Caveat emptor: I am not a philosopher and proffer these posts, as always, as tentative thoughts, designed to hone my ideas, inspire conversation, and learn from my readers.

It has always seemed to me that Plato’s Euthyphro argument pretty much disposed of the claim that morals are grounded in God. If you need a refresher, that’s simply the argument that if morals are underlain by God’s commands, then anything that God commands is good by definition. (Plato used “piety” rather than “morality,” but the argument is the same.) But by those lights God could say, “Stoning adulterous women is the moral thing to do” and we’d have to go along with it. (This is, in fact, the “divine command” theory—DCT used by William Lane Craig to justify the genocide of the Canaanites.)

But of course few of us want to adhere to the notion that whatever God says is moral must be moral, since that opens the door for some pretty dire divine commands. (You can see a lot of these in the Old Testament.) The traditional theological response is that “Of course God would never order us to do those kinds of things, because God is good.” Plato uses that argument (again, for piety) to show that if you make this riposte, you are using an extra-God criterion for goodness—that is, a secular criterion. If God is good, and therefore could not issue immoral commands, then there must be an external standard of good, independent of God, by which we can claim that God is good.

The theological responses to the Euthyphro dilemma have not convinced me, and so the argument has seemed dispositive: our notions of morality come from either secular reason, evolution, or observation of what behaviors keep a society cohesive.

But then I realized that in fact there are many people who do follow Craig’s “divine command’ theory even though they’d probably deny it, and even though they’re not nearly as wedded to that crazy idea as is Craig.

Take, for example, the Catholic Church. Many of its adherents take their morality directly from Scripture (i.e., from God) because they think that whatever Scripture says, or however it’s interpreted by Church authorities, is moral simply because the Church says so. Things like the following, for example, would probably never be arrived at by secular reason alone. It takes religion. Catholic dogma sees these things as moral acts or opinions:

•Opposition to birth control (even to prevent AIDS) •Opposition to abortion (based on the view that life begins at conception, when the soul is instilled) •Opposition to stem cell research (same reason as above) •Opposition to divorce •Opposition to homosexuality (viewed as a “grave disorder” or, if acted on, a “grave sin”) •Control of people’s sex lives •Oppression of women •Instillation of fear and guilt in children

While I suppose you can argue that some secular societies could arrive at a few of these views, I see these as stemming, in the main, from scripture. Really, what secular society would come to the notion that it’s immoral to use condoms or engage in stem-cell research?

All of these claims—some of them are inherent in Islam as well—arise from the idea they are divinely-dictated views of morality. They cannot be justified by secular reason alone, and therefore cannot be easily seen as moral if you use extra-religious criteria.