Religion Before I Started This

Religion Before I started this course, my understanding of evil was very much the same as it is today. Evil is a necessary element in the universe, just as there is night and day, light and dark, for without it there would be nothing with which to compare good, thus good might not exist. It is much the same as friends and foes. Enemies actually enable an individual to define his or her friends, as well as whom she or he really is regarding their own character and ethics.

Whether something is right or wrong, good or evil, because God commands it or whether He commands it because it is right or wrong, is much like the question, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound," it is a question that no one truly knows the answer. According to Divine Command Theory, "things are morally good or bad, or morally obligatory, permissible, or prohibited, solely because of God's will or commands" (Divine pp).

The Divine Command Theory is held to be refuted by the Euthyphro dilemma, named after Plato's Euthyphro dialogue in which Socrates asks, "Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God" (Divine pp). The question cannot be answered because either answer opens the door for debate (Divine pp).

If the Divine Command Theory is true then "either morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good or morally good acts are morally good because they are willed by God" (Divine pp). However, if morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good, then good acts are independent of God's will, yet how can anything be good be independent of God's will (Divine pp).

Divine Command Theory is the ethical theory that says that what God wills or command determines the moral status of various actions, or in other words, "an act is right if and only if God wills or commands it...an act is wrong if and only if God forbids it" (Religion pp). Yet, this simply states what people are supposed to do, and does not take into account free will and individual accountability (Religion pp).

This is also a version of absolutism, for it claims that certain acts are right or wrong universally, whether or not one believes in God (Religion pp). Divine Command Theory presents two problems: There are many different interpretations of God's commands (and one would think that if God were God he would make the truth explicit so that it could be known). DCT presupposes God's existence. Religion pp). When faced with a situation, I generally seek the action.