The Moral Argument for God is Sound

Pro has yet to actually deal with the moral argument itself and from his responses I don’t think he’s even qualified to make this debate. Let me critique what he says first then make a counter argument. Pro is stating that the existence of God would make a moral objective because otherwise we wouldn’t have proof that beliefs are factual. But, belief in God is not factual. It’s a faith based belief. And people who believe in God have different morals. How can we establish one’s belief to be correct? We are ultimately left with the same epistemic problem, that is, how can we know what beliefs are true? Let’s look at the “proof” that Pro offers. Pro’s “proof” doesn’t make sense at all and is horribly written. If we let a belief imply God, and let a property of that belief contain the argument for perfection then somehow he concludes “moral objectivity is founded upon the belief of God.” I don’t see how that follows at all logically. First, how can a property of a belief somehow prove moral objectivity is founded upon the belief of God? Is Pro trying to say that the mere belief that objective morality is founded in God proves that it is? Why can’t the disbelief that objective morality is founded in God prove that it isn’t? Pro needs to make a more serious argument. Second, since Pro failed to even address the moral argument or back up any of its claims, let me throw a softball at him to see how he can handle it. One counter argument to the moral argument is called the Euthyphro Dilemma. It was posed by Socrates 2,400 years ago. It asks, “Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral?” The person who believes objective morality is founded in God here has two options. If something is moral because God commands it, then morality is arbitrarily decided by God. God could command that we murder our children or own slaves and it would be good – merely because God said so. The actual commands would be meaningless and we’d have no way to gauge whether something is morally good or not except on whether it was commanded by God. This would be a “might makes right” ideology. In the other option, God is merely a messenger who alerts us to what is right or wrong independently to whether God exists or not. Morality is not decided by God, God is simply the enforcer of what is naturally right or wrong. Neither option is particularly appealing to the theist. The first option makes morality simply dependent on God’s opinion at any given time. He could command that murder and rape are good, then change his mind and command that they are wrong. The second option turns God merely into a messenger, who one might say is redundant, and at best can only serve as a medium by which natural truths are known. The ontological foundation of God would exist independently of him. Now the Euthyphro Dilemma has been around for over 2000 years and theists have had plenty of time to respond to it. One common objection is to say that God is good – he is the absolute standard by which good is measured and founded. But is this a successful refutation of the dilemma? If God is the standard of goodness, by what means can we know this to be true? So we can ask, why is God good? The theist might say God is good because he is intrinsically loving, compassionate and fair. But then all we have to do is reformulate the Euthyphro Dilemma accordingly: Is God good because he is loving, compassionate and fair, or is being loving, compassionate and fair good because God is good? If you pick the former, then the attributes God has that make him good exist independently of God and are merely descriptive terms applied to God, if you pick the latter then how can we possibly know that being loving, compassionate and fair is good? It can’t simply be good because God is good, because then the word “good” is meaningless. There has to be a reason why we call something good. So what characteristic comes first – God’s goodness, or his being loving, compassionate and fair? The theist is in a squirm here. He cannot simply define God as being “good” without justification. Goodness has to be justified descriptively. But if those descriptions are warranted, then they imply goodness for epistemological reasons that are verifiable due to their intentions and effects. And thus the source of goodness would exist independently of God. So which way is Pro going to choose? But there are even more problems with defining God as the source of goodness. First, defining God as the source of “good” is mere theological wordplay. It doesn't demonstrate that “good” cannot exist independently of God. Even if goodness is an essential property of God, it is a property that can apply to other things independently of God’s existence. Just think of how being hot is an essential property of fire – fire must be hot, it cannot be cold. But “hot” can apply to many other things independently of fire. For example, microwaves cause things to be hot and so does friction. Second, take for example the biblical story of Abraham who God commands to sacrifice his son (Gen 22:5-12). Most Jews, Christians and Muslims agree that it would have been immoral for Abraham to have decided on his own to sacrifice his son for God and what made it moral was solely determined by God’s command. Also in the Old Testament, God commands the Jews to exterminate the Midianite peoples (except for the young virgin girls) and he awards the Jews their property (Num 31:2-18). Most Christians at least think it would have been immoral if the Jews had decided to take upon this genocidal conquest on their own, but here again God’s commanding of it makes it moral for the Jews to physically commit these acts. What these two examples illustrate, is that if something is immoral on its own and only becomes moral if God commands it, or vice versa, then the sole factor separating the morality or immorality of the action, is God’s command. This also means that God cannot be following an absolute and non-arbitrary morality: If something is morally good because God commands it, it must also be morally good if you do it on your own, because otherwise if performing these morals on your own wouldn’t be good unless God commands it, it means you take the first horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma - that something is morally good because God commands it. So if Pro wants to argue against my position he has to argue for a very strong case demonstrating how the God is the objective ontological foundation of morality, that refutes the arguments I gave above.