Good And Evil Reasoned By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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If there is no God, everything is permitted - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Standing in a grand cosmic opposition to one another, the concept of good and evil has been intimately linked by many theists with divine scripture; the ideas of virtue and sin. The quotation by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from the book The Brothers Karamazov, condenses the claim of theological naturalists that our perception of good and evil is essentially derived from the revelations of a supernatural lawgiver. Morality, according to the Cambridge dictionary of Philosophy, is defined as the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and those that are evil. Conducive to the claim of theological naturalists is the belief that divine commandments withhold humanity from plunging into lawlessness and anarchy, a state in which individual self-interest is the sole determinant of right and wrong. However, this dogmatic view proves insufficient when the false cause fallacy of assuming that godlessness necessarily leads to a moral vacuum is further …show more content…

This argument must be critically analysed by considering Euthypro’s Dilemma:

 (1) Is an action evil because God says it is evil?
 (2) Or does God deem an action evil because it is intrinsically evil?

If (1), then the content of morality is solely dependent on God’s whim; rendering morality nothing more than blind obedience to divine arbitration. If (2), then the action is evil independently of God, in which case God is simply redundant. Moreover, if the theist claims that morality is not arbitrary then God must recognize a moral code superior to Himself – in this case, God’s sovereignty devolves into subordination. Therefore, recognizing that humans have the agency of freewill, it must be the case that our motivations to be moral are independent of God’s

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