Essay On Kretzman's 'Absolutely Perfect Being'

Kretzman asserts that in order to understand dilemmas such as the Aquedah and the Euthyphro, we must consider that God offers an objective, universal morality in which God himself can be equated to goodness. This paper will examine what makes Kretzman's solution successful, as well as analyze the idea of a perfect God as a moral standard. Kretzman is successful in offering an explanation for religion-based morality. He manages to capture ideas that theological objectivism and theological subjectivism ultimately fail to express. Kretzman does this with the idea of an "Absolutely Perfect Being", which gives a more concrete interpretation of morality than either of the other two concepts (Kretzman 42). Kretzman states that a perfect God, like the one from Judeo-Christian traditions, is simple, independent, and can be equated with total goodness. This "Absolutely Perfect Being" conception of God doesn't have to decide whether something is moral. This removes how variable morality seemed according to the subjectivism perspective. It also gives God a central role in religion-based morality by making him an end-all be-all of perfection, rather than simply existing alongside morality. This makes God a completely independent entity (Kretzman 41). The APB argument also removes the need to ask “Are God's actions moral?”, because if …show more content…
I think he would reply that while humans may view acts such as murder as deplorable, that is irrelevant to this view of morality. If God is absolutely perfect, it can be assumed that what he commands is also perfect. Him asking Abaraham to kill Isaace is therefore perfect and moral. Placing our basis of morality in an “Absolutely Perfect Being” and not in people means that, as humans, we are either too flawed to understand what is truly moral, or that because God is operating on a plane higher than human existence, we cannot comprehend it in relation to human nature and