God v. Goodness - Chicken v. Egg?

Hey there insufferable Reddit atheists, TikTok philosophers in Che Guevara T-shirts, and cardigan-clad humanities professors treating morality like a customizable Spotify playlist. You strut around with an ancient “gotcha” like it’s fresh-baked enlightenment, convinced you’ve finally pinned God to the mat. It’s called the Euthyphro Dilemma…

“Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s already good?”

Ooh, devastating. You smirk like a toddler who just knocked over the chessboard and declared victory. Either God is an arbitrary sky-daddy pronouncing moral commandments like a bad HOA president, or He’s just a cosmic hall monitor enforcing rules some Platonic form scribbled on a napkin. In either event, you declare traditional religion collapses. And, after such collapse, it is apparently time for your enlightened secular utopia of consent, therapy speak, and whatever “my truth” the algorithm demands this week.

This is peak comedy. Watching atheists preen over this false binary is like watching someone lecture a master chef on cuisine while mainlining glue and gender studies. The intellectual toolkit comes from public schools that swapped catechism for pronoun circles and Netflix sermons about self-actualization. You picture God as a temperamental Zeus or Thor with anger issues, ready to declare puppy-torture a sacrament or child sacrifice trendy again. Adorable. And hilariously ignorant of actual Catholic thought.

Let me carve up this fake dilemma with the contempt it so richly deserves.

First horn of the postulation: Goodness is whatever God arbitrarily decides. This is the favorite nightmare fuel. Next comes the following:

“What if He suddenly commanded genocide or made Tuesday murder day?”

The atheist cackles, imagining trad Catholics goose-stepping to every divine whim. This lets the atheist virtue-signal about “harm reduction” and “bodily autonomy” (translation: abortion on demand and euthanizing the inconvenient) while painting believers as dangerous fascists and fanatical ghouls.

This voluntarist fantasy isn’t Traditional Catholicism—it’s the sloppy thinking of certain late-medieval radicals and their Protestant stepchildren that you gleefully project onto the Church. Real Catholic tradition, rooted in the Fathers and Scholastics, rejects any notion of God as cosmic despot. His will isn’t whim; it flows perfectly from His eternal intellect and unchanging nature. He cannot command evil for the same reason He cannot make square circles or “valid” same-sex marriages: it would contradict His own being.

Second horn—this is the one that makes the atheist feel extra clever: Goodness exists independently of God, so He’s just ratifying pre-existing standards like a divine HR manager. “See? Morality doesn’t need God! We can ground ethics in reason, evolution, or whatever feels nice on Tuesday.” This reduces the Creator of the universe to an optional consultant. Why worship the source of Being when you can bow to abstract “goodness” floating in a Platonic void? This is the perfect setup for the godless autonomy project—until that autonomy redefines marriage, sex, gender, and human dignity into oblivion. But, I have to ask: how’s the secular paradise working out? We have record-low birth rates, skyrocketing mental illness, “therapy dogs” in every store, and “compassionate” death panels. This, we’re told, is peak progress. Socrates would be proud as your civilization collapses into a new paganism dumber than the old one.

Good thing we have a 2000 year old Tradition that gives us a framework to evaluate such dribble. Traditionalist Catholicism laughs this nonsense straight into the void. God is not a being who possesses goodness. He is Goodness itself—Subsistent Goodness, the very essence of perfection. In the doctrine of divine simplicity, masterfully defended by St. Thomas Aquinas, God’s essence, existence, will, and intellect are absolutely one. No composition, no external standards, no arbitrary choices. He created human nature with built-in purposes and teleology. The moral laws are not alien commands simply slapped on us, nor are they rules floating independent of the Creator.

It is our participation in the eternal law of God’s own rational nature. What is good for us flows from how He designed us.

This isn’t a desperate theological patch. It’s the perennial philosophy of the Church—Scripture, the Fathers, the great councils, and every sane Catholic before the 1960s turned seminaries into encounter groups. The saints didn’t lose sleep over these pseudo-dilemmas cooked up by a pagan heading off to prosecute his father for impiety. The saints lived in alignment with the divine order. While your secular “ethicists” twist into pretzels grounding “don’t murder” in evolutionary psychology (then pivot to justifying abortion), Catholics stand on rock-solid ground: the universe reflects divine reason. Objective morality radiates from the One who is its source.

Atheists and secular ethicists hate this because it demands humility. It requires submitting your puny autonomous will to a transcendent order instead of playing god in your moral sandbox. So you mock “sky daddy,” embrace the void, and harvest the predictable fruits: sterile societies, endless identity crises, and a culture that calls killing the elderly and unborn “dignity.” The real satire writes itself every time a progressive lectures Christians on compassion while endorsing the evils destroying human flourishing.

Aquinas solved this 800 years ago—centuries before indoor plumbing and silly microwave burrito philosophy flowing from TikTok. God commands what is good because He is Goodness. The dilemma only works against a cartoon God invented by surface-level thinking fools. It has zero force against the God of classical theism.

Next time some fedora-tipper launches into the smug routine, smile. Explain that God is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Invite him to a Traditional Latin Mass. Watch the discomfort as he realizes his clever trap was built on straw and sand, while the Church built on Peter endures.

The joke’s on the modern world. They abandoned the faith thinking they’d outgrown it, only to descend into better marketed barbarism. Traditional Catholicism doesn’t dodge your questions—it dissolves them in the light of eternal truth.

Endnotes

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, qq. 3-6 (divine simplicity and goodness); I, q. 19 (divine will).

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I.

Catechism of the Catholic Church §§1700-1729 (natural law, eternal law).

Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis.