A question Socrates asked 2,400 years ago is still the sharpest thing the New Atheists have. It deserves a real answer.
You will meet this one eventually, usually in a comment thread and usually phrased as a trap rather than a question. Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?
It sounds like a debating trick. It is not. It is Plato, it is genuinely old, and it is genuinely hard. Dawkins and Hitchens both reached for it, and they reached for it because it works — not against God, as it turns out, but against a shallow version of Him that a great many Christians are actually defending.
So let us take it at full strength first. A Christian who cannot state an objection better than the objector has not answered it; he has only outlasted the conversation.
The Trap, Built Properly
The argument comes as a fork. Two doors, and you are told to pick one.
- Door one: it is good because God commands it. Then goodness is arbitrary. God could have commanded cruelty, and cruelty would then be good. “God is good” collapses into “God does what God does,” which tells you nothing. You are not worshipping goodness; you are worshipping power and calling it good because it is stronger than you.
- Door two: God commands it because it is good. Then goodness is a standard that exists independently of God, and God is subject to it the same way you are. He becomes a very well-informed messenger of a moral law He did not author. Which means you can skip Him and go straight to the standard — and the atheist is right that morality needs no God.
That is the dilemma, and notice its real force. It does not merely argue that God is unnecessary for morality. It argues that either way you answer, you lose something you were counting on: either God’s goodness becomes empty, or God’s necessity does.
If you have ever answered it with a quick “well, God is good, so the question does not arise” — that is not an answer. That is the conclusion, asserted at the point where the argument demanded a reason.
Why the Fork Is Not a Fork
The response is not to pick a door. It is to notice that the question smuggled in a premise, and once you see the premise, the whole thing comes apart.
The dilemma assumes that goodness is either a rule God issues or a standard God consults. Command, or external measure. Those are presented as the only two options.
But there is a third thing goodness could be, and it is what Christians have actually claimed for two thousand years: goodness is what God is. Not something He decides. Not something He looks up. Something He is — the way you might say a meter is not measured by a ruler, because it is the thing rulers are calibrated against.
Thou art good, and doest good: teach me thy statutes. (KJV)
Read the order in that line. Thou art good comes first, and doest good follows from it. The commands are not the source of goodness and they are not a report about some external goodness. They are the overflow of a nature.
So the arbitrariness horn fails, because God cannot command cruelty — not because a higher rule forbids Him, but because it would require Him to act against His own nature, and He does not have one to act against.
God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (KJV)
And the independent-standard horn fails too, because there is nothing above God to consult. The standard is not a separate thing floating in logical space that God happens to match. It is His character.
“That Is Just Redefining the Problem”
A sharp objector does not stop there, and you should not pretend he does. He has two follow-ups, and both are fair.
First: “You have not escaped the fork, you have just relocated it. Is God’s nature good because it is His, or is it good because it conforms to goodness? Same question, one level up.”
The answer is that the question assumes goodness must always be a property something has — a standard a thing meets. But if God is the ultimate reality, then at some point explanation stops, and it stops at Him. This is not a dodge; it is what “ultimate” means. Every worldview terminates somewhere. The naturalist terminates in brute physical facts and cannot say why those facts are there. The Christian terminates in a Person who is good, and who does not have to be propped up by anything behind Him.
For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself. (KJV)
That verse is doing philosophy. He could swear by no greater. When there is nothing above you to appeal to, the appeal is to your own character — and Scripture treats that as the floor of the universe, not as a loophole.
Second: “This is convenient. You have defined your way out.” That charge would stick if Christians had invented the move to escape Plato. They did not. The claim that God’s own character is the standard is older than the objection in its modern form, and it is stated plainly in texts written centuries before anyone framed the dilemma this way. It is not a patch. It was always the position.
The Hard Cases, Honestly
There is a place where the arbitrariness horn genuinely bites, and skipping it would be dishonest. What about the commands in Scripture that look, to a modern reader, like precisely the thing I just said God cannot do? Abraham told to offer his son. The judgment on the Canaanite cities.
Three things, and I am not going to pretend they dissolve the difficulty entirely.
- These are presented as unique, not as patterns. Scripture does not treat them as a general licence; the same law codes that record them also forbid murder absolutely and command care for the foreigner and the poor. A command given once in a specific redemptive context is a different category from a moral principle.
- Abraham’s test ends with the command withdrawn and a substitute provided, which is the opposite of an endorsement, and the narrative itself says the point was the testing.
- Judgment is not the same category as arbitrary cruelty. The texts give centuries of warning, name the specific practices being judged — including child sacrifice — and apply the same standard later to Israel itself, which is not what favouritism looks like.
Does that remove every difficulty? No. I would rather say that plainly than oversell it. What it does establish is that these are not examples of a God who might just as easily have commanded the reverse. Even inside the hardest passages, the reasons given are moral reasons, and the standard being applied is consistent.
Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? (KJV)
Abraham asked that out loud, to God’s face, in the middle of an argument about judgment. Scripture does not treat the question as impiety. It records it. A book that was covering for an arbitrary deity would not have kept that verse.
Now Turn the Question Around
Here is the part that gets skipped in most versions of this exchange. The dilemma is aimed at the Christian, and the Christian answers it. Fine. But the man asking it has an account of morality too, and it is rarely asked to do the same work.
If there is no God, what is goodness? The honest naturalist answers are these, and each one costs something:
- It is what evolution shaped us to feel. This explains why we have moral feelings. It does not establish that any of them are true. A feeling that increased survival in the Pleistocene is not thereby a fact about right and wrong — and if our moral sense is simply a survival adaptation, there is no reason to trust it when it contradicts our interests, which is exactly when morality matters.
- It is what a society agrees on. Then reformers are always wrong by definition, because they contradict the standard of their own society. Nobody actually believes this. Every one of us thinks the abolitionist was right and his culture was wrong, and that judgment requires a standard the culture did not supply.
- It is what I personally value. Then it is a preference, and you cannot bind another man with your preference. “Cruelty is wrong” becomes a statement about you rather than about cruelty.
Note carefully what this does and does not prove. It does not prove that atheists behave badly — many live better than many Christians, and pretending otherwise is both false and insulting. The question is not whether a man without God can know right from wrong. Scripture says outright that he can:
For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts. (KJV)
That is not a grudging concession. It is the Christian position: the moral knowledge is genuinely there, in everyone, whether or not they credit its source. The question is not how do you know? The question is what makes it true? — and that is the question the dilemma was designed to press, so it is fair to press it in both directions.
How to Actually Have This Conversation
Four things worth remembering when this comes up in real life rather than on paper.
- Compliment the question. It is a good one. Saying so is both true and disarming, and it separates you from every Christian he has met who got defensive.
- Refuse the fork out loud. Do not pick a horn and start defending it. Name the hidden premise — that goodness must be either a command or an external standard — and say why you reject it.
- Do not skip the hard passages. If he raises the Canaanites, do not change the subject. A man who watches you handle the difficult text honestly will trust you on the easy ones.
- Ask the question back, and mean it. Not as a gotcha. Ask what he thinks grounds a moral claim, and then actually listen. Most people have never been asked and have never worked it out, and the conversation that follows is usually better than the argument.
And keep the goal straight. You are not trying to win a fork. Nobody has ever been argued into the kingdom, and a man who loses a debate has lost a debate.
But there is something worth saying at the end of it, because the dilemma has a reflex built into it that nobody notices. It assumes that if God is the standard, He is a threat — an authority with the power to define your wrongness. What the dilemma cannot account for is a God who is Himself the standard, who therefore cannot lower it, and who met it on your behalf anyway.
The God at the end of this argument is not a lawgiver looking for compliance. He is the good that the law was always describing, and He came and stood in the place of the people who could not match it. That is not a philosophical answer. It is a better one.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist