Bob’s Insightful Response to Euthyphro’s Dilemma

SPEAKER 02 : 0:00

Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Ear Live. Today we’re playing part one of Bob’s response to Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Bob’s response to Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Euthyphro’s Dilemma is considered by a lot of Christian apologists one of the hardest objections to christianity to respond to and uh today we’re playing part one of bob’s response which i think he really hits the nail on the head and it all comes down to the trinity the trinity is so important for understanding euthyphro’s dilemma with that said let’s jump right into the broadcast

SPEAKER 03 : 1:00

Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Baba Neart Live. I’m the pastor of Denver Bible Church. Today we’re going to talk about thinking clearly and the challenge in the Christian’s life, in every person’s life. of thinking clearly, and we’re going to use an ancient exercise in thinking from Socrates. It’s called Euthyphro’s Dilemma, and apply it to Christian theology and how atheists will throw Euthyphro’s Dilemma at Christians and say, see, this proves that God doesn’t exist. We’ve known for thousands of years. You guys just are not smart enough to realize it. Before we get to that, speaking of thinking clearly, let’s cover a couple items in the news. General Michael Flynn, the case against him has just been dropped. Spike Lee, who on a Friday two weeks ago praised Woody Allen, and then on Saturday he apologized. He retracted his congratulations to Woody Allen. We’ll talk about that. And also Matt Walsh. on all the hate crimes against whites that are not charged as hate crimes. Then we’ll get to the exercise with Euthyphro’s dilemma on thinking clearly. Oh, by the way, Bevelyn and Ed May, famous from their missionary trip to Chaz, it’s looking good like bevel and will be on the show with us next week can’t wait for that okay michael flynn the federal judge in charge of the Michael Flynn, the scam case against him. That was part of the Russia hoax, bloodless coup effort to depose a sitting president by the Obama administration. So the judge in that case, when the Justice Department said they’re withdrawing the charges against Flynn and the federal judge then had only one role, and that was to dismiss the case. Instead of dismissing the case, he appointed another federal judge, a retired federal judge, to act as a prosecutor to see if they could continue the case against General Flynn. Really shocking. And so a week or two ago on one of the big stories about the developments in the case, I posted a comment and said one way to try to get it through this corrupt judge’s mind that what he is doing by taking a judge and basically turning him into a prosecutor to keep the case going, one way to perhaps get get it through his thick skull, his corrupt skull, that what he’s doing violates all the principles that he claims to hold to would be for the Justice Department to take a prosecutor and appoint him as a federal appellate judge and have him order the case dismissed. Wouldn’t that be funny? And this corrupt federal judge would have a heart attack. And they could say, oh, we were only joking just to show you how corrupt you are. Spike Lee, the famous filmmaker, leftist, godless celebrity, just two weeks ago on a Friday, he celebrates Woody Allen. the filmmaker, pervert, pedophile. And by the very next day, that Saturday, he apologized. Now, why would he do that in one day? I mean, he’s known Woody Allen for decades. Why would he apologize after just one day? Oh, because he was mindful of the sometimes justified effects of cancel culture. And he realized some of his friends got to him and said, you know, you remember that you honored Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to raping a 13 year old girl, drugging her and raping her. And now you’re celebrating Woody Allen? You’ve done these things publicly? Do you realize what’s going to happen to you? And so anyway, he apologized for celebrating Woody Allen. And that is a huge change in the culture. Absolutely huge. We have on our website, kgov.com slash pedophiles, we have our big, ugly list of liberals supporting pedophiles. And it’s a stunning list. It begins with Quentin Tarantino and Natalie Portman. It goes to Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, Prince Andrew. Yeah, him. And ABC and their Good Morning America program. And Vogue and NBC and their Access Hollywood program. And the Walt Disney Studios and Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos. And Warner Brothers. And Chris Tucker. You ever hear of him? Comedian. Kevin Spacey. The Washington Post. CNN. New York Magazine. For each one of these, we have links to show how they supported pedophiles. For each one. University of Massachusetts openly supported. Liam Neeson, the Rockefeller Foundation, University of Indiana, Alec Baldwin. Forget about Hugh Hefner. He’s in hell now, but he’s on the list. And it goes on and on. The National ACLU, Colorado’s ACLU, George Stepanolovas. What’s his name? Just stop annoying us. No, it’s George Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler, and then Woody Allen, of course. And it goes on and on with Elon Musk and Harvey Weinstein and Vanity Fair. and Johnny Depp, and on and on and on. Wow. So that’s the Spike Lee news. And then Matt Walsh does this great column about the hate crimes against whites, Caucasians, and there are no hate crime charges. And so you know that question I hate when people ask yesterday on the show, why? Stop being boring. Don’t ask why. Tell people why. And so all these crimes against whites for nothing other than the color of their skin and there are no hate crime charges. So many conservatives confuse themselves and they say, well, the idea of a hate crime is not a valid idea. And they say, well, you know, there’s no such thing as a love crime. When you murder someone, you’re not loving them by murdering them. So, well, that’s true, but that’s not the point of a hate crime. When you look at the spectrum of crime, one crime is a credible threat. When you make a credible threat, that’s a crime. And if you murder someone, you’re at a park, you get in a fight, and you murder them. That’s different than if you threatened your neighbor’s family and you said, I’m going to kill your children, then I’m going to kill your wife and I’m going to kill you. And then you go ahead and kill one of them. That’s a different kind of crime because a threat, a credible threat, is itself also a crime. And so when Muslim terrorists target Jews, or Christians, and if they’re committing crimes specifically in Jewish synagogues, well, then that’s not only a murder and an assault and trespassing, it’s also a hate crime in the fear the terror that they’re trying to instill that they are instilling on thousands of other people perhaps millions so it is it is not wrong the terminology could be debated but it’s not wrong to recognize this additional dimension of criminal behavior and charge accordingly and punish accordingly especially when you have a criminal or an organization that hasn’t committed a murder, when they commit a murder or any crime worthy of death, as the Apostle Paul put it, then nobody should object. You put them to death. But there are also murderer wannabes, terrorist wannabes, who commit hate crimes and could be punished accordingly. So those few news updates in the process of doing that, it wasn’t only covering some current events. It was attempting to not only think clearly about current events, but also to illustrate and to teach what it means to think clearly and from a biblical Christian worldview about the events of the day. You go back 2,500 years ago to the time of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. There is a dialogue of Socrates with Euthyphro. Now, who’s Euthyphro? That’s not a name we’re familiar with these days. It’s a proper name, some guy named Euthyphro. Well, he was a prosecutor. He was a state’s attorney in this dialogue with Socrates. He’s the prosecutor heading to court in Athens in order to prosecute his own father. How’s that? So the Greek philosopher Plato, Socrates’ student, reports an apparent dilemma for those who believe in God. Atheists to this very day, 2,500 years later, they argue that Euthyphro’s dilemma shows that moral absolutes cannot logically flow from a divine being. So they use this as an argument against Christianity, because in Christianity you have God, and all moral absolutes flow from God. And so Socrates thought up this dilemma. as a way to challenge that, to try to falsify that. And you could read Euthyphro’s dilemma, the full text of it, on kgov.com. Just go to kgov.com slash Euthyphro. Oh, wait a minute. Nobody knows how to spell Euthyphro. You could Google Christian answer to Euthyphro or to Euthyphro’s dilemma, and you should find us ranked number one by Google at kgov.com, the article I had the honor to write. And then one of our favorite scientists, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati with creation.com, CMI, Creation Ministries International, He linked to our article on Euthyphro’s dilemma from his own article on the topic over at creation.com. That ministry is based out of Australia. So Euthyphro is spelled E-U-T-H, like euthanize, for example, E-U-T-H-Y-P-H-R-O, Euthyphro. So kgov.com slash Euthyphro. And you can read the full text. It’s not very long, and it’s annotated. So here and there, if something’s a little confusing, we have some explanatory notes. So here is Euthyphro’s dilemma as presented to the Christian. It’s got two parts, one and two. Number one, and these are both questions, is something good, like let’s say humility, is something like humility good because God recognizes it as good? Or, Is something good because God commands that it is good? As Socrates put it, because God loves it. So that was his vocabulary back then. But what he means is, is something good because God recognizes it or because God commands it as good? That’s it. That’s the question. That question falsifies Allah as being a candidate for the true God. Those two questions, Allah cannot survive as the proposed ultimate deity because these two questions expose the fallacy in the Islamic belief about Allah. Now, Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro used these questions as the backdrop. to show the logical contradictions in the Greek religion. The Greeks had their pantheon of gods. And even though Christian theology differs from Greek mythology, the atheist can still start his inquiry with these identical questions posed to the believer. Whether this argument still succeeds like it would against Allah and Islam depends upon the force of this dilemma against the claims of Christianity. We’re not defending a God like Allah. We are defending the God of the Bible because Christianity asserts that the God of the Bible is the true God. Jesus Christ is our Creator and our Savior. He is God the Son of the Triune God. So, is something like kindness or honesty inherently good and simply recognized by the Trinity as good? Or does God make something like kindness good by deciding that it will be a good thing? That is, by approving of it, by loving it, or by commanding it? Now, if God does not make something good by commanding it, but rather recognizes that which is good, what standard of righteousness does he use to make this judgment? Now that’s interesting because if God just decides, okay, I’m going to command what is good. So you have the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not commit adultery, shalt not bear false witness. If something is good only because God commanded it, then he could take all the nots out of the Ten Commandments. And they could be thou shalt murder, thou shalt steal, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt bear false witness. And then if you do all those things, then you’re good. Now, if you are a Christian, something in your spirit should be grieved by that thought. You should recognize that there’s something wrong with that idea. Just a few years after the 1611 King James was printed, there was an Octavia version of the King James. That’s where they would print Bibles on huge paper for the pulpit. And then they’d have quartos, where they would cut that paper into fourths or quarters, and each one was a Bible. Then they had octo, whatever they called it, They cut that same sheet of paper into eighths, and you had little tiny Bibles. And so this small Bible published of the King James came to be known as the Wicked Bible. If you go to our debate on the 1611 King James, King James-only debate, Will Duffy and I, we traveled to Oxford. We got access to the handwritten notes of the King James translators, and we used those in this amazing debate, kgov.com slash KJO. Kgov.com slash KJO. Or you could shorten it to KO for knockout. Really fun debate. And the Wicked Bible was a full and complete printing of the King James Bible, except it had a typo in Exodus chapter 20. And where it’s supposed to say, thou shall not commit adultery, the typesetter left out the word not, and it said, thou shall commit adultery. How’s that one? And by the way, you could search for photos of the Wicked Bible. They’re very rare and not very good quality photos. So Will Duffy and I, we did put a high quality photo of this in our debate at kgov.com slash KJO. And everyone immediately, this is part of the power of God’s Word, everyone immediately knew it was false. They knew it was, this is a bad Bible. This is not a good Bible. This is a bad Bible. So the printer, you know, the king almost had his head cut. Because you couldn’t just start a print shop. You had to be licensed by the king in order to print. And this was the case in many countries, and I think for a period of perhaps some centuries. So again, if God does not make something good by commanding it, but rather he recognizes that which is good, then the question arises, what standard of righteousness does he use to make this judgment? If the standard is external to himself— then it appears that contrary to Christian teaching, an authority superior to God would exist. So far, that’s all valid thinking. If by God’s will, he decides whether some trait will be good as though he could have decided otherwise, that’s very arbitrary. And if his nature itself is is claimed to define goodness, then that is very arbitrary. But what if we say that God’s nature itself is claimed to define goodness? Then how could God himself even know whether he were good? How could that be? If Allah was the true God, how could Allah know if he were good? Now, this is an important question because Jesus brings this up in the Gospel of John. He says, if I testify concerning myself, my testimony is not credible. And that’s Jesus saying that. Christians believe that God commands worship for a reason similar to why he commands a son to honor his father, because it is good for the son. But some non-Christians, acknowledging no fear of the Creator, assert that if a powerful being like the biblical God actually exists, perhaps he doesn’t even realize it, but he commands worship because he is selfish. That’s their challenge. They don’t have a fear of God, and they say such things. Is there a valid response to this? Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is God the Son, and thus Christians should recognize that the euthyphro dilemma presents a valid question to be addressed because, as I had just stated, the Gospel of John quotes Jesus himself raising this concern, “…if I bear witness of myself, my witness is not credible.” The New Testament presents a divine assertion that God the Son urges others to obtain corroborating evidence to his claims. So by the recorded judgment of Jesus, if Euthyphro’s dilemma is ultimately unanswerable, then Christianity is falsified. Paul, the Apostle Paul, said, hey, Christianity could be falsified. How is it falsifiable? Well, for example, if Christ did not rise from the dead, then Christianity is false, and our faith is in vain. However, Christ did rise from the dead, and that means that every other religion is false, and he is the Savior of all those who trust in him. So if Euthyphro’s dilemma, I’m not saying if we can answer it, because sometimes there’s an answer and people are just not smart enough or they don’t have enough information to answer a particular question. I’m saying if it’s ultimately unanswerable, then Christianity is falsified. Conversely, if Christianity is true, then Euthyphro’s dilemma is answerable. So you go back to the atheist, the skeptic, who presents the Christian with two options. If God decides what kind of traits will be considered good, then goodness itself appears arbitrary. Otherwise, if goodness is not arbitrary but objective, then it appears that the true standard of righteousness would supersede God’s own authority. So you could break up these questions into the divine command view and the recognition view. So let’s begin with the divine command view regarding Euthyphro’s second horn. You know, when you’re on the horns of a dilemma, his second option, the divine command view of morality. If God’s command makes something righteous, then as atheists and even some Christian theologians point out, God could have commanded either adultery or faithfulness and forbade murdering or honoring your parents. There’s a famous atheist of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He’s considered by many, he was considered to be perhaps the smartest man alive in the world in the 1900s, perhaps the smartest, at least, mathematician. And if you go to kgov.com slash atheism, you’ll see how astoundingly stupid he was. But many people think he’s one of the smartest people who ever lived because a famous atheist is the one who could say the stupidest things with the straightest face. So atheist Bertrand Russell said, if the only basis for morality is God’s decrees, it follows that they might just as well have been the opposite of what they are. He wrote that in 1962. We link to it. And that’s totally true. Well, go back half a millennium earlier. Go back 500 years before Bertrand Russell to the influential Christian theologian John Duns Scotus. He affirmatively taught that God does make something like honesty or humility good by deciding that it will be good. But if it were true that God invents the distinction between good and evil, then by this atheist objection and this Christian’s reasoning, God’s commands are arbitrary at the deepest level. So the shall nots of the Ten Commandments could have been the shalls. Now, there are real-world effects of this arbitrariness. For example, there are those who claim a special dispensation from God to justify the selling of indulgences. Have you heard of that? It’s an ugly part of church history. It’s called simony, the selling of indulgences, and other bad behavior by the church. You could actually pay the church and get a receipt for a license to sin. Church raised money by doing that. I use the term church loosely. Scripture, though, describes the Lord God as abounding in goodness and truth, with righteousness and justice as the foundation of your throne. Arbitrariness is not affirmed. No, not at all. But rather in the Bible, God shows personal favoritism to no man. There goes Calvinism. God the Son does not show personal favoritism, but teaches the way of God in truth. The scriptures tell us. And he said, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And he teaches of the spirit of truth. And the Lord said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And many other verses that we reference here. Atheists use Euthyphro’s dilemma, hoping to show that both options are invalid. So while they will approve of the conclusion here that we’re drawing, that Euthyphro’s second option is invalid because then morality itself is arbitrary. There’s no such thing as absolute morality. They will reject much of the reasoning that I’m using because this material… Stop the tape.

SPEAKER 02 : 28:26

Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want to hear the entirety of this broadcast series, you can find it online. It’s at kgov.com slash euthyphro. Although euthyphro, that’s a very difficult word. to spell. So I just, I created kgov.com slash E, E for Euthyphro. It’s a lot easier to spell the letter E than it is to spell Euthyphro. So kgov.com slash E. Hey, may God bless you guys.