DIVINE EPISTEMOLOGY OR DIVINE ONTOLOGY: DIVINE COMMANDS AND VALUES REVISITED

It is uncommon to come across literature in scholarly circles that gives attention to the divine metaethics, e.g., the Divine Command Theory (DCT). When the effort is made to address divine-based metaethical claims, the entire project is couched at best in an air of apologetics or at worst in ridicule. Many assume that Plato put the last nail in the coffin for divine based metaethics when he introduced a dilemma for its proponents in the Euthyphro. Hence many moral theorists ignore divine-based metaethical claims altogether or, if they are sympathetic to them, try, in a painstaking way, to respond to the Socratic dilemma. The project of this paper will not continue this confused obeisance to Plato. I will neither ignore divine metaethical claims as illegitimate for metaethical concerns nor try to show how one can solve the Socratic dilemma. My aim is short: I intend to show that Plato set us in the wrong direction about how we are to view divine based metaethics. I take it that Plato and other theorists who try to bury or ignore divine-based metaethics were and are misguided. As such I aim to show that there is no dilemma for divine based theists to solve. I will show this by arguing that divine metaethics should be grounded epistemically, not ontological.

Broadly speaking, metaethics is concerned with the meaning and source of ethical terms like right, wrong, good and bad. A theistic approach to metaethics argues that God somehow grounds ethics. On this view, God is the basis of moral rightness and wrongness and/or that He is the basis of moral value. Let us call the thesis that ethics depends on God, the Divine Metaethics (DM) thesis.
Opponents to the DM thesis have maintained that such a relationship entails a dilemma. This dilemma has its origin in Plato's Euthyphro, where Socrates asks Euthyphro, "For consider: is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? Or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?"[1] Accordingly, either way Socrates' question is answered precludes any hope that a grounding relationship exists between God and ethics. Generally the dilemma is described as follows:
a)If the theist answers that the relationship obtains in so far as the source and meaning of morally right/wrong actions and moral goodness/badness is God, then ethics would be arbitrary.
b)If the theist answers that the relationship obtains in so far as God informs us of the source and meaning of morally right/wrong and moral goodness/badness via his decrees, then God is redundant.
Let us call the above dilemma the DM dilemma.[2] Supposedly the dilemma follows given the theist's commitment to the antecedent of either (a) or (b). Taking the offensive, the critics claim that the consequent of (a) and (b) are unacceptable.

Considering the First Horn
The first horn of the DM dilemma is an ontological assertion about what ethics is in so far as God is its source (in virtue God’s will or nature). Accordingly, actions and values are morally right/wrong and good/bad solely because God wills them to be so or because they are grounded in his being. It is interesting the claim that God is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the objective moral realm can be found in the works of both theists and non-theists alike. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, claimed that if there is no God there can be only descriptive facts in the world, no normative facts.[3] The contemporary atheist Kai Nielsen remarks:
Perhaps there are human purposes, purposes to be found in life, and we can and do have them even in a Godless world, but without God there can be no one overarching purpose, no one basic scheme of human existence….[4]
Representing the contemporary theist perspective, William Lane Craig similarly remarks that “if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is a Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted.”[5]

First Interpretation of the First Horn
As stated, theists who would hold the first horn may claim that God's will somehow structures certain types of actions and things, in their very natures, to be morally constituted, such that there are objectively right or wrong actions and morally good or bad things. That some actions and things are morally constituted is as much a part of the furniture of the universe as physical properties and objects are part of the universe. How the universe acquired these non-natural, objective moral features is solely due to God.[6]
If God has this relationship to metaethics, proponents of the DM dilemma charge, then what counts as "moral" under the description of the first horn is a contingent, non-cognitive and capricious affair. It just so happens that in the actual world, certain actions (e.g., rape) are morally wrong and certain things (e.g., persons) have value. In other logically possible worlds they might not have a normative status at all. These are possible worlds where God does not will that they have any normative status. Accordingly, critics claim, if such were the case, God could have willed in the actual world that acts of coveting thy neighbor's wife have the property of being moral as opposed to having the property of being immoral.[7] Since God's will is the sole arbitrator for deciding which state of affairs obtains in the actual world, God can have no reasons for willing either way he does. In some logically possible world, instances of "coveting thy neighbor's wife" are moral because God in some mysterious sort of way placed "moralness" on them there. Thus the result of relating God to ethics according to this first interpretation of the first horn is undesirable for the theist.
Now a theist could object to the critic's charge of arbitrariness. She could argue that as far as actions are concerned, God would not will or command that infidelity be morally permissible because he is a loving God. Here God's will is constrained by God’s loving, benevolent nature. Thus actions are not arbitrarily morally right or wrong; they are right or wrong because they are willed, forbidden or commanded by a benevolent God. William Craig holds that our moral duties are “determined by the commands, not merely of a supreme potentate, but of a just and loving God. God is essentially compassionate, fair, kind, impartial and so forth, and His commandments are reflections of His own character.”[8] In short, moral decrees derive from God’s loving character. The theist makes this move in order to establish an objective, non-arbitrary basis for ethics and to ensure that the status of moral judgments is not determined independently of and above the sovereignty of God. However, this move does not adequately respond to the DM dilemma for the following reason. By admitting that God's will is constrained by His benevolent nature, the theist would also be admitting that actions are genuinely morally right or wrong, independently of God. After all, why would a theist object to God willing that infidelity be morally right unless she understood that God is also constrained by a standard of what could be classified as morally right and wrong? Surely the proponent of DM has a response. She will proclaim that God is “benevolence” or “goodness itself.” A noted proponent of this view, Greg Bahnsen, provides us with the following clear description of it:
Certain behavior is good because God approves of it, and God approves of it because it is the creaturely expression of His holiness -- in other words, it is good. To be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of it. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot be ascertained independent of Him.[9]
This proclamation simply begs the question as to what goodness is. What is good is replaced by what God approves, which in turn is replaced by what is good.
To highlight the circularity of this view another way, consider what its proponents consider to be the basis of rightness and wrongness, viz., what a benevolent God wills. But we can ask what they means when they say God is benevolent? The obvious response for them to give is that God is benevolent because he always does what is right. With this reply in hand, we should now see the DM proponents’ circular logic. As we saw earlier, they equate “what is right” with “what God wills.” So to say God is benevolent is to say God does what he wills. If we are looking at what God does to discern his benevolence, then short of admitting to an independent standard of benevolence, theists like Bahnsen must say that benevolence is whatever God does or wills.
Equally problematic is Bahnsen’s claim that “we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of it.” This is a rather extreme epistemic claim about axiology. It entails that short of God’s revelation, no one can discern what constitutes good behavior. Does this mean that all non-Christians are hopelessly lost as to what goes by the name good behavior? It surely seems so. Of course Bahnsen would reply that his reference to revelation includes general revelation, which is available to all. But this won’t work, for how does the non-Christian know what behavior God approves given his exposure just to general revelation? Is God’s moral approval known by reflecting on creation? This is a highly dubious claim and it suggests that special revelation is superfluous. After all, why seek God’s 10 Commandments in the book of Exodus when they are accessible from nature? Perhaps rather the non-Christian’s recognition of God’s approval is known by intuition? But like the former claim about God’s general revelation, intuition has its own set of problems.
It is no compromise of God’s glory to hold that his benevolence is measured by his actions, which in turn are measured by an independent standard of benevolence. Theists like Bahnsen make the common mistake of confusing what God makes to be true and what God knows to be true. Consider the following analogy from the benevolent parent example. A benevolent parent would command her child “do not touch the stove” because she cares for her child. If the child asks, “why should I not touch the stove,” the parent could simply say, “because I said so.” Of course, the parent does not mean that her command is capricious. The prescriptive “because” here does not refer to the act of touching the stove but to the act of obedience. As things turn out, there are reasons why the child should not touch the stove (e.g., physical pain and damage to the child’s body). So the parent could say the command to not touch the stove is also obligatory because the act of touching the stove is detrimental to her child. Thus the parent’s command is not arbitrary. So the reason why touching the stove is wrong[10] has nothing to do with the benevolent character of the parent. Whether the parent gives the command or not, the act of touching the stove is wrong in virtue of the effects that follow for the one who touches it. This story simply shows that benevolent parents would never command their children to do what they already know to be wrong. By analogy it illustrates two points about God’s commands. First, it shows that certain actions are wrong or right independently of God’s command to do or not to do them. The fact that God commands us not to do certain things is because he knows that they are immoral and as a benevolent being, could not command that we act to inflict harm to our self or others. However, God commanding in this benevolent way in no way leads to or is identical to the ontological assertion that God constitutes moral states of affairs.
Secondly the story notes the distinction between some action being wrong and some wrong action being prohibited. Actions that are prohibited merely exact obedience whether or not performing them entails doing something wrong. A child who disobeys her parent’s prohibition to eat food for a week is actually doing what is right although she acts from disobedience. Thus disobedience is not intrinsically wrong, particularly when starvation is a threat. However, when an action is neither right nor wrong, to fail to do it can be indirectly wrong if it is done out of disrespect. This is an important point to mention since the Bible is filled with commands from God to do things that are neither morally right nor wrong in themselves (e.g., like the command or prohibition against eating meat mixed with milk or the command to follow the copious dietary laws) and commands to do or refrain from doing things that are right or wrong in themselves (e.g., like do not rape or murder).
Not withstanding definitive problems of what makes actions right/wrong and how we come to know that actions are either right or wrong, DM proponents also have problems defending their version of axiology. Theists of this sort have traditionally held that God is the source of values. As the "source" of values, God is intrinsically valuable and anything reflecting God's image is likewise valuable. In this "platonic" way, God represents the eternal, maximum Good itself, and anything participating in His nature in any degree likewise has value, though to a lesser degree. For example, theists hold that humans have value and the basis for this claim is the presence of the Imago Dei in human nature. Accordingly, human nature is qualitatively similar to the divine nature. This can be taken to mean that humans are valuable because of their possession of, or potential for, various forms of rationality that God possesses, viz., self-determination, moral reflection, social discourse and personal preferences.[11] God's role in metaethics then is twofold: (1) He functions as a maximum, objective standard of value and (2) He creates humans who reflect this intrinsic value and who are the objects of moral judgments. I do not dispute these two claims; however, I do not think that talk of "source" should be taken in a robust way such that God plays a major, necessary role in value production. Those who take this robust approach towards God as the source of value, generally claim that God is a necessary condition for value.[12] Here things in the universe have value only if God exists. Championing this position, theist J. P. Moreland writes:
On an evolutionary secular scenario,.. [human] beings are nothing special. The universe came from a Big Bang. It evolved to us through a blind process of chance and necessity. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about human beings in terms of having moral non-natural properties. The same process that coughed up humans beings coughed up amoebas; there is nothing special about being human. The view that being human is special is guilty of specie-ism-an unjustifiable bias toward one’s own species….There is no point to history[13]
This theistic driven axiology also finds support in the work of William Craig. For Craig, God is the standard of value, where nothing else could be that standard. Thus without God, or where naturalism obtains, we would live in a world without value where nihilism reigns. As Craig notes:
The question might be pressed as to why God’s nature should be taken to be definitive of goodness. But, unless we are nihilists, we have to recognize some ultimate standard of value, and God seems to be the least arbitrary stopping point….[because] God is a being worthy of worship.[14]
I reject this robust axiological claim for two reasons. First, Moreland and Craig fail to explain why valuable things in this world require a transcendent foundation. Surely naturalists would hold that all things are constituted by randomly organized molecules but would not be required to hold that they are identical to them. On naturalists’ and theists’ accounts, rationality is the content of human value. Naturalists and theists differ primarily[15] over the mechanism responsible for the rationality. Thus upon reflection, we see that humans are not valuable per se because of the mechanisms responsible for their possession of value; rather humans are valuable because they possess value. Thus it can be asked, what difference does it make what kind of causal factor(s) are responsible for producing rationality? Whether God or naturalistic evolution is responsible for our having rationality, it does not matter. The fact is we have rationality. If there is no God, then naturalistic evolution perhaps is the only alternative to account for our rationality. It would be ad hoc for a theist to admit that humans are valuable in light of their rationality but then to deny this claim if it turns out that rationality were the result of blind Darwinian forces. Thus theists like Moreland and Craig confuse the causes of value with our being valuable.
But what about value simpliciter? Craig specifically addressed this issue and it is unclear what Craig means by standard. The word “standard” in the context of determining value asks for a definition of value as Craig correctly points out. This much is clear, but why is a definition of goodness difficult to come by? If God is required to define goodness, how is it that God does so? If God did not exist, is it even conceivable that a toothache is good and drinking clean water to stay alive a bad thing? But suppose God is definitive of goodness, we can always ask the question, “Why is God definitive of goodness?” Craig’s answer is that “God is a being worthy of worship.” But this answer simply places us back where we started since God would be worthy of worship because in part he is good. Should we offer higher-order definitive explanations of goodness (as in this last question), or should we accept goodness as something earthly or non-supernatural? In this latter case, we could simply take goodness as some unanalyzable non-natural property that certain actions and things possess or we could take goodness as some analyzable property of actions (e.g., psychological and physical pleasure) that is teleologically oriented towards some enity’s well-being. In either case, an assent to God is not required.
Now Craig, Moreland and other DM proponents would object that no argument has been offered for my last claim. And on this note, I am not convinced that an argument needs to be given. Surely to ask whether feeding the poor is good or not, is an ill-placed question. What makes such actions good is that they promote a human’s well-being. What is not ill-placed is the question why God is needed to affirm these types of actions as good. To retreat to the position that human well-being ought to be pursued because they are made in God’s image is another instance of confusing the cause of some thing’s value with its being valuable. Surely the issue of goodness simpliciter is the latter concern.

Second Interpretation of the First Horn
For other theists, the claim may be that actions are either "morally right" or "morally wrong" and things "morally good" or "morally bad" because of how God feels about them and not because of any objective properties within them. For example, to say that God likes or prefers X type of actions is to say X type actions are morally right and to say that God hates or does not prefer X type of actions is to say X type of actions are morally wrong. Thus God decrees actions to be either moral or immoral based on how he feels about them. Unfortunately then, if it is God who decrees certain actions to be either moral or immoral, based simply on the pleasure or pain state they place him in, then the basis of morality is non-cognitive and capricious. That is, if God says "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," He can have no prior reason for willing this act as immoral other than that this type of act places Him in a certain unpleasant emotive state or because He simply dislikes it. Moreover again, such a scenario equally leaves open the counterfactual “If God willed that adultery be permissible, then it would be permissible.” Such a decree would stem from God’s affinity to adulterous behavior. As any critic of the DM thesis would point out, this is not an entailment from the first horn the DM theorists would want to accept.
As I have tried to show, theists have failed to show how ethics depends on God, such that ethics is not arbitrary, non-cognitive or redundant. Until theists provide a theistic basis for ethics without these problems, the criticism of the DM dilemma stands. Theists have long tried to solve the DM dilemma, particularly from the point of view of the Divine Command Theory.[16]

Considering the Second Horn
Perhaps the second horn of the dilemma is a better option to ground ethics in God for the theist. This is so because both interpretations of the first horn allow for the absurdity of God's will-being non-cognitive, unlimited and the sole, arbitrary foundation of ethical actions and values. Again, the second horn asserts that actions and things are morally constituted for reasons independent of God's handiwork. Here God is related to ethics in that He knows what types of actions are morally right or morally wrong and what things are morally good or morally bad. Thus His decrees for moral agents express what He already knows to be true about ethics and the moral order. Unfortunately, critics claim, this entails that the second horn of the dilemma offers little hope for the theist as well. For even if it is true that God's decrees correctly describe what is morally right/wrong and what is morally good/bad, given the problems in (a), God cannot be the basis for what such terms mean or for what they are. The charge then is that God occupies a redundant position in a theist's metaethical theory. Accordingly, God knows that there are reasons for why certain actions are morally right/wrong and why some things have value and others do not. His decrees for us simply reflect this knowledge. These reasons, then, become the foundation of ethics and God simply plays a secondary role as a divine ethical informer.
Of course accepting the second horn requires that the theist answers two questions: How can there be reasons that ground our ethical claims about moral rightness, moral wrongness, moral goodness and moral badness without God? And how is God not redundant in an ethically autonomous world?

The Theist’s Triumphal Acceptance of the Second Horn
In answering these questions, I argue for the acceptance of the second horn. Let’s consider the first question. Our option for grounding ethics in the second horn does not lead to ethical nihilism and skepticism. For example, one can take a kantian view and claim that child abuse and rape are wrong, whether God exists or not, simply because such acts violate the autonomy of their victims. Or one can appeal to empirical considerations and take a utilitarian ethical view. Here such actions as child abuse and rape are wrong, whether God exists or not, because of the amount of disutility (in terms of pain or psychological damage) such acts produce. The ethical judgments or truths corresponding to such actions (e.g., it is wrong to cause pain for pleasure sake or it is wrong to restrict a person’s autonomy irrespective of the person’s goodwill) are necessarily true are not made true by God, albeit they are platonic.
Some theists argue that platonic truths that exist a se are hard to comprehend. This is the position that J.P. Moreland and William L. Craig take.
It is difficult…even to comprehend this view [non-theistic ethics]. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists? It is hard to know what to make of this….it is bewildering when in the absence of any people, justice itself exists….it is hard to know what it is for a moral value to exist as a mere abstraction.[17]
This quote is a bit surprising coming from these theists, particularly Moreland who has written in defense of universals.[18] At least for Craig, he holds that abstracta do exist independently of the concrete particulars that they instantiate.[19] A consequence of this claim is that an abstractum like the number 2 exists independently of two apples. Whether abstracta are grounded in God or not is not the issue here since Moreland and Craig’s above objection concerns the comprehension of abtracta in the absence of concrete particulars. In fact, given Moreland’s commitment to modified platonism, he should not find it hard to comprehend abstrata in abstration. Nevertheless, Moreland and Craig’s text asks how can there be justice without just people? Questions like this have the potential of leading to a stalemate. Is it any more difficult to affirm the necessity of “It is wrong to arbitrarily torture persons” even before God created humans? At any rate, able ethicists have historically been able to comprehend ethics either in part or in whole without ethics being couched in theistic metaphysics. They have argued from secular considerations to justify the ethical nature of situations also maintained belief in God.[20]
As for the second question, there is ambiguity in the charge that an acceptance of the second horn entails a redundant relationship between God and ethics. According to the Oxford dictionary, for example, redundant is defined as "no longer needed or useful; superfluous; able to be omitted without loss of meaning or function." Theists who take the second horn admit that God is not strictly needed to ground ethics. So God is redundant in this sense but God is not redundant if redundant is taken to mean superfluous. All the theist needs to do is show how the following claims are compatible:
i. Ethical judgments can be true independent of God’s will.
ii. For any ethical judgment that is true independent of God’s will, God does in fact know to be true.
iii. Given the truth of (i) and (ii), God does not occupy a superfluous relationship to ethics.

There are several ways the theist can do so.
According to the first way, an ethics couched in theism (according to the second horn in a non-grounding sort of way) is more robust than an ethics couched in naturalism for epistemic reasons. God can play an occasional, but important, role in our discernment of what is ethically right/wrong and ethically good/bad. For example, when the theist asserts an ethical judgment of the form x is ethically wrong, she is actually asserting truth conditions for knowing that x is wrong. In other words, our belief that x is ethically wrong can be[21] justified if God condemns x and similarly our belief that x is ethically right can be justified if God wills x. Being omniscient and benevolent, God knows all possible states of affairs, including all possible ethical states of affairs. Such an account of divine commands or divine will is not open to the attack of the DM dilemma since actions are not ethically right or wrong because of God's commands or will. They are ethically right or wrong for other reasons that say a kantian or utilitarian can offer; however, God's benevolence and omniscience provide a basis for why we should follow his commands.[22] In either instance, it is not God acting as the determining cause of x's ethical status, but God acting as the objective discerner of x's ethical status in light of His omniscience and benevolence. We need not know whether God’s commands are continuous with deontology, utilitarianism or natural law theory. It is enough for us to know that there are ethical and unethical acts and that an omniscient being would necessarily know which acts were of those kind.
The limitation of such a theory is its redundancy as warrant for a certain set of ethical beliefs of which I shall now talk about. These beliefs concern certain states of affairs that do not beg for justification. Mere introspection tells us that these beliefs are ethically self-justifying. They are properly basic ethical beliefs. One such properly basic belief is the belief that murder is wrong, persons have intrinsic value or the belief that harming innocent infants by inflicting them with pain is wrong.[23] We do not need to appeal to God to justify our holding these beliefs, in so far as these beliefs describe certain normative states of affairs. If what I say here sounds suspect, that there are properly basic ethical beliefs, then theists who assert the strong assumption that actions are ethical/unethical or that things are valuable only if God exists must remain skeptical about all ethical beliefs. Put another way, if the existence of God is necessary for discerning the ethical status of all beliefs qua objectively ethical, then skepticism rules if it were not the case that God was in the ethical discerning business. In a counterfactual sort of way, this entails that if God did not assert any moral decrees concerning murder, adultery and the like, necessarily we would never be within our epistemic rights to assert that such acts or any act are immoral independent of His discernment.
At worst, God's will would only be consistent with the ethical status of properly basic ethical beliefs and acts, though uninformative. However, when it comes to holding beliefs concerning the ethical status of polemic issues like abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia, God's objective discernment would be crucial. It is here that the DCT has its appeal. Since we are fallible, at times unconsciously bias and sometimes lack pertinent information and the virtuous character to make right, objective ethical judgments, we often disagree about what actions are right and what actions are wrong. Moreover, as many theists hold, a human's ability for ethical discernment is also infected by adamic depravity. Looking to what an omniscient and benevolent God knows and wills would be crucial in such circumstances. Short of hermeneutical problems with the revealed text, DM is not open to this problem.
A second way ethics is more robust, if couched in theism than an ethics couched in naturalism, is that while God is not necessary for ethics, God qua creator and benevolent Lord provides a qualitatively greater motivation to act morally than in a world without God. So, for example, while ethics can exist in a purely naturalistic world or what George Mavrodes calls a Russellian world,[24] ethics in a theistic world would prompt greater motivation to be ethical, e.g., to respond in gratitude to a loving God. Plato notes this motivational element in the Apology. He quotes Socrates as saying: "Men of Athens, I respect and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you….For know that the god commands me to do this, and I believe that no greater good ever came to pass in the city than my service to the god."[25]
Finally ethics couched in theism is more robust than ethics couched in naturalism even when the issue of value is the concern. As I argued earlier, humans in a Russellian world have value (viz., in light of their sentience, self-determination and rationality); however, they would be qualitatively more valuable in a theistic world since we are seen as created by an ethical and loving God who calls us to be ethical and loving - we aren't just the random effect of an amoral and purposeless world.[26]
Final Remarks to the Secular Moralist
It has not escaped my notice that the approach to divine metaethics I have presented or any other approach to divine metaethics has to face the objection that its range of normative applicability does not go beyond the bounds of those who believe in God. A similar hermeneutical objection holds that even if the existence of God is granted, the particular God and the particular decrees we are obligated to follow is an open question. Both objections should be taken seriously, but not any more seriously than issues of objectivity for any other metaethical theory. Talk of what rightness and wrongness mean, what acts are right or wrong and what has value are ipso facto relative to a given metaethical theory. For example, a consequentialist can deny any moral obligation to do or not do x according to the ground rules a deontologist provides and a Nazi can deny that he is acting immoral by how he views and treats non-Aryans, relative to his own ontology and conception of rationality. I do not intend to espouse a relativism about ethics, far from it. My point is simply to show that the objectivity and obligatoriness of a metaethical theory should not be called into question simply on the basis of actual or possible dissenters of the theory. Unlike any other philosophical enquiry taken to be objective, metaethical theories are often asked to be objective in the sense that their truth conduciveness entails necessarily that they compel everyone to believe that they explain how things really ought to be. But I take this to be a mistake. If my approach to DM is a defensible metaethical theory, our obligation to comply with it follows even if we don't believe it. The truth of a theory does not rest on its universal acceptance. When did any theory require this condition?

BERNARD WALKER
[1]Plato, Euthyphro 10a in Greek Philosophy: Thales To Aristotle, trans. R. E. Allen (The Free Press: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889).
[2]This dilemma is broader than the one against the Divine Command theory; here the focus is on moral values and not just on moral rightness and moral wrongness.
[3]Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism in Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948).
[4] Kai Nielsen, “Ethics Without Religion,” in Introduction To Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 556.
[5]William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 67.

[6]On this view, it is not enough to say that God describes certain actions and things to be morally constituted a certain way. This would suggest that actions and things are not objectively morally constituted. For actions and things to be morally constituted, they must genuinely have moral features within them. This claim is true by definition; nothing can be morally constituted unless there is something about it that makes it that way. This is analogous to saying a red pencil is red because it really has the property "redness" in it. For moral realists, these moral features of actions and things are not reducible to descriptive physical features of the universe. See George Mavrodes, "Religion and the Queerness of Morality," in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, edited by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 213-226.
[7]A well-known proponent of this view is William of Occam. According to Occam: "The hatred of God, theft, adultery, and actions similar to these actions according to common law, may have an evil quality annexed, in so far as they are done by a divine command to perform the opposite act. But as far as the seer being in the actions is concerned, they can be performed by God without any evil condition annexed; and they can even be performed meritoriously by an earthly pilgrim if they should come under divine precepts, just as now the opposite of these in fact fall under the divine command." See Guillelmus de Occam, Super 4 libros sententiarum, bk. II, qu. 19, O, in Vol. IV of his Opera plurima (Lyon, 1494-6; reimpression enfac-simile, Farnborough, Hants, England: Gregg Press, 1962).

[8]See William Lane Craig, Does God Exist?: The Craig-Flew Debate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 172-173. See also Robert Merrihew Adams, "Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again" Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (Spring 1979): 66-79.
[9] Let us restate Bahnsen’s claims by replacing the word “it” with what he identifies as “good behavior:” “Certain behavior is good because God approves of good behavior, and God approves of good behavior because good behavior is the creaturely expression of His holiness -- in other words, good behavior is good. To be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of good behavior. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot be ascertained independent of Him.” If one thing is clear from Bahnsen’s words it is that God approves of good behavior, but we are left wondering what defines behavior as good. We can make the circularity in Bahnsen’s claim more obvious by connecting other identity claims he makes and get something like the following: good behavior = what God approves = the creaturely expression of God’s holiness=good. See Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, (New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. 1977), 284.
[10] The term wrong is being used in a prudent sense, but the analogy holds for ethical situations as well.
[11]In chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, the Bible says that God created humans in His image. A being of God's nature cannot lack significance and value, and if we are made in His image we likewise have value. For a biblical discussion of this issue, see Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 442-450. For a theological and philosophical discussion of this issue, see Keith Yandell, Christianity and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, Co., 1984), 260-261.
[12]Craig, Reasonable Faith, 57-72.
[13] J. P. Moreland and Kai Niesen, Does God Exist? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), 112.
[14] Craig, Does God Exist?: The Craig-Flew Debate, 173.
[15]It must be granted that causal factors in the existence of value are not irrelevant, for surely a splash of paint on canvas is valuable merely because of its arrangement. However, it is more valuable when the arrangement is the result of a designer rather than chance.
[16]For contemporary defenses of the DCT see Robert M. Adams, "Divine Command Ethics as Necessary A posteriori," in Divine Commands and Morality, edited by Paul Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109-119; Richard G. Swinburne, "Duty and The Will of God," in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. IV, No.2 (1974); and Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).


[17] J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2003), 492.
[18] J.P. Moreland, Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
[19] See chapter 10 of Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview.
[20] This is certainly the case for Immanuel Kant and John S. Mill. Recent ethicists who champion ethical realism without theism are not few. See, Richard Boyd, “How To Be A Moral Realist” in S. Darwall, A. Gibbard and P. Railton (eds.), Moral Discourse and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[21]It is important to notice my use of the phrase "can be justified" when talking about the ethical status of some act. My claim here is that God can be a sufficient condition for discerning the ethical status of an act, though He need not be nor ever is a necessary condition for discerning the ethical status of all acts. The playing field is large and we can appeal to other considerations that are equally sufficient for discerning the ethical status of some act, e.g., utility, logical consistency and natural teleology of the entities involved.
[22]Robert Merrihew Adams makes a point similar to this when he defends divine commands for their motivation input: God is supremely knowledgeable and wise--he is omniscient, after all; and that is very important motivationally. It makes a difference if you think of commands as coming from someone who completely understands both us and our situation." See Adams in "Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation," Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 272.
[23] The proposition “It is wrong to boil innocent infants in hot oil” isn't a basic belief. The wrongfulness of this proposition is a contingent matter. It depends on whether the infants are constituted in such a way that harm results from the boiling oil. There is a possible world where the boiling point of oil is much lower and where boiling infants in hot oil might be a standard way to give them a bath.
[24] Mavrodes’ description of a Rusellian world comes from Bertrand Russell’s description of a world without God in his 1903 essay, A Free Man’s Worship. In such a world the following are true: a)Minds and mentality are produced accidentally by blind evolutionary forces and b)human life ends at the grave. See George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality in Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, eds. R. Audi and W. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
[25] Plato, The Apology 29d-30a, ed. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
[26] I am grateful to Harry Gensler for his helpful comments on this paragraph.