Euthyphro's Third Way: How God Can Be Good Without Being Bossed Around

Here's a puzzle that's been quietly wrecking dinner parties since roughly 380 BC: does God love goodness because it's good, or is something good simply because God loves it?

That question comes from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, and over the last two videos in this series we've watched it split into two horns, both of which gore something we care about. If you're just joining us, welcome — I'll catch you up in a moment. But if you've been with me through the first two installments, you already know the discomfort I'm describing. You've sat with the two horns, turned them over, maybe lost some sleep. Today, finally, we get to the payoff: a third way through the dilemma that I think is not just clever but true. Grab a coffee. This one's worth taking slow.

A Quick Recap: Where We've Been

In the first video, we sat with Horn One: moral truths exist independently of God, and God commands things because they are already good or evil. Torturing infants is wrong — full stop, as a fact about reality — and God, being perfectly wise, recognizes this and forbids it. This sounds reassuring morally, but it came at a steep theological price. If there's a moral law floating out there, above and beyond God, that even God has to answer to, then God isn't the ultimate reality anymore. He's more like a very powerful civil servant enforcing a code He didn't write and can't amend. This is roughly the picture you get in certain readings of Platonism — the Form of the Good, sitting serenely above all things, including the gods, the way Plato describes it in the Republic (~375 BC), where the Good is even said to be "beyond being" (epekeina tes ousias). It's a gorgeous picture, but it leaves God's throne conspicuously occupied by someone else. We also asked the harder question: if these moral truths don't depend on God, what grounds them? Where do they live? That Horn threatened God's sovereignty, His omnipotence, and His freedom.

In the second video, we took Horn Two: God decides. Saving lives is good and torturing babies is evil not because those facts were sitting around waiting for God's endorsement, but because God's will makes them so. This is Divine Command Theory in its starkest form, and it preserves God's sovereignty beautifully — nothing constrains Him. But it makes morality look arbitrary. God could, in principle, have commanded the opposite. Nothing about torturing babies is intrinsically evil on this view; it's evil only downstream of a divine decree. Flip the decree, flip the moral status. That's Horn Two, and it's the horn that makes goodness feel like it's resting on nothing but a coin flip that happened to land in our favor.

So there's the trap: arbitrary sovereignty on one side, subordinate goodness on the other. Pick your poison. Or so it seems.

Motivation Recap: Why We Can't Just Shrug This Off

Before we go further, let's feel the weight of this again, because it's easy to treat the Euthyphro Dilemma as an academic parlor trick when it's actually got real teeth.

We know, with about as much moral certainty as we know anything, that torturing infants for fun is evil, and that rescuing innocent people from harm is good. These aren't controversial claims requiring footnotes. But why are they true? If God simply picked "torturing babies = bad" the way you might pick a paint color, then we have to ask: could He have picked differently? Did we get lucky? Is there a possible world where a different divine whim made cruelty the virtue and compassion the vice, and the inhabitants of that world sing hymns to sadism with a totally clear conscience because, after all, God said so? That thought should bother you. It bothers me.

But swing to the other side and a different worry appears. If God consults some external moral law the way a judge consults a legal code, then who wrote that code? Is God bound by it whether He likes it or not? Can He change it if He wanted to — and if He can't, in what sense is He all-powerful? The very perfection we want to attribute to God — His complete sovereignty, His status as the source of all reality — seems to crack the moment we admit there's a standard sitting outside of Him that He has to defer to.

So which is it? Arbitrary tyrant or subordinate rule-follower? Neither option feels like it's describing the God that classical theism — the tradition running through Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas — has actually been talking about for two millennia. And that mismatch is a clue. It suggests we're missing an option.

The Tempting (But Failed) Compromise

Before we get to the real solution, let's dispense with an obvious halfway move, because you may have thought of it already: why not just split the difference? Maybe some moral truths are grounded in God's commands (Horn One) and others are grounded in an independent standard (Horn Two). A hybrid view.

The trouble is that hybrids don't dissolve problems, they just distribute them. Whatever portion of morality you assign to raw divine command still carries all the arbitrariness we worried about — those particular moral facts remain accidents of divine whim, could-have-been-otherwise all the way down. And whatever portion you assign to the independent standard still dethrones God with respect to those facts; He's still answering to something outside Himself, just for a smaller slice of the moral universe. Mixing the horns doesn't get you a version of the bull with no horns. It gets you gored twice, in two different places. We need something that actually escapes the dilemma's own terms, not a diplomatic split between them.

The Third Way: Grounded in God's Nature

Here's the move, and it's one of the more elegant pieces of reasoning in the history of philosophy of religion. It goes back at least to Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (composed roughly 1265–1274 AD), especially in the discussion of the divine nature in Question 6, where Aquinas argues that God does not merely possess goodness the way a good man possesses goodness. God is goodness itself. Goodness is not a trait God has; it's identical with what God is. In the twentieth century, philosophers like Alvin Plantinga picked the question back up directly — his 1980 monograph is literally titled Does God Have a Nature? — and more recently you'll find it worked through clearly in Brian Davies's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (2004), and William Lane Craig has run a version of this exact argument in his public debates for years. So this isn't a novel dodge I'm inventing to get God off the hook. It's a load-bearing piece of the classical theist tradition.

Here's the reasoning, step by step, and I want you to follow the logic carefully because the payoff depends on it.

Start with something almost trivially true: what's right or wrong for a thing to do depends on what kind of thing it is — on its nature. It is good for a human being to love her children. It is neither good nor bad for an amoeba to "love" anything, because an amoeba doesn't have the kind of nature — rational, social, capable of will and attachment — that makes love either possible or fitting for it. Morality, in other words, isn't a free-floating cloud hovering over all possible beings identically. It's indexed to natures. Wolves hunting is not "evil" the way a human committing an analogous act of predation upon another human would be, because a wolf's nature is different from a human's. Aristotle was already onto this in the Nicomachean Ethics (~340 BC) when he grounded the human good in ergon — the characteristic function or activity proper to a rational animal. Whatever is good for a thing is tied to what that thing essentially is.

Now bring God into the picture. God is the one who invents natures. He didn't discover the blueprint for "human being" lying around somewhere and then stamp out a few billion copies. He conceived it, willed it, and brought it into existence — rational, embodied, social, capable of love and cruelty alike. That means God, in creating the natures of things, is thereby determining what's right and wrong for those things to do. He didn't consult an external moral law to figure out that love is fitting for humans; the fittingness of love for humans falls right out of the kind of creature He chose to make.

At this point you might think we've just circled back to Horn Two in a fancy disguise — "God decides," full stop, arbitrary as ever. But hold on. Here's where the whole argument turns on its hinge: God Himself has a nature. And it's because of that nature that God will never choose to invent natures for which cruelty is the fitting response, or for which torturing the innocent is virtuous. The determination isn't arbitrary because it isn't free-floating — it flows necessarily from what God essentially is. Nor is it externally imposed, because there's nothing outside God doing the imposing. The standard is internal to Him. It just is Him.

The Molechs: A Thought Experiment

Let me make this vivid with a thought experiment, because abstractions like "nature" and "essence" can slide right past you if we don't ground them in something concrete.

Imagine a possible species — let's call them molechs, borrowing the name of the ancient near-eastern deity associated with child sacrifice — for whom torturing babies for fun is not merely permitted but morally required. It's woven into their nature the way loving your children is woven into ours. For a molech, cruelty to infants is what love is to us: fitting, virtuous, the mark of a molech living well according to its kind.

Could God create molechs? Here's where the answer needs real precision, because a sloppy answer here recreates the whole dilemma. In one sense, yes: molechs seem to be a logically coherent kind of creature — there's no contradiction in the concept, the way there's a contradiction in "a square circle" — and God, being omnipotent, has the raw power to actualize any logically possible being. So it's not that He's incapable, the way He's incapable of making a stone too heavy for Him to lift because that description is self-defeating nonsense from the start.

But in another, more important sense, no: God would never actually do it. And here's the crucial refinement — it's not quite right to say He "couldn't" make molechs, as if some external chain were holding His hands back. It's that He wouldn't choose to, because doing so would be radically out of step with His own nature, which is perfectly good. Think of it less like a fence around God and more like the fact that a master painter with impeccable taste simply would never produce an ugly, tasteless canvas — not because someone forbids it, but because it would be a betrayal of who the painter is. The restraint, such as it is, comes from within, not from without.

And notice the distinction this lets us draw, which I think is the single most important move in the whole argument: God did create beings — us — who are capable of torturing babies. We have the freedom, the physical capacity, the tragic possibility of monstrous cruelty. That's just part of having genuine free will bundled with a body and a will that can be misused. But we are not molechs. For us, torturing babies remains wrong; it's a perversion of a human nature whose proper fulfillment lies in love and care. A molech, by contrast, would be a creature for whom that same act is right — built into the design specs, so to speak, as the fitting expression of what a molech is. God made creatures who can do evil. He did not — and, given who He is, never would — make creatures for whom evil is the good.

Why This Escapes Horn One's Problems

Let's check the third way against the very objections that sank the first two horns, because a solution that doesn't actually solve the problem isn't worth much.

Recall Horn One's trouble: it threatened God's sovereignty, omnipotence, and freedom by placing moral truths outside of Him, making Him answer to something He didn't create. Does the third way reintroduce that problem? No. There's nothing outside God at work here at all — no Platonic Form of the Good sitting serenely above Him, no independent moral law He's consulting like a legal reference book. The entire standard is internal to His own nature. Goodness isn't something God looks up. It's something God is, in the strong sense that Aquinas has in mind when he insists on divine simplicity — the doctrine that God's nature isn't a composite of separable parts (a bit of power here, a dash of knowledge there, a scoop of goodness on top), but a radical unity in which God's goodness, God's power, and God's knowledge are all identical with His single, undivided essence. There's no assembling God out of goodness plus some other ingredients. He just is, through and through, the fullness of goodness itself.

God is still sovereign because His decision is only "restrained" by His own will — and even putting it that way is misleading, because it makes it sound like He's actually constrained, when all we mean is that He just wouldn't choose those things, not that He couldn't. We don't say a perfectly honest person is "restrained" by their honesty in some regrettable way; we say their honesty simply is who they are, and their choices flow from it freely. Likewise, God is free and omnipotent, choosing without any external constraint whatsoever.

Why This Escapes Horn Two's Problems

Now check it against Horn Two's trouble: Divine Command Theory made God's moral decisions look arbitrary, like a coin flip that could have gone the other way with nobody the wiser. Does the third way inherit that? Also no — and here's why. This isn't arbitrary in the way Horn Two was arbitrary. It's not a coin flip that could have landed the other way. Given who God necessarily is, He would always and only choose to make things for which cruelty is evil and rescue is good. There's a reason for the choice — it's not a-rational static, it's an expression of a perfectly coherent, perfectly good character. The choice fits the chooser the way a signature fits the person who signs it.

Nothing external is constraining Him, but nothing random is happening either. If there's any "restraint" on what He creates, it's His own will and His own nature, which is just another way of saying there's no restraint at all in the relevant sense — it would be strange to call a person's fidelity to their own character a "restraint" in a way that diminishes their freedom. The "wouldn't" here isn't a "couldn't" wearing a disguise. It's the wouldn't of perfect, self-consistent character.

"But What If God Had a Different Nature?"

Here's the question that always comes up at this point, and it's worth taking seriously precisely because it sounds so reasonable at first: fine, but what if God had a different nature? What if, in some other possible arrangement, God's nature had been more like a molech's? Doesn't that just push the arbitrariness back one more level?

The honest answer is that this question doesn't actually make sense once you understand what "God" means in classical theism. You can certainly imagine — in the loose, storytelling sense of imagination — a being with different values, more power than us, who runs the universe and calls itself a god. Fiction does this constantly. But being imaginable in that thin sense doesn't make it metaphysically possible that the God who actually exists could have had a different nature, because on the classical view, everything that exists other than God depends on God for its existence, and God's own existence and nature are necessary rather than contingent. That's the crucial distinction between necessary and contingent existence that runs through this whole tradition, from Anselm's Proslogion (1078 AD) through Aquinas's Five Ways: contingent things — you, me, this laptop, this planet — could have failed to exist, or could have been otherwise, because something else explains why they're here rather than not. God, on this view, is different in kind. He has always existed; there was no moment, whether temporal, logical, or of any other sort, prior to His existence at which some alternative deity with a rotten nature could have gotten the job instead. There was never an audition. There was never a vacancy. God's nature is not one candidate that happened to win out over some other possible candidate; He is the ground of possibility itself, the reason there's a "possible" at all. So the worry that God might have had an evil nature isn't really a coherent worry about our God — it's a worry about a different, merely hypothetical being that the word "God" doesn't actually pick out.

The Objection: In What Sense Is God "Good"?

Now, the sharpest objection to all of this, and I think it deserves real respect rather than a quick brush-off. If God is the one who determines, by His nature, what's good and bad for the things He creates — and if there's no standard outside Him to measure Him against — then in what sense can we even say that God is good? We just said good and evil are relative to a nature. So is God good relative to His own nature? That sounds suspiciously close to saying "God is exactly however God is," which is true but empty, a tautology dressed up as a compliment.

I think this objection is actually onto something real, and rather than dodge it, I want to lean into it, because I think the honest answer is genuinely illuminating rather than embarrassing. There is no external standard of "good gods" against which we measure our God and find Him passing with flying colors. That whole comparative framework simply doesn't apply to Him the way it applies to us. But this doesn't mean the word "good" becomes meaningless when we point it at God — it means the word is being used differently, and this is exactly the insight Aquinas develops as analogical predication.

Aquinas noticed that when we talk about God, we're never speaking either univocally (using a word in exactly the same sense as we'd use it for creatures) or equivocally (using a word in a totally unrelated sense, a mere homonym, like "bank" of a river versus a "bank" where you keep money). Instead we speak analogically — the word carries a related but not identical meaning. Consider "healthy." We call a vitamin "healthy" and we call a person, say Mariah, "healthy." But a vitamin doesn't have health the way Mariah does — a vitamin isn't itself alive, thriving, well-functioning. It's healthy in the derivative sense that it promotes and sustains the health that belongs, properly and fully, to Mariah. Mariah's health is the primary case; the vitamin's "health" borrows its meaning from hers.

I think something similar is going on when we call God "good." Our goodness — human goodness — consists in living up to a standard, fulfilling the potential and function proper to human nature, the way Aristotle described it. But God's goodness isn't measured against any external standard He's living up to, because He simply is the standard, the primary case from which all our derivative, creaturely goodness borrows its meaning. We are good, in the full sense of the word appropriate to us, insofar as we live up to the nature He gave us. God is "good" in a different, primary, and frankly harder-to-fully-grasp sense: He simply is, in His own unchanging essence, that reality which all lesser goodness reflects and depends upon.

I know this won't satisfy everyone, and I want to be honest about that rather than paper over it. Some people want to be able to say "God is good" using the word in exactly the same sense we'd use it to praise a kind neighbor, and this analogical account tells them they can't, not quite. But I think that's actually the right place to land, rather than a disappointing consolation prize. God isn't a very large, very powerful person who happens to score well on the same moral test we take. He's a different kind of reality altogether, and it would be strange — even a little presumptuous — to expect the vocabulary we built for judging each other to map onto Him without remainder. C. S. Lewis leaned into exactly this discomfort in The Problem of Pain (1940) and, even more rawly, in A Grief Observed (1961), written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, where he confesses that God's goodness may be stranger and harder to reconcile with our categories than we'd like — not because God fails to be good, but because our categories are simply too small for Him. "My idea of God is not a divine idea," Lewis writes there; "it has to be shattered from time to time." That shattering isn't a defeat for theism. It's what you'd expect if the object of your worship actually exceeds your comprehension, rather than being a slightly bigger version of yourself.

And none of this undermines worship, or awe, or the sense that God deserves our devotion. If anything, it deepens it. We're not worshipping a cosmic rule-follower who scraped by on a test written by someone else, and we're not worshipping an arbitrary tyrant whose commands could have gone either way. We're standing before the very source and standard of goodness itself — something, or rather Someone, whose depths we should expect not to fully sound. That's not a bug in the theory. Given what we mean by "God," it's exactly what we should expect to find.

Where This Leaves Us

So there's the third way. Not a compromise between the horns, but a genuine escape from the dilemma's own framing. Good and evil for creatures are grounded in the natures God gives them — not invented by arbitrary fiat, not answering to some standard above God. And God's own goodness is not itself grounded in a further external standard; it's identical with His own necessary, unchanging, simple nature — the reference point, not a competitor for the title. We avoid the subordination of Horn One and the capriciousness of Horn Two by relocating the whole question to where classical theists like Aquinas always insisted it belonged: inside the very nature of God Himself, who was never one contestant among possible gods, but the ground from which the entire question of goodness gets its sense.

We've now walked the whole arc together — from Euthyphro's original question in Plato's Athens, through two horns that each threatened something precious, to this third way that I think Aquinas and the classical tradition got right some seven centuries ago and which contemporary philosophers of religion are still refining today. It's been a long swim, but I think we've reached solid ground.