Answering the Euthyphro Paradox Your statement of whether Physical laws either stemmed from an arbitrary whim or from some ontological necessity brought up Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma. Is something Good or True because God deems it such, or is it independent of God? If the former, then God could have pronounced the most horrendous of crimes as virtuous. Allah is said to be capricious, perhaps in the moment, and morality or the Laws of Gravitation could change with the wind. If the latter, then God is not sovereign and is bound by some necessity, and this merely begs the question of what force is superior to God. However, there is a 3rd way. Goodness is the way it is because God is Himself Good. The emanation of the universe’s moral and physical structure is intrinsically tied to the warp and weft of his essential being. Nature is orderly and organically integrated because God is ordered and wholly self-sufficient, lacking nothing. The universe is the necessary Creation He set into motion and sustains with His concern hour by hour —This concern is Love in its highest and perhaps most abstract incarnation. Aristotle may have had his mechanics wrong, but the origin of the unmoved mover’s “music of the spheres’ is His abiding concern for what He hath wrought—-and it flows undiluted from the matrix of his immutable essence. Changeless, having no beginning or end, wholly rational and integrated, His laws reflect that necessary compulsion because they can be no other way. On might as well imagine a circle that is also a square or a sum where two and two are equal to anything but four. God cannot make a one-ended stick or create a weight that he could not lift because it is an incongruity that disintegrates upon exposure to pure mind — rationality incarnate.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 17:45:27 +0000