A belief in God and also the possession of ethical goodness are often claimed to be associated, and even dependent upon each other. Defences of religion against atheist criticisms typically invoke the good works done by religions and their followers. But, for this claim to be meaningful, the link between God and goodness wants to be established; why is doing God’s work good? We may suppose that moral goodness is defined by God, in that no matter God wills us to try to is sweet by definition. That idea will sit well with a lot of theistic believers.

There may be a drawback with this view, however. The matter is that it renders moral goodness as one thing entirely arbitrary. If the definition of moral goodness involves nothing alternative than the decree of an omnipotent, omniscient being, then what’s after all morally sensible might are anything. Murder and torture might have been moral if God had willed us to act thus, on this read. This robs morally good acts of their essential goodness, and reduces morality to more than blind obedience. It goes against the intuitive read that morality depends on something objective and unchangeable.

It wouldn’t help to argue that the will of God is special as a result of his omnipotence and omniscience. No quantity of data can improve arbitrary picks, and if God defines moral goodness, then nothing different than God’s will is on the market to ‘recognize’ and assist in the selection of morally good acts. This read additionally reduces the standing of God’s omnibenevolence to something utterly trivial. It’s easy to meet a customary that you simply alone outline.

To avoid these issues, a theistic believer would possibly take the opposite approach, and suppose that moral goodness is outlined by something objective and external to God. This has the advantage of giving substance to assertions of God’s goodness, since there could be a normal of goodness to that God matches perfectly, in the same approach that there may be a commonplace of efficiency and information. It also makes God’s commands to be good one thing more than arbitrary demands for obedience.

Unfortunately, this feature gives an excessive amount of weight for many theists. If the great is something external to and independent from God, then God is irrelevant when it comes to morality. God failed to produce goodness, and so is subject to it. This seems to contradict the essential theistic beliefs that God is omnipotent and therefore the creator and author of reality.

It additionally means that religious believers have no bigger claim to the concept of morality than atheists. A cursory look at history would seem in-tune with this final point. Worse still, to avoid the issues stated in this text, it should be held that a belief in God is irrelevant to morality practicing moral beliefs.