Allabaster is annoyed:
If i hear one more self important uni drop out refer to Socrates and his bloody Euthyphro dilemma i’m going to go mental. BTW Vox good work including a nice refutation in the last chapter of TIA. Has anybody tried to refute your position or have they all stalled at chapter 3ish?
There has only been one half-hearted and wildly incorrect attempt that I’ve seen, and I don’t think it was an atheist who gave it a shot. Although some young university atheists encountering philosophy for the first time are infatuated with it, it’s tangential to the whole debate because it doesn’t really have anything directly to do with God’s existence. My strong suspicion is that no one has tried to address it because so few of those who cite it have actually read the dialogue. Even those who have read it probably haven’t grasped its logic; Beezle, for example, didn’t understand that he can’t possibly describe my refutation of Euthyphro as an evasion, (which is incorrect anyhow), because in addition to pointing out the way in which the “dilemma” can’t logically be applied to the Christian God, I also demonstrate how Socrates himself admits that he is cheating by artificially redefining terms in order to create a false dilemma.
While I’m far from the first to point out that whining about an arbitrary nature is not sufficient to preserve the weak horn of the “dilemma” from the assault of Thomas Aquinas and others, it is entirely possible that I may be the first to show that Socrates’s logic in constructing the false dilemma is flawed. I’ve yet to see anyone even attempt to address this point and would very much like to see someone do so.