God and Morality

God and Morality
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God and Morality
Shafer-Landau argues that “even if you believe in God, you should have serious reservations about tying the objectivity of morality to God’s existence.” (p. 78)
What is Shafer-Landau’s argument for this conclusion?
In this argument, the author implies that God may exist, but is not necessarily the source of the moral law. In other words, he means that Moral Objectivism can do without God, According to Landau (2003), theists, people who believe in God’s existence, have the conviction that God is the author/source of morality, and that morality is objective. The author concludes that even if one believes in God, he/she needs to have serious reservations with regard to tying the objectivity of morality to God’s existence. The author states that one of the common attributes of God is that of being Author of Morality. He states that most theists believe God to be the source of everything, including being the source of morality. They believe that standards of wrong and right come from God, since it is God who decides what is wrong and right, and it is our duty to do our part by aspiring to live according to the divine decrees. However, ethical objectivists maintain that a realm of moral truths exist, that have not been created by God (Landau, 2003).
The author reflects about Euthyphro and poses the question that modern theists should respond to: is an action right for the reason that God loves it, or God loves the act because it is right? If God loves an act because it is right, this seems to undermine God’s all-powerfulness since that would imply that God is not the author of the moral law, but rather, he is one who invariably knows how to appreciate it. The author adds that if God loves an act because it is right, then it is not God’s love that makes it right. The act would still be right, prior to, or independently of, God’s love, and this would be a response to a moral feature of the world, which is already there (Landau, 2003). In addition, divine love would not endow an act with its moral character, instead, such love would be an absolute response to the moral attributes that wait on divine appreciation.
This posits a moral law which exists separately of God’s having created it. According to the Landau, it is a somewhat problematic/complicated picture of how God relates to morality. For instance, actions are right because God commands or loves them. It is God’s say-so, which makes it wrong or right. If the objectivity of ethics centers on the existence of God, that must be because objective moral laws require/need an author who is nonhuman – and that must be God. The Divine Command Theory holds that actions are right or correct only because of a command from God. However, if a divine command lies at the core of ethics, then ethics is arbitrary, that is, an implausible collection of ungrounded moral rules (Landau, 2003). Landau poses a question, that if God’s say-so is what makes an act wrong or right, then the question is; does God love and command things for reason, or just arbitrarily? If the answer is arbitrarily, then God would be the inventor of the moral law.
According to Landau (2003), either there are, or there are not reasons supporting God’s commands, and if there are not, it means that these commands are arbitrary, and so they are the foundations of morality. On the other hand, God may have reasons for the divine commands. In this case, it is these reasons, rather than the commands, that justify the schedule of duties. The commands of God would not create the standards of evil and good; rather, they would codify the standards, which are sustained by the reasons God has relied on to support the divine choices. If there were no moral rules or reasons prior to the commands of God, then there could have been nothing that God could have relied on to justify the divine commands.
Landau (2003) states that theists must reject the viewpoint of God being the author/source of moral law, and adds that God is constrained by the moral laws, in just the same way as God is constrained by the laws of logic. He suggests that theists should reject the Divine Command Theory and the notion that things are...