Some thoughts on morality and god

In his book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams wrote that “the development of the ethical consciousness means the collapse of relgion”, (p33) which seems disquieting to some of my classmates in the course of the contemporary ethics. Some of them said there is a namelist which could serve as a good counterexample of his contention. In the list there are philosophers such as Aquina and Kierkegard who are not only highly reflective but religious as well. Virtues in terms of divine command can still have their essential place within ethical theories and moral considerations. I think it is a quite interesting question.

A stringent version of Christian standpoint may like this: God creates everything including both the world and the values of the world, therefore the truth of moral life comes from God which is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, then comes the meta-ethical question that could be raised by Williams: what is the grounding of morality? To make the question clearer, is it that God decides moral truth, or that moral truth decides God’s decision? I think it is this question, in its form of “dialectical reasoning” which asks for the grounding of ehtics, that might undermines the foundation of religion.

(1) If moral truth is decided by God, why is “no killing” morally good rather then “killing”? If God chooses “no killing” as morally good because “It is good not to kill”, then the truth value of “it is good not to kill” is independent of God’s will. Thus God does not decide the moral truth, but only conforms to certain pre - existing truth. Thus God is not omnipotent.

(2) Or one might come up with the other answer that God considers “no killing” to be good not because “no killing is good anyway”, but just because God creates the truth value of “no killing is good”. Since moral truth is created by God’s will, you cannot ask why it is P to be morally good rather than Q without making reference to God’s will. However there remains the problem that God’s decision is random, because, if deciding “killing is good”, God is still omnibenevolent.

(3) One might move on to argue that one cannot – and should not—conjecture God’s will from his own perspective, since human intelligence is inferior to God and you never fully understand God’s plan. If this is the case, then it will turn out to be unreasonable for us to ask such a question: Can God disobey logical rules to create a round square? The fact that, according to human intelligence, there is no round square in the world, is by no means a promising way to show that God’s power is limited. But I don't think such response a good strategy.

Therefore I believe in the question of where does moral truth come from, theological answers are not that convincing. Of course it is a difficult task to seek the grounding of morality. Just as what Socrates asked in Euthyphro regarding the relationship between piety and gods, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”