What Makes God Moral?

What do you think makes god moral?

Why are his commandments and actions moral by definition (as is often claimed)? If you read the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures, you see that god is also prone to jealousy and anger at times, but even if you leave these aside, what do you think makes him intrinsically moral?

Many religious apologists claim that he’s moral because he’s the one who created everything, so it’s for him to determine what is or isn’t right in his own universe. But in that case, morality is just a function of power. An intrinsic difference between good and bad must transcend—not depend on—power. Because if power is the metric for morality then by extension, you’d find powerful people dictating morality to weaker people. And yet most people are in agreement that this isn’t the way morality works.

So, the logic of the idea of a godly morality is flawed. You can’t claim it’s a function of power but that it transcends power too. And you can’t hide behind the claim that god’s power is exponentially greater than that of humans, and that he is therefore not bound by human constraints. Even if you were to accept this, it’s not a question of god having more rights than humans when it comes to moral authority, it’s a question of logical inconsistency. The argument makes no sense.

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4 thoughts on “What Makes God Moral?

  1. This is a good question. What makes God moral? Or where does God get his morality from .. if he himself is neither created or has a god over him?
    Additionally, if all things that exist require a cause, why not God himself? And if he by definition and without evidence is uncaused and eternal, why not the universe as a whole, without evidence or just by definition?

  2. a very good argument. Many theists, especially Christians, claim that their god is good because it says it is and anything it wants is therefore “good”. However, that is a morality is built on nothing more that might equals right.

  3. The Christians who scare me – actually, most of them do – are the ones who say that, if God ordered them to kill their wife and/or children, they would do so, because God is infallible and determines what is right and moral. 😛

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