Morality is either relative or doesn’t come from God
Many theists believe that whenever something terrible (and often arbitrary) happens, it somehow fits into God’s plan. For instance, the earthquake in Haiti, some say, might be taken to be God’s way of making non-Haitians better people because it wakes them from their moral slumber and provokes them to do something good for those suffering, thus raising the general level of goodness in the world. As with many theistic arguments, it is often difficult to show, to one making the argument, that it makes the world less meaningful, rather than more so. But the argument, which implies that God is the sole arbiter in any question of morality, when taken to its conclusion leads to a contradiction.
Suppose that someone very dear to you was tragically killed. Your natural reaction would almost certainly be extreme grief and probably anger towards the guilty party. But suppose further that God descended to give you the following message: “you are not to grieve, nor to be angry at the killer, since it was I who ordered him to do what he did. It was for the greater good.” You then have two choices: you take God at his word, thus conceding that morality is relative; or you take a stand and say that God is objectively wrong, thus conceding that you think morality, whether objective or not, does not come from God.
(As an aside, suppose that you are the killer doing God’s will. What do you make of the position that God’s plan put you in?)
This is not substantially different from the all-part-of-God’s-great-plan case. Many theists simply posit that the Haitian earthquake was part of a masterplan, without any idea at all of what that masterplan might be. This kind of view can only be followed by a wad of theological interpretation, none of which can be conclusive. And even though God might exist and might have a grand plan, nonetheless it would be decidedly unhealthy, if faced with the hypothetical situation above, to console yourself with the idea that this plan evidently trumps both the value of people’s lives and any meaning that life might have.
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I’m not sure I follow all of this, but I think the point is interesting. You may be well acquainted with this, but in case not, the line of argument you are advancing is commonly taken to have its (written) origin in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro.
One thing I would like to better understand is why you think conceding the apologistic view, or as you put it “taking God at his word” entails that morality is relative. In one sense, yes: it entails that morality is relative-to-what-God-commands. But that sort of relativity is already inherent in the concept of an omnipotent and intelligent creator. God is conceived as someone who can make the world behave however he wants, and there is no particular reason to expect his wants to match our preconceptions about how the world should be. In other words, relativity-to-what-God-commands is not going to seem like a surprising consequence to a sincere theist — at least not if they are honest. Of course it seems surprising to many of us that it *could* even *possibly* be good to kill someone (e.g. because God says so). But is there anything deeper to this than a surprise? You say at the outset of your post that the theistic view is contradictory, but so far it just strikes me as hard to believe. Is there a literal contradiction in believing that morality is ‘whatever God makes it’ or is it just a really strange view of things?
The problem is that so many theists passionately believe that to be an atheist means you have no place from which to derive moral principles, and also that morality is absolute. In other words, for these theists, killing is never, ever justified, and this law comes from God. But if God can change his mind about these things, then what is absolutely wrong one minute is not so the next, and therefore there is no absolute morality. The most a theist can say is that morality is objective (rather than absolute), and that there is some set of laws governing its contingency on the will of God. So there is no contradiction in believing that morality is whatever God makes it, as long as you admit that it cannot then be absolute (unless God cannot, by some definition of what God is, change it — in which case why invoke God?).
But there is a larger point. If one believes that morality comes from God and that God intervenes in the world, then one must either accept that God does a lot of bad things, or conclude that there is some great plan behind it. But the latter option leads to what amounts to a passive evil, whereby one’s own intellectual laziness leads to thinking little of the suffering of others.
Please check out this reference which points out that morality comes from the human heart when it is established in the intrinsic state of Prior Unity.
http://www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm
Plus related references.
http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/literature/observe_learn.php
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-life.aspx
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