The divine command theory dictates that whatever god says is morally correct is morally correct and whatever god says is morally wrong is morally wrong. This makes moral dilemmas as easy as looking it up in an instruction manual. This in theory completely resolves the issue of subjectivity in morality. (Aquinas 1274)
For evil to exist in this theory god would have to be evil himself or he/she/it would have to be good or neutral and allow evil because if god is all powerful, they should be able to stop the evil but have purposefully allowed it instead for some reason. On the other hand the first problem is that this theory presupposes a belief in god and if you don’t believe in god, you certainly won’t be willing to accept imaginary deities’ codes of conduct because obviously if he isn’t real these rules were not made by a deity but instead by a very manipulative liar. (Pascal 1662)
In other words is something good because god commands it or is it just good so god commands it. Is god actually defining what is good and we’re just going along with what he says because he god or is good something separate from god and he/she is simply directing/guiding us to it? (Aquinas 1274)
Because obviously if the first is true god telling everyone to wear bowler hats and clogs becomes morally correct, this makes no sense. For example god sets out that killing is wrong in the Ten Commandments written in stone but then tells Abraham to kill just to see if he would. Basically god’s word in that situation directly from his mouth overrides his previous decision set in stone; Murder was evil but then became good for a short period. For that brief period god promoted evil.
If god can change his mind if we believe morality is defined by what he says and what he says is not consistent and in this case completely contradictory that must mean that morality is just as inconsistent. Can we be sure what he actually said is even interpreted correctly? What if god is misunderstood? Is it possible that god could be evil and controls our actions under the pretence of being good or say evil is subjective and someone from another planet might consider everything we believe to be good as evil.
However in the other perspective morality becomes something independent of god and god just tells us about it, so we don’t really need god to be objectively moral at all, because he’s served his purpose, we don’t need god to be moral because we already have his basic schema we just need to follow it. In these terms god has little to no power over our actions, so to be evil is the same as evil, a moral choice born of the existence of free will. Evil will always exist as long as there is free will, god essentially allowed evil by giving us free will. (Nietzsche 1900)
Upon breaking down the elements of how senses gather information Rene Descartes begins to realize that all these elements also exist in dreams and it is very difficult for him to create a clear distinction between dreams and reality because they share the same elements and often you have a dream that seems real but then is justified as a dream by the act of waking.
In theory as I am sitting at my computer now typing if I were to then black out and wake up in my bed I would have to attribute what I am doing now to a dream. Descartes eventually concedes that in retrospective we can indeed tell dreams from reality by waking.
A devil or an evil genius that may have the powers of god and may want us to believe we are real people when in fact we could just be concepts or brains floating in vats, he can deceive our minds into believing false claims such as two plus two equals five and we have no means to disprove that as we are blinded by this devil. He can make us believe wax is solid and then changes into a liquid.
The only argument Descartes poses against the idea of the devil tricking us is that for a loving god to exist this has to be false because a loving god who created us in his image would not want us to be deceived because by definition this god is good and if something is all knowing and powerful and good this being would never allow something evil to make us believe something that is in fact false. What he’s referring to is obviously more or less believing core principles like two plus two equals four because we’ve already established that our senses deceive us but that is just common error not a conscious deception.
It’s not a foundational deception which affects all other judgments about the world because we can easily prove that what our senses are experiencing is correct or not. On the other hand for something to make us believe that two plus two is five is something we cannot prove one way or another because we won’t actually know we’re being deceived, there’s no way of knowing that we’re not actually brains in vats other than trusting in a loving god.
Works Cited
Descartes, Rene Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641. Print.
Eagleton, T. God and Evil: In the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas, 2010. Print.
Nietzsche, F. We Philologists, 2012. Print.
Plato Euthyphro, 424/423 BC. Print.
Shouler, K. (2013) Pascal's Influence on Kierkegaard, 2013. Article.
