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Single Idea 19454

[filed under theme 28. God / A. Divine Nature / 6. Divine Morality / b. Euthyphro question ]

Full Idea

The concept of God depends on the concepts of justice, kindness and wisdom - a God who is not kind, not just, and not wise is no God. But these concepts do not depend on the concept of God. That a quality is possessed by God does not make it divine.

Gist of Idea

A God needs justice, kindness and wisdom, but those concepts don't depend on the concept of God

Source

Ludwig Feuerbach (Introduction of 'Essence of Christianity' [1841], II)

Book Ref

Feuerbach,Ludwig: 'The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings', ed/tr. Hanfi,Zawar [Anchor 1972], p.119

A Reaction

This is part of Feuerbach's argument for atheism, but if you ask for the source of our human concepts of justice, kindness and wisdom, no one, I would have thought, could cite God for the role.

The 20 ideas with the same theme [which comes first - morality or God(s)?]:

4013 And God saw the light, that it was good [Anon (Tor)]
1657 Socrates holds that right reason entails virtue, and this must also apply to the gods [Vlastos on Socrates]
336 Is what is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it? (the 'Euthyphro Question') [Plato]
337 It seems that the gods love things because they are pious, rather than making them pious by loving them [Plato]
2627 I wonder whether loss of reverence for the gods would mean the end of all virtue [Cicero]
1515 Pythagoreans believe it is absurd to seek for goodness anywhere except with the gods [Iamblichus]
23178 Divine law commands some things because they are good, while others are good because commanded [Aquinas]
7399 Even without religion, there are many guides to morality [Bacon]
6892 Moral principles have some validity without a God commanding obedience [Grotius, by Mautner]
19330 If justice is arbitrary, or fixed but not observed, or not human justice, this undermines God [Leibniz]
5642 For Shaftesbury, we must already have a conscience to be motivated to religious obedience [Shaftesbury, by Scruton]
18242 Confucius shows that ethics can rest on reason, rather than on revelation [Wolff, by Korsgaard]
5633 We don't accept duties as coming from God, but assume they are divine because they are duties [Kant]
8046 We can only know we should obey God if we already have moral standards for judging God [Kant, by MacIntyre]
3721 We judge God to be good by a priori standards of moral perfection [Kant]
6199 Obligation does not rest on the existence of God, but on the autonomy of reason [Kant]
3780 We must judge a thing morally to know if it conforms to God's will [Bentham]
19454 A God needs justice, kindness and wisdom, but those concepts don't depend on the concept of God [Feuerbach]
2609 If God's decrees are good, and this is not a mere tautology, then goodness is separate from God's decrees [Russell]
4350 If people are virtuous in obedience to God, would they become wicked if they lost their faith? [Hursthouse]