Is something good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

[Lucian]

Does God get to decide what is good, or does goodness exist an an intrinsic part of God that God has no control over and He merely commands good things because goodness itself decides that they are good?

 

[Lamb]

Does God get to decide what is good, or does goodness exist an an intrinsic part of God that God has no control over and He merely commands good things because goodness itself decides that they are good?

God is Holy, which makes Him good and the things He does as good.

 

[Frankj]

Does God get to decide what is good, or does goodness exist an an intrinsic part of God that God has no control over and He merely commands good things because goodness itself decides that they are good?

You ask a question that can't be answered.

Some things are simply beyond our designed ability to understand.

 

[Lucian]

God is Holy, which makes Him good and the things He does as good.

No. Holy merely means "set apart", not good. Something holy is something unique, not like others, separated in nature from the rest. It has nothing to do with goodness. This is the basic theological understanding. In the Old Testament, the word means separateness, sacredness, or being cut out for a specific use. An object, day, or person was "holy" simply because it belonged exclusively to God and was removed from common, everyday use (like temple dishes or the Sabbath).

 

[Lamb]

No. Holy merely means "set apart", not good. Something holy is something unique, not like others, separated in nature from the rest. It has nothing to do with goodness. This is the basic theological understanding. In the Old Testament, the word means separateness, sacredness, or being cut out for a specific use. An object, day, or person was "holy" simply because it belonged exclusively to God and was removed from common, everyday use (like temple dishes or the Sabbath).

Set apart because it's of God. God is Holy and blameless, faultless, unblemished and that makes Him good.

 

[Lucian]

and that makes Him good

But first we must come to an agreement on what good is. What is the ontological meaning of good? Is good something that God decides or does good exist independently of God, as an intrinsic aspect of reality?

 

[jswauto]

Let's Examine the Bible: What does it say?​

Goodness is the expression of God’s own nature.​

God commands the good because He Himself is good, and His nature is the standard by which goodness is defined.​

1. God IS good — goodness is His nature, not His choices.​

Psalm 119:68​

“You are good and do good.”

This is the clearest verse in the entire Bible on the topic.
It does not say: “Whatever You do becomes good.”
It says: “You ARE good — therefore You DO good.”
Goodness flows from His nature, not His commands.
This destroys the “arbitrary morality” horn of the dilemma.

2. God cannot do evil — not because He chooses not to, but because His nature forbids it.​

James 1:13​

“God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone.”

This is ontological. It’s about what God IS, not what He decides.
God cannot do evil because evil is incompatible with His being.
This destroys the “God could command cruelty” horn.

3. God’s nature defines goodness — goodness does not exist outside Him.​

Psalm 25:8​

“Good and upright is the Lord.”

Goodness is not a rulebook God follows. Goodness is God Himself.
This destroys the “good exists independently of God” horn.

4. God’s commands flow from His nature — not from external moral laws.​

Psalm 19:7​

“The law of the Lord is perfect.”

Why is the law perfect?
Because it flows from a perfect Lawgiver.
Commands are good because they express His nature, not because He arbitrarily declares them.

5. God’s nature is the standard of goodness — not His commands.​

1 John 1:5​

“God is light; in Him is no darkness at all.”

Light = goodness Darkness = evil
This is not about commands. This is about being.
Goodness is not something God “decides.” Goodness is something God is.

6. God’s holiness includes moral perfection — not just separateness.​

If you try to argue “holy = set apart,” Look, Scripture expands holiness far beyond that.

Leviticus 11:44​

“Be holy, for I am holy.”

Holiness here includes:

• purity
• moral perfection
• righteousness
• goodness

Holiness is not just separateness — it is moral transcendence.

7. God’s nature is the source of moral truth.​

John 14:6​

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Truth is not external. Truth is not arbitrary. Truth is not invented.
Truth is God Himself.
Goodness and truth share the same ontological root.

8. God’s character is the definition of goodness.​

Exodus 34:6​

“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth.”

Goodness is not a rule. Goodness is God’s character.

9. God’s goodness existed before creation — proving it is not based on commands.​

Psalm 136:1​

“Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”

God was good before He commanded anything. Before creation. Before moral laws. Before humans existed.
Goodness is eternal because God is eternal.

10. God’s goodness is the foundation of His commands — not the other way around.​

Micah 6:8​

“He has shown you, O man, what is good.”

God doesn’t invent goodness. He reveals it.
Because goodness is Him.

THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA (asks whether morally good actions are good because God commands them, or whether God commands them because they are already good) EXPLAINED​

1. Where it comes from​

The dilemma comes from Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates asks:

Is something good because the gods command it? Or do the gods command it because it is good?

This creates a trap with two bad options.

2. The Two Horns (the trap)​

Horn 1: Good is whatever God commands​

This makes morality arbitrary. If God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be “good.” This destroys the meaning of God’s goodness.

Horn 2: God commands what is already good​

This makes goodness independent of God. God becomes a messenger of moral truths He didn’t create. This destroys God’s sovereignty.
Plato designed this dilemma to trap polytheists — but skeptics still use it today against Christians.

3. The Christian Answer​

The Bible and classical Christian theology reject both horns.
The answer is:

**Goodness is not whatever God commands.​

Goodness is not something outside God. Goodness is what God IS.**
Goodness is God’s nature, not His decisions and not an external standard.
It's “nature-grounded.”

4. Why this collapses the dilemma​

Because the dilemma assumes:

• God is separate from goodness
• God chooses goodness
• goodness exists independently
• goodness is a rulebook
• goodness is a category God fits into

But Scripture teaches:

God is goodness.​

God is righteousness.​

God is love.​

God is light.​

God is truth.​

Goodness is not a rule God follows. Goodness is not a rule God invents. Goodness is God’s own nature expressed.
So the dilemma fails because it misunderstands God.

 

[Lucian]

We're finally getting somewhere. If goodness is fundamentally identical to God's nature, the statement "God is good" merely means "God is like God" or "God possesses God's own characteristics".

If "good" is defined by whatever God's nature happens to be, then saying "God is good" offers no informative description of His character. It is a circular definition.

If goodness is just a reflection of God's nature, praising God for being "good" is hollow. You are essentially praising Him for matching His own template.

This merely pushes the problem back a step. If God's nature happened to favor cruelty (and we have clear examples in the Bible that it does sometimes favor cruelty), then cruelty would, by definition, be "good". Asserting that God's nature is inherently loving or just assumes a priori, independent understanding of what "loving" and "just" mean.

Is it goodness to have eternal torture as a consequence for disagreement with God's views? If you're going to answer yes, then we need to answer why the moral compas of most humans find this immoral and not good. Curiously, even the conscience of some of the holiest of God followers throughout history have found the idea of eternal hell immoral and evil, therefore developing the doctrines of universal reconciliation and annihilationism.

 

[Frankj]

We're finally getting somewhere. If goodness is fundamentally identical to God's nature, the statement "God is good" merely means "God is like God" or "God possesses God's own characteristics".

If "good" is defined by whatever God's nature happens to be, then saying "God is good" offers no informative description of His character. It is a circular definition.

If goodness is just a reflection of God's nature, praising God for being "good" is hollow. You are essentially praising Him for matching His own template.

This merely pushes the problem back a step. If God's nature happened to favor cruelty (and we have clear examples in the Bible that it does sometimes favor cruelty), then cruelty would, by definition, be "good". Asserting that God's nature is inherently loving or just assumes a prior, independent understanding of what "loving" and "just" mean.

Is it goodness to have eternal torture as a consequence for disagreement with God's views? If you're going to answer yes, then we need to answer why the moral compas of most humans find this immoral and not good. Curiously, even the conscience of some of the holiest of God followers throughout history have found the idea of eternal hell immoral and evil, therefore developing the doctrines of universal reconciliation and annihilationism.

Lucian, don't let the simple definition of words prevent you from understanding their meaning.

If you haven't studied Wittgenstein's latter work Philosophical Investigations you might find some value in doing so, it may give you a new direction to pursue for an understanding of the questions you pose.

A point to remember: Ethics and morality are different things, one derived from the thinking of men and the other derived from a higher source that establishes it.

FWIW, what would you say 'good' means?

 

[jswauto]

“God’s Goodness Is Not Human Goodness: A Biblical and Spiritual Defense”​

1. “If goodness = God’s nature, then ‘God is good’ is circular.”​

This is the classic misunderstanding.
Based on that, People may also think:

“If goodness = God’s nature, then ‘God is good’ means nothing.”

But that’s not how essential predicates work.
When Scripture says:

• God is good
• God is love
• God is light
• God is truth

…it’s not describing a category God fits into. It’s describing the source of the category.
It’s like saying:

• Fire is hot
• Light is bright
• Water is wet

These are not circular. They are essential identity statements.
They tell you:

“This thing is the origin of the property.”

It is treating “good” like a detached adjective. It’s using the wrong category.But Scripture treats “good” like an ontological attribute.

2. “If God’s nature favored cruelty, cruelty would be good.”​

This is the exact mistake the Euthyphro dilemma warns about.
It is assuming:

“Goodness is a moral category external to God.”

But it's already been showed:

Goodness is God’s nature. Cruelty is not God’s nature. Therefore cruelty cannot be good.

Cruelty is not “something God could have been.” Cruelty is the opposite of God’s nature.
Cruelty is:

• darkness
• evil
• injustice
• unrighteousness
• impurity
• wickedness

And Scripture says:

“In Him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

This hypothetical is impossible. It’s like saying:

“If light were darkness, then darkness would be light.”

It’s a category error.

3. “God sometimes favors cruelty.”​

Bbiblical clarity:
God’s judgments are:

• holy
• just
• righteous
• perfect
• measured
• purposeful
• proportional
• rooted in His goodness

They are never cruelty.
Cruelty = harm for pleasure. Judgment = justice for righteousness.
This is the confusional belief:

severity with cruelty justice with malice holiness with harshness

But Scripture says:

“The Lord is righteous in all His ways.” (Psalm 145:17)

If God judges, the judgment is good because God is good.

4. “Eternal punishment is immoral because humans feel it is immoral.”​

This is the anthropocentric fallacy.
He is saying:

“Human conscience defines goodness.”

But Scripture says:

“The heart is deceitful above all things.” (Jer. 17:9)

Human conscience is:

• fallen
• inconsistent
• culturally shaped
• emotionally biased
• morally limited

Already been showed:

Goodness is God’s nature — not human intuition.

It is trying to judge God by human moral taste.
That’s backwards.

5. “Some Christians reject eternal punishment, therefore it must be immoral.”​

This is not an argument. It’s an appeal to:

• popularity
• emotion
• discomfort
• modern sensibilities

But Scripture is not shaped by:

• human comfort
• human preference
• human psychology
• human culture

It is shaped by God’s nature.

The Bible does not describe annihilation. The Bible does not describe universalism. The Bible does not describe extinction. The Bible describes eternal conscious judgment.

It's not arguing Scripture. It'sarguing emotion.

The God’s Goodness Summary​

Scripture defines goodness as God’s own nature — not human intuition.
When the Bible says “God is good,” it’s not circular. It’s an essential identity statement, like “light is bright” or “fire is hot.” It means God is the source of goodness, not a being who conforms to an external rule.
The hypothetical — “If God’s nature favored cruelty, cruelty would be good” — assumes cruelty is something God could be. But cruelty is darkness, and Scripture says: “In Him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)
God’s judgments are severe at times, but never cruel. Cruelty is harm for pleasure. Judgment is justice for righteousness.
As for eternal punishment: You’re judging God’s nature by human moral intuition. But Scripture consistently describes the fate of the cursed as conscious, ongoing judgment — not annihilation, not extinction, not universalism.
Human conscience is fallen. God’s nature is perfect.
Goodness is not defined by what humans feel. Goodness is defined by who God is.

 

[Lucian]

1. The Essential Predicates and Circularity Fallacy
The analogy of "fire is hot" actually defeats your argument. "Hot" is a descriptive physical property that humans can independently experience, measure, and understand separate from any specific fire. If we did not know what heat felt like, telling us "fire is hot" would convey zero semantic meaning.
By claiming that goodness is identical to God's nature and that God is the only source of the category, the opponent reduces the word "good" to a mere tautology. If "good" has no independent definition outside of "whatever God's nature happens to be," then the statement "God is good" simply means "God is God" or "God’s nature is God’s nature." It strips the word "good" of any actual moral praise or objective meaning. It is empty vocabulary masquerading as an ontological truth.
Moreover, if we could hypothetically take an individual who has never experienced any source of heat and described heat to them as "a feeling of extreme happiness" and then we presented him with fire and he would get burned, he would be entitled to call us liars. That is exactly what Christianity does: it presents God as the source of love, it presents love as something pleasant and positive, and then presents God as doing things that are not pleasant and positive.

2. The Euthyphro Dilemma and the Definition of Cruelty
Your argument states that cruelty is logically impossible for God because cruelty is "darkness" and God's nature is "light." Therefore, a hypothetical where God favors cruelty is a category error.
This response dodges the core of the Euthyphro dilemma through a semantic trick. It defines "cruelty" as "that which is opposite to God." This is a textbook begging the question (circular reasoning) fallacy.
The actual philosophical question is about actions, not abstract nouns. If God commands the slaughter of infants (as recorded in 1 Samuel 15:3), the opponent is forced to argue that the act of killing infants is "good" simply because God commanded it. If God’s nature dictated that slamming a child against a rock is "righteous judgment," the opponent would have to accept it as "light." If God commands the eternal torture of humans in hell for finite disobedience, then the opponent needs to agree that eternal punishment for temporal disobedience is just (even though our very reason tells us that it isn't). Therefore, the opponent hasn't solved the dilemma; they have firmly trapped themselves in the voluntarist horn of it: actions are not inherently good or bad; they are arbitrarily moral or immoral based solely on God's nature, meaning the definition of "good" remains entirely arbitrary.

3. Redefining Cruelty vs. Judgment
Your argument is that God’s severe actions are "judgment," not "cruelty." Cruelty is defined strictly as "harm for pleasure," whereas God inflicts harm for "justice and righteousness."
This is a fallacy of equivocation and a flawed definition of cruelty. In both legal and philosophical ethics, cruelty is not limited to "harm for pleasure." Cruelty is defined as the infliction of gross, unnecessary, or disproportionate suffering.
If a human judge sentences a person to be tortured for life for simply disagreeing with him about certain social issues, that judge might not derive "pleasure" from it; they might claim they are doing it out of a strict sense of "retributive justice." However, the act remains objectively cruel because it is disproportionate and excessive. Labeling horrific suffering as "holy judgment" does not magically alter the ontological reality of the suffering being inflicted. If an act causes immense, unmitigated agony without a restorative or corrective purpose, it meets the definition of cruelty, regardless of the emotional state or "holiness" of the executioner.

4. The Anthropocentric Fallacy and Moral Skepticism
The argument that humans cannot judge eternal punishment because the human conscience is "fallen, deceitful, and culturally shaped." God cannot be judged by human moral taste, introduces a catastrophic wave of total moral skepticism that completely undermines the Christian faith. If human moral intuition is so profoundly broken and "deceitful" that we cannot recognize eternal torment as immoral, then humans also lack the capacity to recognize God as good.
If our moral compass is entirely untrustworthy, we have no baseline to distinguish between a perfectly benevolent God and a perfectly deceptive, malicious entity who merely claims to be good. Apologists constantly appeal to human moral intuition to argue for the existence of God (e.g., the Moral Argument). You cannot weaponize human moral intuition to prove God exists, and then discard that exact same moral intuition the moment it objects to hell. If we cannot trust our conscience to evaluate the morality of eternal torture, we cannot trust it to evaluate the "goodness" of salvation.

5. Scriptural Alternative Interpretations vs. Emotion
You claim that Christians who reject eternal conscious torment (ECT) are just acting on emotion, preference, and modern sensibilities, because the Bible only teaches eternal conscious judgment.
This is a historically and exegetically inaccurate strawman argument. The rejection of Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) by many Christian scholars is not driven by modern emotionalism; it is driven by rigorous biblical hermeneutics.
Prominent theologians throughout history argue for Annihilationism (Conditional Immortality) or Christian Universalism using the exact same Greek and Hebrew texts.

• The Bible repeatedly states that the wages of sin is "death" (Romans 6:23) and "destruction" (Matthew 10:28), not eternal life in torment.
• The Greek word aionios (often translated as "eternal") historically refers to an "age" or the permanent consequence of an action (eternal destruction/death), not a never-ending timeline of active torturing.

By dismissing these deeply biblical, textual arguments as mere "emotion," the you avoid engaging with the actual scriptural flaws of the Eternal Conscious Torment doctrine.

Your reply relies on redefining words so that they lose all human meaning. If "good" means whatever God does, then "God is good" is an empty statement. If human morality is too broken to see the "goodness" in eternal torture, then humans are too broken to genuinely worship God's goodness. True objective morality must mean that certain actions (like disproportionate, never-ending torture) are inherently incompatible with genuine benevolence.