Funny you should ask.

Spoiler: later this year I will publish an anthology of all of peer reviewed philosophy papers (which will be about the same page count and include updates and be the companion piece to Hitler Homer, only in philosophy rather than history). I am proofing it now. It will include those papers.

I will announce it on my blog and social media when it’s out.

Similar to your free article critiquing Matthew Flanagan’s Divine Command Theory. If not, then it’s no bother, just thought I’d ask!

You may be interested in my article about that: The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory: Matthew Flannagan’s Failed Defense.

But as to your closing point, “Why didn’t God just make us with compatibilist free will and such that we never wanted to do an evil thing?” it’s worse than that because God doesn’t even need to do that. He could just design the consequences of failure to be less egregious. This is what human societies do: safety nets exist to make it safer to take risks, because taking risks is beneficial for societal and economic progress (classic example: automobile safety laws and evidenvce-based civil engineering of roads and traffic systems = safer to take the risk of driving a car).

A bullet proof vest is another good example. Suppose we could make all clothes (without adding weight or anything) bulletproof? Would we be horrified at something so immoral and ban anyone from wearing it because murderers deserve the right to kill you? No. We would praise the development and delight in the reduction of gun deaths and gun coercion crimes. But God could just “make us bulletproof” (or there not be bullets). If somehow we need to allow “some” effect, getting shot could still hurt, say (if that really were morally necessary as they claim). But why does it have to absolutely kill or maim you? That doesn’t make sense from a design perspective. Even in video games we get healing potions and respawns. We know how to design a better world than God.

I discuss a possibility in How Not to Live in Zardoz that is actually within human capability (within a few hundred years at least). And that’s fallible, fragile, limited, human capability. A God surely could outperform that.

It seems to me that DCT is what happens when you don’t understand what makes the Euthyphro dilemma an actual dilemma. Either the gods command what is pious, so piety is independent of the gods, or what the gods command is pious, thus making hash of decent notions of morality, in that morality becomes arbitrary and capricious. Craig grasps the latter horn and goes for arbitrary and capricious. Yet all the while that he says it’s fine for god to order genocide, you occasionally catch him trying to justify the ensuing moral atrocity, such as arguing that the kids under “the age of accountability” (when did Christians come up with that defense of their “accept, believe, and confess” soteriology?) will be okay, since they’ll go to heaven. Or that God knew the kids would grow up wicked so, pre-crime style, he condemned them to death in advance. But this is not necessary when God’s command absolutely and completely defines what is morally good. It’s like Craig realizes this doesn’t really convince people.

But if that’s the case, we can have a world in which people do things that seem terrible to us, but are really good because God commanded it.

Why didn’t God just make us with compatibilist free will and such that we never wanted to do an evil thing?

“Christians, thus cornered, and being trapped in a delusion, will resort to absurd and illogical defenses to try and keep believing their God isn’t evil (literally, a vile slavemaster who is utterly against basic human rights). The three most common approaches are to defend slavery as somehow actually moral (at which point the Christian has lost all moral ground and thereby advertised their religion to everyone as morally repugnant)”

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” – Isaiah 5:20

But, I must add, this has all been speculating angels on the head of a pin.

In practical reality, no Christians will ever adopt the theory Erich proposed; and even if any did, it would fail to succeed in any relevant way (the idea would fade into fringe irrelevance at best).

This is because Christianity is not believed on any basis of rationality. Christians start, epistemically, with an emotional need to believe certain things—not just that a god exists, but that that god is an infallible and all-powerful authority. Everything else is just an elaborate matrix for defending that motivated belief.

This is why process theology (the closest thing in reality to what Erich has in mind) failed. It has taken no sect by storm and is now pretty much just an obscure footnote in history.

It’s getting silly at this point, but to play Devil’s Advocate:

If the theory is that the OT exhibits just bad human philosophy, then yes, this would contradict the NT. But since Christians routinely believe contradictory things, I don’t see how adding one more contradictory belief would have any effect on their faith.

But if the theory is that the OT exhibits a malformed learning god, then no, this would not contradict the NT, since, insofar as to get the OT theory even to work one has to stretch symbolical discourse rules to allow any seemingly falsifying statement to be reinterpreted as in some symbolical way referencing the theory, one would then simply apply the same hermeneutical and exegetical principles to any purportedly falsifying statements in the NT.

In other words, once a Christian is committed to a ridiculous exegetical procedure, they can apply it as easily to the NT as the OT, thus avoiding what you might mean here by “failure” (though not avoiding what you and I usually mean by failure, on which definition, all modern Christianity is already a failure, logically and empirically, which is why adding yet more failure modes won’t impact belief—they are already immune to falsifications; that’s why they still believe in such an illogical worldview in the first place).

Wouldn’t this position fail though just by reading the NT where “Jesus” and Paul and others explicitly say that the OT is revealed scripture?

(Just a footnote here: God cannot be immune to logic. To say something is illogical is semantically identical to saying it does not exist.)

You’d have to build out the theory more to evaluate it. As stated, you sound like you are saying “What if the OT is just a bunch of bad human philosophy couched in god-language?” If that is what you mean, you are obviously correct.

But if you mean something else, like somehow God himself is confused or malformed in his ideas and he himself had to tinker with people over time to figure out what was moral, that contradicts (and thus eliminates) Platinga’s God (and all other gods are eliminated by other consequence arguments than that).

I’m sorry, I don’t understand your questions.

Is being cognisant of a metric/standard necessary to say x is good/ y is bad?

In English the word “good” means benevolent and beneficent, not malicious or malevolent. That’s the metric. One does need to be aware of a metric to apply it. But pretty much every sane human adult is cognizant of this metric. So what do you mean?

Matt Dillahunty often gets rather workt up when speaking of human trafficking in the bible – ‘that is effing evil’ etc.

This is a kind of affective fallacy, confusing a speaker’s emotions with their arguments. It does not matter whether someone gets emotional about what they are saying. What matters is the content of their arguments.

Yet he admits the basis for his morality is subjective opinion to start with (though not the objective actions that get us to the subjective ‘human flourishing’ morality basis)

This sentence is not intelligible. But I think (?) you mean to say that Dillahunty says morality is just “subjective opinion” (he does not; you are confusing the words “subjective” and “opinion”; to school yourself up, see Objective Moral Facts) and that Dillahunty said there is no objective fact as to which behaviors maximize human flourishing (he did not; he said exactly the opposite: to school yourself up on his metaethics, see Morality as Well-Being).

Perhaps you are having difficulty expressing something else, such as the notion that Dillahunty’s subjectivist moral theory is in some way inadequate to ground morality. When posed this he generally focuses on comparative metaethics (that theism is also subjectivism and thus does not solve this grounding problem, either, and he is correct about that: see The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory), which (along with his appeal to universal human sentiment, a la Hume) dismisses the inadequacy objection.

So perhaps you mean, not that he doesn’t ground morality, but that his ground does not adequately justify his morality (i.e. it lacks adequate motivation for people to adopt that ground and thus his morals). This he sort of answers to Jordan Peterson, which is simply that one can choose to be evil or good, but you must logically necessarily face the social judgments that that entails (rather than try to hide from them by pretending evil is good), i.e. you will be correctly labeled evil and treated accordingly (conversely, he is a Humean about tendency: most humans innately prefer being good, so it’s not a 50/50 proposition, since most people are coming to the table already with a committed empathy they cannot get rid off and don’t want to).

I do not agree with him (I think there is a better way to justify and ground morality). But he is at least making these points, so you cannot claim he isn’t. He is also bad at this. I do not consider his handling of metaethics to be very well constructed or clear and he is bad at understanding what a critic is asking him; because he is not a professional philosopher. But that’s not the same thing as saying he doesn’t have answers to these questions; he’s just not great at explaining them.

There are times when Dillahunty veers toward social contract theory (there are consequences to adopting the wrong ground that reverberate poorly back on you) but he seems unaware of the concept and doesn’t articulate it well; and there are times he seems almost deontological regarding one’s self-opinion, but never clearly elaborates this, either, i.e. his arguments can be reduced to a clearer expression he himself never uses: if you are evil but tell yourself you are good, that is an objectively false assessment of yourself.

People tend to confuse that with genuinely agreeing you are evil. So Dillahunty has a point here: why does almost no one take that position even when it is true? His answer is: because people don’t want to be evil; they want to believe they are good, and so if they are evil, they will try lying to themselves about that, rather than simply conceding it and being content with who that then entails they are. Yet that is objectively lying to themselves.

This is Dillahunty’s theory in a nutshell, IMO. Even in its social contract theory incarnation, as that reduces to the same matrix of false beliefs about what is best even in that context: people tell themselves that their moral system satisfies a good social contract (and by their own definition of good) when, objectively, it does not (even by their own definition of good), which gets back to false beliefs, this time about things outside themselves.

In other words, almost no one argues “it is better to be evil by common human definition,” and for a reason: humans generally are good (genetically and by enculturation), and so morality is just the mechanics of working out how to behave once you have decided to be good.

Professional philosophers can build this out better. But if that’s what you want, start at Real Moral World, then to ground in Objective Value Cascade, and back to application in Some Things to Consider. And to orient you within the gamut of professional positions on this generally, see Open Letter.