Divine command theory is the idea that God’s commands are what determines whether things are morally right or wrong.

Believers believe that what God says is good is good, and what God says is bad is bad. But does God command certain things because they’re good? Or are those things good just because God commands them?

Divine command theory says it’s the latter. If the former was true, if God had reasons behind his judgments of certain acts as good or bad, that would be contrary to divine command theory. This would mean that there are important things that God did not create, and has no power over. It would also mean that we don’t need God to tell us what’s right and wrong, since we could just figure out for ourselves what the actual reasons behind morality are and what principles of behavior they entail.

So that first option doesn’t tend to be very popular with religious people. But it’s the only option that works.¹ If the second option was true, if morality was indeed defined solely by whatever God decided to command, rather than being based on some separate objective standard, that would make morality completely arbitrary and meaningless. If there was somebody who could just say that something was good, and that was how you defined good, then anything could be “good”.

It would mean that instead of saying you shall not murder, God could just as easily have said murder was the best thing in the world, and it would be so. Imagine a world where all believers think murder is always absolutely good, because God said so. Sounds bad, right? But how could it be bad if it was what God commanded? If you think that scenario would still be bad somehow, that proves that you have moral standards that are independent of what God says.

If you think God would never command something like that because he’s not like that, what makes you think that? The idea that God wouldn’t command a particular thing seems to be based on the assumption that the thing is evil, and God would never do something that’s evil, because God is good.

But what makes you think it is an evil thing? Evil is just whatever God happens to say is evil. Unless you reject divine command theory, the only thing making the bad thing bad is the arbitrary choice of God to call it bad. You have no reason to think he couldn’t have just as easily said the opposite. Divine command theory says he could have.²

According to divine command theory, “God would never command something evil” just means “God never commands things that God doesn’t command”, which is perfectly compatible with murder being something he does command. If you don’t think that evil things could have been good things if God had happened to make different decisions when he made up the rules of morality, then you don’t believe in divine command theory.

Another problem with divine command theory is that we have no commands from God regarding a lot of ethical issues. The laws given in the Bible have nothing to say about torture, or about child molestation. So I guess there is no right and wrong when it comes to those things, according to divine command theory.³

The Bible doesn’t say God gave humanity any general commands about moral issues for the first 2500 years or so. But sexual deviancy and murder and stuff are already considered morally wrong in the Bible during that time, before God gives Moses the law. How could those things have been wrong when there had been no divine commands about them?

But why would commands be what makes things good or bad, anyway? If God had told us what the speed of light was, is this what you would be asking: “Is the speed of light 299,792,458 m/s because God said so, or did God say so because that’s what it is?” No, you wouldn’t be asking that. It probably wouldn’t even occur to you to think that God telling us it was so might be why it was so, because that’s absurd. If God has anything to do with why that value is what it is, it’s because he made it that way, not because he said it was that way.

But when we’re talking about moral facts, for some reason we instead jump to the bizarre idea that those facts are somehow caused by someone telling us about those facts. Why do people who claim to believe morality is objective not think about it the same way they think about other objective facts?

Divine command theorists like to say you can’t have objective morality without God. Which is completely backwards. For morality to be objective, there have to be facts of morality that are independent of what anyone thinks. Divine command theory says morality depends entirely on what God thinks (and that he doesn’t even have any reasons for what he thinks), which would make morality subjective.

If morality was determined by divine commands, it would be meaningless to call God good. You would just be saying that he does whatever he wants. There’s nothing praiseworthy about that. You would just be saying that God does what God says is good. If he wanted to do something else, then he could just say that was what was good, and people would still call him good.

If God is “good” no matter what he actually does, then calling him “good” doesn’t actually tell us anything about him or about how we can expect him to behave. And nothing he does can be evidence either for or against his goodness.

If you said “It’s good to do what God commands”, then normally, you would be saying something. But not under divine command theory. That statement would become vacuous: “God commands you to do what God commands you to do.” Equating “good” with “what God commands” drains the meaning out of that statement. If you clam that “what God commands” is just what the word “good” means, then we lose the normal meaning of the word “good”, and this statement about what’s “good” is no longer clearly telling us to do anything.

Anyway, “what God commands” is not what the word “good” means. Words like “good” already mean something to everyone, and what people normally use those words to mean has nothing to do with anybody commanding anything.

It’s dishonest to try to assign a nonstandard meaning to a word that already means something else, and to pretend that your new meaning is just what that word means, and that anyone using the word the normal way is wrong. Generally the only reason people would do something like that is to trick people into feeling the same way about one concept as they already feel about another.

Where do Christians even get this idea, anyway? Do they not read the Bible? The Bible doesn’t agree with divine command theory. The Bible says if God was to kill the righteous along with the wicked, that would not be right. That only makes sense if there is a moral standard apart from God by which we can judge God’s actions.

The Bible says that at one point, God was giving people laws that were not good. And it says some of the laws that God gave through Moses were not truly good, and were in need of correction.⁴ That’s only possible if good is not defined by what God commands.

So what really defines morality? As even the Bible admits at one point, good and evil acts don’t affect God, they affect people. The morality of your actions is determined by how they affect people. God has nothing to do with it.

All of these problems with divine command theory exist even if God exists. But in reality, God doesn’t exist, which means it has yet another problem: The “divine commands” that people are basing their morality on were actually made up by imperfect humans, and a lot of these rules are actually bad ones. When people think these flawed rules are the commands of a God who can never be wrong about morality, this causes people to do evil and think they’re doing good.