God and Morality (For the Umpteenth Time)
Shared by Cameron Bertuzzi and worthy of comment:
Interesting exchange, but setting aside the snarky response and getting to issue raised by Jon…
For the classical theist, the answer to the question of “Could God’s Nature Have been otherwise?” is “No.” But this does not mean that God’s nature is arbitrary. God’s nature just is God (given the doctrine of divine simplicity), which just is the fullness of being: the absolutely simple, purely actual ultimate reality.
If one signs on for cosmological reasoning, that’s because they believe (correctly, I think) that contingency demands necessity for its ultimate explanation; more specifically, a being whose essence just is its existence to account for why any finite thing whose essence is really distinct from its existence actually is – has actual being – in the first place. Once in place, we then have an explanation for God’s necessity, in virtue of God being purely actual, in principle non-multipliable, simple, and subsistent; that is, in virtue of being a being of pure existence, or pure esse, to use Aquinas’s term.
This is just the sort of thing – the only sort of thing, so far as I can tell – that could be self-actual and necessary through itself; that could, not, in fact, have been otherwise — hence the classical theist commitment of divine immutability, which is definitely not an arbitrary consequence of prior commitments.
This highlights the theme of classical theism that I have been trying to hammer home for some time: that the God of classical theism seems to be the only sort of thing that can explain everything, including God.
Granted, I have neither defended nor detailed the metaphysical reasoning that leads up to the classical theistic position in this post (see my many articles and podcasts on this topic, plus my upcoming book), but it is definitely correct to say that if the classical theistic position is properly understood, then it is quite clear that God’s nature is not arbitrary but quite the opposite, so the problem raised by Jon is not a problem for the classical theist.
Nevertheless, the link to God as the ground of morality is more complicated than many theists seem to think, but ultimately falls into place once one affirms essentially two traditional commitments – namely, 1) a virtue ethic or natural law perspective, alongside 2) the convertibility thesis of being and goodness. With these commitments in place it will ultimately follow that God, in virtue of being the fullness of being, is likewise the fullness of goodness. Just as God is the paradigm existent, God is the paradigm good.
I have much to say about the link between God and morality in my upcoming book, The Best Argument for God.