36 Arguments For The Existence Of God

Edge ran an except from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, which combats various justifications for the almighty. From the book:

Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did?  Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while  genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitraryhe could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide goodand we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

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