16 Problems with Divine Command Theory

16) God is a consequentialist

And finally…

A fundamental problem for Christians is that theologians claim that things like DCT are correct, but actually, most of the population tend to be consequentialists. As William Lane Craig has declared: “consequentialism is a terrible ethic”. However, it turns out that about 90% of people are intuitively consequentialist. The most famous experiment to look into this is the trolley problem. 90% of people would pull the lever. This goes dramatically down if they have to push a fat man off the bridge, which shows that morality is a function of psychology. It turns out that (as Jonathan Haidt would say in “The emotional dog and the rational tail”) that we intuitively moralise and then scrabble around for reasons as to why we did something.

But Christians supposedly decry such consequentialism. Funny this, because it turns out that God is the biggest consequentialist of them all. You will hear that God moves in mysterious ways, that there is a reason for everything. The Problem of Evil dictates that there can be no gratuitous evil, that every bit of suffering must be necessary towards eventuating a greater good. So the moral value of the action which brings about suffering is in the consequence of the eventual greater good. It cannot be good that all of the world, bar 8, and all of the animals bar some died in a great flood. No. So the goodness comes from the greater good which this brought about. Everything happens for a reason and God moves in mysterious ways. Jesus being sacrificed was for the sins of the world. This was pure consequentialism. In fact, every atrocity in both the Bible and the real world is explained in this way.

But, according to Christians, this ethic is terrible. The ethical system employed by theologians to use in EVERY SINGLE THEODICY is consequentialist, and apparently terrible!

See more in my essay here.