Euthyphro in Genesis? (2)

Merrymarymarry’s comments are to the point – thank you!

We can discern the two approaches to our basic question already in the first few chapters of Genesis. God’s first command to Adam and Eve appears arbitrary – do it because I say so! (God determines the good.) But Cain’s sin was not against statutory law, but against moral common sense: he was expected to know murder was wrong without being explicitly told. (The good is independently defined.) This distinction would later be elaborated by the rabbis into the difference between hukkim (arbitrary laws) and mishpatim (laws expressing the dictates of reason). The history of these two approaches in later Jewish thought is elaborated by Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments.

Merrymarymarry touches on another possibility—to transcend this dichotomy and merge God (or God’s dictates) and the good into one. I agree that this is the highest wisdom that we hopefully get to in the end. But I think it’s important to go through all the intermediate steps of thought that tilt toward one or the other side, to appreciate all the nuances of truth that each has to offer.

Take today’s debates on public policy — whether on abortion, global politics, or the place of religion in public life. The evangelicals hold by Euthyphro’s position, that the Word of God ought to determine what we do. The secular liberals hold that invoking God has no place in these debates, that we should decide what is good on the basis of reason alone.

Each of these contemporary positions has its roots in recent history, especially the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment and its aftermath. The Enlightenment had its roots in the religious wars from the Reformation through the Thirty Years’ War (ending in 1648). In those wars, oceans of blood were shed over who had the right version or interpretation of God’s word. Progressive anti-clerical thinkers such as Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire and Diderot drew the moral that it is all too easy to invent spurious claims of God’s word to support one’s own interested position. Only objective reason could be trusted as a guide in human affairs.

But using reason as a guide was far more complicated in practice than in theory. The French Revolution started in a promising fashion but culminated in the Terror of 1793. The Russian Revolution similarly promised to implement reason in human affairs, but it ended up in the Gulag of Stalinism. Each of these produced a religious reaction, among those who drew the moral that religion was a better guide to right living than human reason on its own.

I just want to add one more wrinkle at this point: Does “determining the good by reason” mean the same thing if one considers the moral problem in purely human terms, or in a world governed by God? How do we justify our moral logic if we assume that we are legislating morals just for humanity, in a godless universe? Is the equation appreciably changed if we assume, instead of a godless universe, a universe guided by divine purpose?

In my next post, I will address how the question “God —? — good” was addressed in Biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish thought.