A strict but made-up moral code, is arbitrary in the sense that it is mere opinion or no better. People want a solid moral values system. They know that arbitrary can lead to control or to chaos.
Philosophers often distinguish between: The practical question: What should I do? What’s right or wrong? The metaethical question: What makes something right or wrong? What grounds morality? Practical ethics matters more to our lives than the metaphysics behind it. The idea of God being the one that matters more than any human undermines this.
The evidence is that despite the lofty sounding proclamations from philosophers and theologians they are giving answers that are more in line with mystery than clarity and logic. They seem to depend on what they want to get from some kind of process of elimination. While such methods can help, they never satisfy. Proving John did not kill Jane and so it must have been Thomas does not tell you much. Same thing.
THE ARGUMENT
There are three main and essential theistic accounts of how morality relates to God:
(a) morality is grounded in God’s commands,
(b) morality is independent of God but upheld by Him, or
(c) morality is grounded in God’s nature.
Each account attempts to explain the source of moral truth, but each introduces its own unresolved difficulty.
Divine Command Theory makes morality depend on commands, but does not explain why those commands are good; it merely identifies authority, not moral grounding.
Morality independent of God preserves objectivity but removes God from the explanatory role, leaving the theistic explanation redundant.
Morality grounded in God’s nature ties goodness to God’s character, but offers no explanation for why those character traits are morally authoritative, and treats them as unexplained brute facts.
Because each view ultimately appeals to something unexplained—commands, independence, or divine nature—none of them provides a fully clear or conclusive account of why moral truths hold.
Each theory stops at a point where the explanation becomes opaque rather than illuminating.
Appealing to mystery does not constitute an explanation.
If a theory ends with “we cannot understand the grounding,” then the appeal to God has not clarified the origin of morality; it has only relocated the mystery.
Human beings still have to identify moral truths through reasoning, experience, and reflection, regardless of which theistic model is adopted.
No divine grounding theory gives us accessible, decisive moral knowledge on its own.
If God has not provided a clear, universally recognizable explanation of moral
foundations, then saying “morality comes from God” does not improve our
understanding.
Without reliable, accessible clarification, the invocation of God adds no
explanatory power for human moral knowledge.
Therefore, none of the theistic grounding accounts provides a clear or convincing explanation of morality’s structure, and they do not exceed the clarity achievable by human moral reasoning alone.
The mystery remains, only shifted to a divine source rather than resolved.
THE PROBLEMS
Problems for “Morality Depends on God”
(General) Euthyphro dilemma: If moral truths depend on God, are they good because God endorses them, or does God endorse them because they’re already good?
Arbitrariness worry: If God defines morality, then morality could become arbitrary—goodness is whatever God wills, even if counterintuitive or cruel.
Moral autonomy: If morality depends on God, humans lose any independent moral reasoning—everything reduces to obedience.
Epistemic access: Difficulty determining what exactly God commands or what God’s nature entails, given conflicting scriptures and traditions.
Problems for “Divine Command Theory” (Morality = God’s Commands) Arbitrariness (stronger here): God could command torture, and it would be “good.”
Moral motivation becomes obedience: What’s morally right collapses into “whatever the strongest being says,” which resembles might-makes-right. Conflicting divine commands: Different religions claim different commands; unclear which set is morally authoritative.
No moral reasons: Actions are right because God commands them, not because of any moral features of the actions themselves.
Problems for “Morality Grounded in God’s Nature”
Nature–goodness identity problem: Saying “goodness = God’s nature” risks being non-explanatory or tautological. Is God’s nature good because it fits some standard? If so, that standard is independent of God, undermining the theory. If goodness just is God’s nature, then claims like “God is good” become trivially true (like “bachelors are unmarried”), losing meaningful moral praise.
Selective interpretation: Theistic scriptures depict God acting in ways that appear morally problematic, raising tension between the alleged perfect nature and the evidence.
Problems for “Morality Independent of God” (for the theist trying to defend divine importance)
Redundancy: If morality is truly independent, God becomes unnecessary for explaining moral truths.
Loss of moral authority: Moral obligations no longer come from a divine legislator; moral motivation must be grounded elsewhere.
Undermines certain apologetic arguments: Many moral arguments for God rely on morality needing a grounding; independence weakens those arguments.
MEANING God's connection to objective morality is forged by talk of ultimate meaning. Ultimate meaning is a rhetorical weapon. Religious apologists use the term in an ambiguous way: sometimes describing eternal significance, sometimes objective truth, sometimes cosmic purpose, sometimes metaphysical necessity. Sometimes a combination. This is a shell game. Philosophers call this the equivocation fallacy. If morality already has real-world meaning, then “ultimate” is either irrelevant, undefinable, or simply a tool for manipulation.
FINALLY Even though a world with nothing in it would contain no suffering, many religions claim that only faith in a perfectly good God lets us take morality seriously. They present morality as either mere human convention or something objective that requires God as its foundation. But morality doesn’t obviously need God—or any cosmic purpose—to be real or authoritative. And even if some deeper foundation existed, it’s unclear how it actually grounds or sources morality. Even if it is not a crutch, it is treated as one. It clearly "asks" for it. When belief in objective morality becomes a crutch rather than a guide, it raises a further question: is the very idea of objective morality still good if it ends up encouraging that dependence? Good trees should bear good fruits.
APPENDIX Aristotelians claim that flourishing and potential are good. Classical theists would ask: “Why is flourishing good?” The answer would be that valuing flourishing is built into what we are. That’s a fact about human nature, not an opinion. The answer seems rather hollow - human nature being able to flourish does not prove it morally should. It can be asserted though that there is something right about it - and that is enough. The trouble is that is mystery talk. Our psychology, not philosophy is the reason we think they are linked.