Moral Argument for God

Either you judge God's nature to be good because it is God's or there is some external standard by which God can be judged "good". So we come back to the same dilemma.

quote:

---

One must eventually say that God's nature is judged to be good by intuition:

​

Regardless of how one grounds the concept of goodness, another could always ask, "But what makes that notion good?" To avoid a vicious regress, one must eventually appeal to some irreducible, primitive concept known by intuition.

​

This avoids both horns of the dilemma.

---

To avoid the infinite regress you need to give a foundation - what you call "an irreducible primitive concept". However by resorting to intuition you simply evade saying what that concept actually refers to. Because intuition is subjective it cannot be the actual foundation of an objective morality.Thus you only avoid the dilemma by evading the question - not by providing a genuine resolution.

You're confusing ontology and epistemology.The question is not how we know what is moral (epistemology) but what is the foundation of morality (ontology).(And of course we have other questions - for instance if my moral intuition says that an act attributed to God in the Bible is morally wrong should I question the Bible or my moral intuition ? Either answer raises problems for your stated view).

quote:

---

For the sake of my argument, let us assume that God is in fact good. With this assumption do you see how the two horns of the dilemma can be avoided?

---

No, because it can't be. Either you arbitrarily call God "good" (second horn) or there is a moral standard by which God is judged good (first horn).

quote:

---

For the sake of my argument, let us assume that God is in fact good.
With this assumption do you see how the two horns of the dilemma can be avoided?

---

If God is IN FACT good this is the first horn. If you are simply assumning that God is good it is the second horn. So, no you don't avouid the dilemma.

quote:

---

The first horn is avoided because a good God would be definition only command what is good.

---

That IS the first horn. There is an independant standard of "good", which God (by his nature) follows.

quote:

---

The second horn is avoided because there is no "higher"
goodness by which we judge God to be good - we simply assume that God's nature is already good, and thus there is nothing "higher" than God to conflict with the view that God is the highest power in existence.

---

So IN FACT you are choosing the second horn but pretending to take the first. If you simply decree that God's nature is "good" whatever it is it is meaningless to say that God is "in fact good". What you have actually done is to redefine "good" to mean "according to God's nature" - which is the second horn.