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  • Essay / Shafer-Landau Analysis - 1144

    This is the “view that an act is morally right simply because God commands it” (Shafer-Landau 2004, 145). If we assume that God exists and is the creator of all moral laws, this creates a twisted image of a God who fancifully created the moral laws that guide his teachings by pure chance. As Shafer-Landau puts it: “if an act is right because God loves it or commands it. Now it is the word of God that makes it so, transforming something that was previously morally neutral into something that is good or bad, or right or wrong” (Shafer-Landau 2004: 80). An alternative solution proposed by Shafer-Landau is to imagine God as a referee of a sporting game, simply a follower of rules or laws previously created by a higher power. By creating this new concept of God, we can understand that morality exists this way for an important and right reason. It is worth noting that Shafer-Landau and I believe that theists should reject the first premise in addition to the second, because this would create flimsy and unreliable implications about God and our moral laws. Whether or not God is the author of his own moral laws, if he existed, morality would always be