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Well that I can talk about! It's a basic misunderstanding because Plato correctly perceived the gods but did not know about God, so his ability to reason about this was limited. I.e. The Euthyphro dilemma is only coherent in the context of paganism.
But I should take the question in the spirit in which it was intended and apply it to God rather than the gods (again, entirely different categories). So it's like this:
Is something good because God says it is good? Or does God say a thing is good because there is some higher standard to which God must conform?
Answer: No.
Goodness is rooted in the intrinsic and unchanging nature of God. It is neither arbitrary (God does not choose what is good) nor is it imposed externally (there is no higher authority to which God submits).
In other words, false dilemma, and always has been, and this has been addressed probably thousands if not millions of times in the last two thousand years, so it's confusing to me that people keep bringing it up. It's not like they weren't talking about this in AD 300 and giving the same answer that I am now.
N.b. I definitely phrased that poorly and I know it seems to imply that you're dumb or something, which is definitely not how I feel. I was an atheist for something like seven years and found it convincing too. Just, it turns out that, like almost any group, most Christians are not so bright and aren't very capable of understanding let alone defending their position, and especially in the West they've also lost touch with huge portions of their tradition that would shed light on the rest, so they're not even playing with a full deck as it were. This is a reflection on that sad situation, not any commentary on your competence. Thanks for the conversation.
Sorry, just doesn’t make any sense to me. I tried to wrap my head around it. I can easily understand the horns and of course, doing away with the god hypothesis altogether, and various criticisms of those positions, but your answer just sounds like a flat denial of the obvious by a motivated party. But anyway, I appreciate the attempt.
Well it's simple:
Is there a higher power to which God is beholden? No. So it's not that.
Is something made good by God arbitrarily saying so? No. So it can't be that either.
Indeed, in Christian thought God cannot even be arbitrary, but is always, by nature, perfect. So anything He says must be in alignment with His perfect nature. So if He calls something good, He's doing so not arbitrarily, but because it is in alignment with His nature.
Therefore, 'goodness' is something like equivalent to 'in alignment with [God's] nature'. And God's nature is not arbitrary, but necessary. It simply is what it is, and could not be anything else.
Flat denial, I say. Refusal to answer an uncomfortable question does not render it invalid.
Even if I were to grant that something by nature perfect exists, I don't see how that is a god, much less your god in particular.
These are two completely different (and sort of contradictory) complaints.
Let me put it this way:
Atheist: We evolved from lower apes.
Fundie: So you say. But did the apes turn into us, in which case there should be no more apes? Or did we evolve from something other than apes, in which case why are we so similar to apes rather than the other thing?
Atheist: ...Some of the apes evolved into humans while others did not.
Fundie: Aha! You are refusing to answer with one of the horns of my lemma. Why even talk to you if you won't answer?
Now,
You: Is it A or B?
Me: Neither, it is C.
You: Aha! You refuse to answer an uncomfortable question!
So that's the first complaint down.
As to the second (where you note that I did in fact answer), I fail to see what your ability to understand the argument has to do with its validity.
And you are definitely misunderstanding, since I'm not arguing that "if something by nature perfect exists it is a god and mine in particular."
My argument is: According to Christian understanding, God's nature is the standard of goodness itself.
To elaborate: God could not be other than what God is, so it's not arbitrary. And there is no other reference frame from which something like 'good' could be evaluated, so it's not external.
Now, you can say that doesn't make sense to you, or you can say that it's a silly thing to believe. That's fine. The point -- the only point here -- is that neither horn of Euthyphro's dilemma is applicable to Christianity in the first place. So expecting me to tell you which of two inapplicable concepts is applicable (let alone correct) is... not productive.
Do you want to eat your cake and therefore not have it? No. Do you want to keep it and therefore not eat it? No. False dilemma, I want both. My cake is special, by definition.
If goodness means in alignment with god’s nature, god is not good, he’s just In alignment with his own nature. And if god’s nature is not arbitrary, goodness is external.
To say that He is good is to say that He is in alignment with His nature, sure, since His nature is the benchmark of goodness.
This would seem to be unsupported.
You wish to drape your god in a positive attribute, recognized among men. But you cannot accept the judgment of men upon which your compliment rests, so you try to define it away. Your definition of goodness is useless in any other context. If I say, 'why did god order the destruction of the canaanites, amalekites, the flood, the egyptian firstborns etc'? try and reply: ‘it was his nature, that was good’.
I'll reply that without hesitation. What's the problem?
Or do you suppose you're able to judge the actions of a transhumanly intelligent entity with access to understanding and wisdom vastly beyond anything to which we might hope to aspire?
Is temporal death an insurmountable evil in the face of an afterlife?
Look man you can disagree, but there's no internal contradiction here.
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