The Euthyphro Dilemma Wears a Tuxedo
Nonsense presented in a sophisticated and skeptical manner is still nonsense.
The Euthyphro dilemma is philosophy’s favorite gotcha against theists. You’ve heard it, probably more than once: “Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good?” Pick the first horn and morality is arbitrary. Pick the second and God is subordinate to an external standard. Checkmate, believer.
Except it isn’t. The dilemma is a false one, and the quickest way to see why is to do something its proponents almost never do: make it concrete.
Try this version: “Is something morally wrong because Jesus commands or forbids it, or does Jesus command or forbid it because it is morally wrong?”
Feel the difference? The abstraction evaporates. You’re no longer debating a faceless cosmic legislator. You’re asking whether the person who washed his betrayer’s feet, touched lepers, defended the accused, spoke truth to power knowing it would kill him, and died forgiving his executioners might issue an arbitrary moral command. Whether that person needs to consult some external standard before he knows what goodness looks like.
The question answers itself. And that’s the first problem with the Euthyphro dilemma as deployed against Christianity: it treats the Christian God as if he were Zeus.
This isn’t a minor point. Plato originally posed the dilemma in the Euthyphro dialogue, and he was right to pose it. The Greek gods were arbitrary, petty, contradictory, and frequently immoral by any recognizable standard. Asking whether their commands tracked an independent moral reality was a perfectly good question, because the gods of Olympus manifestly did not embody consistent moral character. Euthyphro was prosecuting his own father for murder on the grounds that Zeus had done something similar. Socrates’ question was devastating in that context precisely because the Greek gods provided no stable moral anchor.
Christianity makes an entirely different claim. The Logos through whom all things were made (John 1:3) took on flesh and demonstrated his character in public, in history, in a life that can be examined. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). This isn’t a philosophical postulate about what God’s nature might be. It’s a historical portrait of what God’s nature is. Deploying the Euthyphro dilemma against this claim is a category error that trades on surface-level formal similarity while ignoring the metaphysical gulf between Greek polytheism and Christian monotheism.
But grant the skeptic his abstraction for a moment. Set aside the incarnation. Take the dilemma on its own terms. It still fails, because both horns depend on a hidden assumption: contingency.
“God commands it and it becomes good” assumes God could have commanded otherwise. There is an alternate possible world where God says cruelty is virtuous, and in that world it would be. “God commands it because it’s already good” assumes a standard existing independently of God, one he might have failed to notice or chosen to ignore. Both horns require that things could have been different.
But on Christian theism, they couldn’t. God is a necessary being. His nature is not contingent. He does not happen to be loving, just, and holy the way I happen to be right-handed. He necessarily is these things. There is no possible world in which God has a different character, because a being with a different character would not be God. The question “what if God commanded cruelty?” is logically equivalent to “what if God were not God?” It’s not a challenging hypothetical. It’s incoherent.
Necessity eliminates the counterfactuals. And without the counterfactuals, the dilemma collapses. Neither horn can get purchase on a being whose moral character is identical with his necessary nature.
There’s a third problem, subtler than the first two but arguably more damaging.
The word “good” in “does God command it because it’s good?” is doing enormous unacknowledged work. Good by what standard? The skeptic posing the dilemma presupposes an independent criterion of goodness against which God’s commands are being measured. But that’s the very thing under dispute. The Euthyphro dilemma is supposed to challenge theistic moral grounding, yet it only works if there’s already a standard of goodness available to serve as the measuring rod. Where does this standard come from?
The options aren’t encouraging. Platonic forms? Causally inert abstractions floating in a non-physical realm with no explanation of how they bind anyone to anything. Evolutionary instinct? Survival-enhancing impulses that track reproductive fitness, not moral truth. Cultural consensus? A standard that makes it impossible to call any culture’s practices genuinely wrong. Each of these generates a grounding problem far more severe than anything the theist faces.
The Euthyphro dilemma, as typically deployed, is parasitic on the very moral realism it cannot fund on its own terms. The skeptic borrows a robust concept of “the good” to challenge the theist, then retreats to a worldview that can’t account for such a concept existing at all. That’s not a critique. It’s a loan taken out against someone else’s metaphysical capital.
The standard Christian response to the Euthyphro dilemma has long been the “third option”: God commands things because they flow from his nature, and his nature simply is the good. This is correct as far as it goes, but it remains abstract. Critics can reasonably ask: “Why think this God’s nature is good rather than evil? You’ve named a foundation, but you haven’t demonstrated one.”
Christianity has an answer to this that generic philosophical theism does not. The incarnation is the demonstration. The content of “God’s nature” isn’t inferred from logical requirements or stipulated by theological convention. It’s displayed in a life: self-sacrificial love, enemy love, truth-telling at the cost of death, compassion for the marginal, justice without vindictiveness. And that life was publicly vindicated by the resurrection, which functions as God’s endorsement of everything Christ represented.
If the resurrection happened, we’re not trading in abstractions. We know what the moral character of ultimate reality looks like because it walked through Palestine, and we know this portrait is authoritative because the God who raised Jesus is the God whose character Jesus displayed. The “evil God” objection dissolves. The Euthyphro dilemma becomes irrelevant. The content of the good is a historical datum, not a philosophical primitive.
If the resurrection didn’t happen, then Christianity is false and should be abandoned. Paul understood this: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17). That’s a falsification condition. The skeptic is free to investigate the historical evidence and draw conclusions. But notice what’s happened to the conversation: we’ve moved from an armchair puzzle about abstract deities to a concrete historical question. And that’s exactly where Christianity wants the conversation to go.
So the Euthyphro dilemma fails three times over. It treats the Christian God as interchangeable with the Greek pantheon. It presupposes contingency that Christian theism explicitly denies. And it smuggles in a concept of “the good” it cannot ground on its own terms.
Why does it persist? Partly inertia. It sounds devastating the first time you hear it, and first impressions are durable. Partly because the abstract formulation obscures the concrete reality. As long as you keep saying “God” without specifying which God, without attending to the incarnation, the necessity of the divine nature, or the historical anchor of the resurrection, the dilemma retains a superficial plausibility.
But pull back the curtain, put Jesus in the frame, and the dilemma doesn’t just fail. It reverses. The skeptic is the one left needing to explain where “the good” comes from, what grounds moral obligation, and why anyone should think that blind physics cares about justice. Christianity has a person, a life, a death, a resurrection, and two thousand years of moral transformation to point to. The Euthyphro dilemma has a twenty-four-hundred-year-old question designed for gods who threw lightning bolts when they were angry.
Nonsense in a tuxedo is still nonsense. Time to take the tuxedo off.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.