In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates raises a fundamental question about morality. We can state the question as follows:
According to the first option, morality is fundamentally dependent on religion. According to the second, morality is fundamentally independent of religion in such a way that even God, if he exists, would have to affirm. In this dialogue, Socrates slowly maneuvers Euthyphro into endorsing the second option, affirming that God commands actions because they are right, and, hence, that morality is fundamentally independent of religion. This is an alternative that is still favored by many religious believers, and usually, but not always, by atheists and agnostics as well.1 However, the first option – that actions are right because God commands them, and, hence, that morality is fundamentally dependent on religion – also has its defenders. These defenders have been appropriately called “divine command theorists” because they identify morality simply with the commands of God.
To illustrate their view, divine command theorists often cite the following story from the Bible. In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham, “Take your only son Isaac whom you love and go into the district of Mona and there offer him as a holocaust on a hill which I shall point out to you.” Abraham does as he is told, but as he is about to sacrifice his son, an angel of the Lord stops him by telling him, “I know now that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son.” And later he is told, “Since you have done this, and have not withheld your only son, I will indeed bless you and will surely multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens and sands of the seashore.”2
In this story, Abraham does not argue with God, as he had done on an earlier occasion when God proposed to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. At that time, Abraham argued with God and got a reprieve for the cities if “fifty just men” could be found in them. He then went on to get the requirement of fifty reduced to just ten. In this way, Abraham exhibited a willingness to argue with God.
With respect to God’s command to sacrifice his own son, however, Abraham does not argue with him at all. Rather, he immediately takes steps to do just what God commands him to do. In the end, Abraham is not required by God to make the ultimate sacrifice of his son. Instead, God is satisfied with Abraham’s willingness to do what he was commanded to do, and for that Abraham is said to have been rewarded handsomely.
Now the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son has been taken to illustrate divine command theory. It purports to show how an action that we might otherwise think is wrong – intentionally killing one’s own innocent child – could be made the right thing to do simply by the commands of God.
During the Middle Ages, William of Ockham (1280–1349) extends this same divine command theory analysis to other actions: “The hatred of God, theft, adultery, and actions similar to these actions … can be performed meritoriously by an earthly pilgrim if they should come under divine precepts.”3 In support of the same view, another medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), provides the following explanation:
Adultery is intercourse with another’s wife, who is allotted to him by the law emanating from God. Consequently, intercourse with any woman by the command of God is neither adultery nor fornication. The same applies to theft, which is the taking of another’s property. For whatever is taken by the command of God, to whom all things belong, is not taken against the will of its owner, whereas it is in that that theft consists.4
So what Ockham and Aquinas are saying here is that acts which previously were wrong, such as intentionally killing an innocent person, theft, adultery, even hatred of God, are transformed into acts that should be done if and when God commands them to be performed. This is because what made them wrong in the first place was simply that God commanded that they not be done. So if God were now to command differently with respect to those actions – command that they be done rather than that they not be done – then the moral character of them would change from being morally prohibited to being morally required.
However, there are two significant problems for divine command theory that need to be addressed:
Let us examine each of these problems in turn.
Suppose we had a list of God’s commands, how should we understand them? We might think of God as a one-person legislature with ourselves having a role similar to the judiciary and executive branches of government. God, as the one-person legislature, would make the commands/laws, and we, as the judiciary/executive, would have the task of interpreting and applying those commands/laws.
Of course, there would be differences. The U.S. judiciary, in interpreting the laws, often tries to determine what purpose the legislature had in passing particular laws, and whether that purpose accords with the U.S. Constitution. And sometimes the U.S. judiciary strikes down laws passed by the legislature as not in accord with the U.S. Constitution.
According to divine command theory, however, there wouldn’t be any comparable role for humans to have with respect to the commands of God. We couldn’t, for example, strike down any of God’s commands because they failed to accord with some independent standard. Thus, our role in interpreting and applying God’s commands would be narrowly circumscribed.
Even so, there are further problems understanding what that role would be.
This is because divine commands presumably could come into conflict. Thus, suppose we had one divine command that we should each love and care for the members of our family and another that we should love and care for the deserving poor wherever they are. Surely, these two commands would conflict when we are faced with the option of using our limited resources either to provide luxuries for the members of our family or to use those same resources to provide for the basic needs of the deserving poor elsewhere. Here we seem to require some kind of a background theory that compares what good would be accomplished in each case, as well as weighs the competing obligations involved, and then makes a recommendation about what should be done.
Yet divine command theory does not provide any such background theory for resolving conflicts between commands. According to the theory, each command is obligatory simply because it is commanded by God. Conflicts that arise among God’s commands could be appropriately resolved only by another command of God that indicates which command is to have priority. This is because, according to divine command theory, the resolution always could go either way. So there is no way for us to figure out, in advance, how it should go. This, then, would leave us with a very minimal role when interpreting or applying the commands of God, and in cases where those commands conflict, we would be at a complete loss as to what to do.
Another problem with divine command theory is how to determine what God has actually commanded us to do. It would seem that divine command theorists maintain that God’s commands are communicated through special revelations to particular individuals or groups. But if the commands of God are made known only to a select few, how are others to know what those commands are or when they are reasonably bound to obey them? Presumably, people can be morally bound to obey only by commands they know about and have reason to accept.
To add an additional complication, different individuals and groups have claimed to be recipients of different special revelations that conflict in ways which would support conflicting moral requirements. Of course, if some of those who claim to have received a special revelation rise to power, they may be able to force obedience on the rest. But if that happens, others may have no independent reason to go along with that forceful imposition.
To deal with these problems of divine command theory, some philosophers have distinguished between general and special revelations as sources of God’s commands. According to Stephen Evans, “[General] revelation is the knowledge of God that God makes possible through observation of the natural world and through reflections on human experiences that are universal and commonly accessible.”5 This is, of course, to recognize creation as a relatively independent source of moral requirements. Most importantly, it has the effect of radically modifying divine command theory. As the theory was originally formulated, moral requirements were determined simply by the commands of God. God could make anything right or wrong simply by commanding differently without making any change in our human nature or the circumstances of our lives.
Yet faced with conflicting special revelations, what else were divine command theorists to do? There was a clear need to appeal to a common ground to deal with apparently conflicting requirements of different special revelations. So that common ground was taken to be provided by normative requirements (i.e., the dos and don’ts) that are grounded in our nature and circumstances. Of course, it is also open for divine command theorists to claim that their own favored special revelation provides the best interpretation of the normative requirements that are grounded in our nature and our circumstances. At the same time, atheists and agnostics could also accept those normative requirements that are grounded in our nature and circumstances as their sole basis for moral requirements. For the religious person, however, there remain two sources of morality:
Hence, there still is the problem of what should be done if and when these two purported sources of morality come into conflict, especially in the public arena.
Attempting to deal with just this problem, John Rawls has argued that in the public arena, citizens should conduct their fundamental discussions within the framework of public reason, appealing only to reasons that others “can reasonably be expected to endorse.”6 Since not all citizens in liberal, pluralistic societies can reasonably be expected to share the same religious perspective, Rawls proposed that reliance on public reason rule out any role for religious considerations in public debate over fundamental issues in such societies. This is because legislation must be sufficiently supported by reasons that are accessible to everyone to whom that legislation applies, and religious reasons are usually not claimed to have this general accessibility.
Now it might be objected that the relevant religious reasons are accessible to virtually everyone and so this would serve to suffice to justify legislation that is based on them. For example, to assert that Christian moral teachings as such are accessible to everyone is to say that these teachings are accessible as part of a unique Christian salvation history, which has, as key events, an Incarnation, a Redemptive Death, and a Resurrection. But let’s examine this claim.
Surely, some religious moral teachings can be given a justification that is independent of the religion in which they are found (e.g., the parable of the Good Samaritan7) – a justification that is accessible to virtually everyone on the grounds that virtually everyone would be able to understand that it would be unreasonable to reject those religious moral teachings so justified.8 But the claim we are considering is not about justifying religious teachings in this way. Rather, it claims that religious moral teachings are justified as part of a distinctive religious tradition, with the consequence that it would be unreasonable for virtually anyone to reject them on that account.
But is this the case? Surely, for example, many Christian moral teachings are understandable to both Christians and non-Christians alike, but the sense of “accessible” we have been using implies more than this. It implies that persons can be morally blamed for failing to abide by such requirements because they can come to understand that these requirements apply to them as part of a unique Christian salvation history, which has, as key events, an Incarnation, a Redemptive Death, and a Resurrection, and that it would be unreasonable for them to fail to abide by them on that account. So understood, it would seem that Christian moral teachings as such are not accessible to everyone. Too many non-Christians, who seem otherwise moral, do not recognize the authority of Christian moral teachings as such, even though they may grant that some of these teachings have an independent justification. And the same would hold true here for non-Christian religious moral teachings as well.
Accordingly, religious moral teachings as such cannot serve as a substitute for accessible substantive reasons, like a set of constraints modeled somewhat after those found in the U.S. Constitution or the European Convention of Human Rights, which are needed, along with democratic procedural reasons, to morally justify legislation that everyone should abide by. If legislation is to be morally justified, there must always be accessible procedural and substantive reasons, which, taken together, constitute a sufficient justification to coercively require everyone to abide by that legislation. Accordingly, our ethical norms require us to provide sufficient nonreligious justifications for whatever coercive measures we want to impose on others.
Yet it is also important to realize that our ethical norms have an even more significant role to play with respect to religion. This is because it has long been argued that our ethical norms are incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. An early formulation of this argument, purportedly attributed to Epicurus (341–270 BCE), went as follows:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Over the centuries, this argument, expressed in one way or another, has given rise to what has been called the problem of evil. This is the problem of whether, in light of our ethical norms, an all-good, all-powerful God is compatible with the evil that exists in the world.
Now in the classical world, the problem of evil might have at least sometimes been taken as a challenge to the very existence of God or gods. The historical evidence here is a bit mixed. For example, even Epicurus, the purported author of the above argument, allowed that gods might exist, although they had nothing to do with human affairs.
During the Middle Ages, however, the problem of evil was definitely taken to be limited to the challenge of providing some explanation for why an all-good, all-powerful God would permit the evil that we find in the world. Virtually no one during the Middle Ages thought that the evil in the world was incompatible with the very existence of the God of traditional theism. Yet with the coming of the European Enlightenment, and especially in the writing of David Hume and Baron d’Holbach, just such an interpretation of the problem of evil began to emerge.
Later in the 19th century, Charles Darwin was deeply troubled by the problem of evil, particularly with regard to the natural evil in the world. Just a few months after publishing his The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote to Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a staunch believer:
I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a species of caterpillar] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.9
Darwin clearly thought that his theory of evolution made it even more difficult to show that an all-good, all-powerful God was compatible with all the evil in the world.
In the 20th century, John Mackie restated the problem of evil in its more challenging form as follows:
God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must and cannot consistently adhere to all three.10
Yet today the tide has seemingly changed because it is widely held by theists and atheists alike that Alvin Plantinga essentially solved the problem of evil as formulated by Mackie.11 What Plantinga was thought to have shown is that it may not be within God’s power to bring about a world containing moral good but no moral evil, and so the existence of at least some evil in the world raises no problem at all for the existence of the God of traditional theism.12 Plantinga argued that this is because to bring about a world containing moral good, God would have to permit persons to act freely, and it may well be that in every possible world where God actually permits persons to act freely, everyone would suffer from a malady that Plantinga labeled “Transworld Depravity,” which meant that everyone would act wrongly at least to some degree. Accepting Plantinga’s defense, both theists and atheists have been willing to grant that it may be logically impossible for God to create a world with moral agents like ourselves that does not also have at least some moral evil in it. Thus, it is generally agreed by theists and atheists alike that a good God is logically compatible with some moral evil, and the only question they now want to pursue is how probable or improbable it is that God is compatible with all the evil that exists in the world.
Nevertheless, there is a better way to approach the problem of evil posed by Mackie. The general approach favored by Plantinga and others has been to come up with possible, even plausible, constraints on God’s power that would serve to account for evil in the world. Yet what about seeing evil in the world as required by God’s goodness rather than simply being required by constraints on God’s power?13 Surely, we have no difficulty seeing at least some of the natural evil in the world in this light. Think, for example, of the pain most of us experience when we get too close to fire. Clearly, a good God would want us to experience pain in such contexts. Now consider a doctor who pushes and shoves her way through a crowded subway in order to come to the aid of someone who is having a heart attack. Or consider your not being fully honest with a temporarily depressed friend to keep him from doing something he would deeply regret later.14 Arguably, a good God would have no difficulty permitting (hence, not interfering with) such minor moral wrongs, given the greater evil that would thereby be prevented. That admission appears to be all that is needed to solve the problem of evil posed by Mackie, but it is a solution based on an appeal to God’s goodness rather than simply to any constraint on God’s power.15 So the idea is to appeal to God’s goodness to explain why his power has not been exercised in a certain regard rather than appeal to (a limitation of) God’s power to explain why he has not done some particular good.
Notice that underlying this alternative approach to solving the problem of evil posed by Mackie is a commitment to the following moral principle.
Every moral agent has reason not to interfere with the free actions of wrongdoers when permitting the slightly harmful consequences of those actions would lead to securing some significant moral good, in some cases maybe just that of the freedom of the wrongdoers themselves, or to preventing some significant moral evil.
Clearly, noninterference holds of ourselves, but it also holds of God, and, on that account, it seems to permit a solution to the problem of evil posed by Mackie. And this seems right. The morality that is operative here is appropriately a morality that applies to all moral agents, ourselves as well as God.
Yet what we now need to do is turn to the task of determining what moral principle or principles holding of God and ourselves apply to the degree and amount of moral evil in the world. This new task need not be seen as moving from a logical problem of evil to something else – an evidential problem of evil where the existence of God is no longer an issue of logical possibility or logical impossibility but rather one of probability or improbability. Rather, in seeking to determine the compatibility of God and the degree and amount of moral evil in our world, there is no reason to think that we are dealing with a really different kind of problem of evil from the one posed by Mackie. This looks like just another logical problem of evil where the question at issue is whether there is some other moral principle that holds of ourselves, and should hold of God as well, which is consistent or inconsistent with the existence of God.
Now from our discussion of both consequential and nonconsequential theories of ethics, one such principle that immediately comes to the fore is the Pauline principle that we should never do evil that good may come of it.
Of course, the Pauline principle has been rejected as an absolute principle. This is because, as we noted in the previous chapter, there clearly seem to be exceptions to it when the resulting evil or harm is:
Yet despite the belief that there are exceptions to the principle, and despite the disagreement over the extent of those exceptions, the Pauline principle still plays an important role in ethical theory, as we have seen in Chapter 4.
Given, then, that there are standard exceptions to the Pauline principle, might not God’s permission of evil fall under them? Well, consider how morally constrained these standard exceptions to the Pauline principle are. They allow us to do evil that good may come of it only when the evil is trivial, easily reparable, or the only way to prevent a far greater harm to innocents. So it is difficult to see how God’s widespread permission of the harmful consequences of significantly evil actions, which is not of these sorts, could be a justified exception to the Pauline principle.
In addition, the standard exceptions that are allowed only seem to be allowed because the agents involved lack the power to accomplish the good or avoid the evil in any other way. Yet clearly God is not subject to any such limitation of power. Thus, God can negotiate crowded subways without harming anyone in the slightest. God can also prevent a temporarily depressed person from committing suicide without lying to them, and God can save all twenty civilian hostages without having to execute any one of them. Consequently, none of these exceptions to the Pauline principle that are permitted to agents like ourselves, because of our limited power, would hold for God. So God, if he exists, would not be subject to any causal constraints with respect to preventing evils. Nor would it make sense to say that where we are just subject to causal constraints, God is subject to logical constraints, because that would make God impossibly less powerful than we are.
Now it might be objected here that while God cannot do evil that good may come of it, God could permit evil that good may come of it. Of course, moral philosophers do recognize a distinction between doing and permitting evil. Doing evil is normally worse than permitting evil. But when the evil is significant and one can easily prevent it, then permitting evil can become morally equivalent to doing it. The same kind of moral blame attaches to both actions. Think of someone who permitted a family member to be brutally raped. Surely the “permitting” here has the same moral status as a “doing.” Likewise, God’s permitting significantly evil consequences when those consequences can easily be prevented is morally equivalent to God’s doing something that is seriously wrong.
It might also be objected that God is not really intending evil consequences at all but merely foreseeing their occurrence, or, put another way, God is intentionally doing something, that is, making us free, but then he is only foreseeing the evil consequences that result therefrom. Yet God is said to be permitting those evil consequences, and permitting is an intentional act. So if God intends not to stop the evil consequences of our actions when he can easily do so, then he is not merely foreseeing those consequences.
So, given that God is not subject to any causal constraint with respect to the prevention of horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions, and given that permitting evil can be as bad as doing it and that God’s permitting evil could not be just a foreseeing of it, the question remains: Could, in light of our ethical norms, an all-good, all-powerful God be compatible with all the evil that exists in the world? Surely this is an ethical question as important as any we face in our lives.16
We started off this chapter with the central question that Socrates raises in Plato’s Euthyphro: Are actions right because God commands them, or does God command actions because they are right? We then pursued the answer given by divine command theorists that actions are right simply because God commands them. We saw how divine command theorists did not want to rely on the normative structure of human nature and the circumstances of our lives as a source of morality, but that they were forced to do so because of the various problems facing their theory. We then considered what to do when the requirements of the normative structure of our nature and circumstances come into conflict with the requirements of special revelations in the public arena. Here we saw that fairness required that there be sufficient reasons accessible to the minority to justify coercively requiring it to accept the will of the majority. Finally, we considered whether the norms of morality might actually be in conflict with the very existence of an all-good, all-powerful God owing to the severity and amount of evil in the world.