Divine Command
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Divine Command
For a long time now people have discussed Socrates famous philosophical question, which in Nielsons updated language is, “is something good because God wills it or commands it or does God command it because it is good. Because Euthyphro is trying to discuss that the gods love the pious, Socrates come up with his question. He starts to think that the gods may disagree and then asks if the pious the pious because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it is the pious. The first part of Socrates questioning is implying that morality is independent of God and that God has to deal with morality just like the people he created. His questions also brings up that what is good is arbitrary and that if God would have made killing and stealing a virtue then they would be virtues. Which would mean that calling God good would not make sense because good is arbitrary. And also the natural law of humans tells us to do good and avoid evil, so if killing was a virtue we would still know that killing is wrong.
If something is good just because God commands it then it would seem that we have lucked out so far because what God has commanded has been good for mankind. But then again we would not know if what we were doing was really good; it might just seem good in our eyes because God commands it. But from Nielsons writing, we can say that for us to rely on what God is saying is good