The dilemma is ancient — it appears in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, formulated as a question about piety — but its force has not diminished in two and a half millennia. Applied to theism: is something morally good because God commands it? Or does God command it because it is morally good?
If the first: morality is arbitrary. God could command cruelty, and cruelty would thereby become good. The command-theory of morality gives God no moral character — just infinite power to define. If the second: goodness is a standard independent of God to which God conforms. God is then constrained by something above Him, and we could in principle know what is good without knowing God.
Both horns appear to damage theism. The dilemma is taken seriously in contemporary philosophy of religion. It deserves a serious response.
The third option: divine nature theory
Classical theism — articulated by philosophers including Anselm, Aquinas, and in the Islamic tradition by scholars in the Ash’arite school — responds by rejecting the dichotomy. The dilemma assumes that God’s commands and the standard of goodness are two separate things. But on the divine nature theory, they are not separate. God’s nature just is the standard of goodness. God does not conform to a standard above Himself, nor does His command create goodness arbitrarily. His commands express His nature, and His nature is the ultimate reality of what goodness means.
On this view, goodness is neither independent of God nor defined by arbitrary divine fiat. It is identical with God’s own character — with what a being of unlimited love, wisdom, and justice necessarily is. God commands honesty not because honesty was good before God existed, nor because God’s command makes it good. God commands honesty because God is truthful — and God’s truthful nature is what goodness ultimately means.
The objection to divine nature theory
The standard response to divine nature theory is that it makes the moral argument circular: if goodness just is what God is, then “God is good” becomes a tautology rather than a substantive claim. And if we can know what goodness means only by knowing God’s nature, we have no independent grip on the concept of goodness that would let us evaluate whether God actually has it.
The response to this objection is that we do have some independent grip on moral reality — through moral intuition, through the objectivity of certain moral judgements that seem undeniable — and that what the divine nature theory claims is that this independent grip is itself grounded in the God whose nature it reflects. The convergence between what God is and what we independently identify as good is not an accident. It is the signature of a common source.
Why this matters
The Euthyphro dilemma is often cited as a refutation of theistic ethics. It is not a refutation — it is a genuine philosophical challenge that has a genuine philosophical response. The divine nature theory is the most defensible theistic position, and it has been the dominant classical theistic position for centuries. The person who finds the dilemma compelling has not encountered an unsolvable problem. They have encountered a well-developed philosophical debate that the tradition has engaged seriously.