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?
Continue reading Refuting divine command theory