thomas Aquinas
- book · 2013God and Moral ObligationC. Stephen Evans
Sources (4)
- Plato, Euthyphro 10a: Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 6 (God as the highest good)
- Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford University Press, 1999)
- William P. Alston, 'Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists', in Michael D. Beaty (ed.), Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)
Related questions
Can you be good without God?
Yes, atheists can be good people, and the Bible explains why: God's moral law is written on every human heart. But that is a different question from whether goodness can be *real* without God. If there is no God, it is hard to see what makes moral duties objectively binding rather than just feelings or social conventions. Our deep conviction that some things are truly wrong is itself a clue that God exists.
Isn't morality just a product of evolution?
Evolution may help explain how humans came to have moral feelings, but it can't tell us whether those feelings are true. If our moral beliefs were shaped only for survival, not for truth, then we would have no reason to trust that cruelty is really wrong, and the same reasoning would also undermine our trust in reason itself. Christians can accept that God used natural processes to form us while holding that morality is grounded in his character, and that we were made able to recognize it.
Hasn't religion caused most wars?
Christians must honestly admit that people have done terrible things in Christ's name. But historians find that most wars have been driven by land, power, wealth and ethnic or national rivalry, not religion. The 20th century's officially atheist regimes killed on a vast scale. Violence comes from the human heart, not from God. And when Christians use violence to spread the faith, they directly disobey Jesus, who told Peter to put away his sword.
If there is no God, does life have any meaning?
Without God, people can still find life meaningful in a personal sense: love, beauty and good work are real joys. But if the universe is ultimately purposeless and everything ends in death and cosmic heat death, then nothing we do has lasting significance; we create meaning, we don't discover it. Many atheist thinkers have admitted this. Christianity says life has real, objective meaning: we were made by God, for God, and nothing done in love for him is wasted.
This entry is a draft and has not yet been theologically reviewed.