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Over at the STR Place blog, we've been posting skeptical challenges to Christianity every Tuesday. This week, we posted the following challenge:

Why does God say something is good? There are only two possibilities. First, it could be that a thing (or an action) is good just because God says it is. In other words, He declares something to be good, and therefore it’s good, and we should do it. He could have just as easily declared it to be bad, and then it wouldn’t be “right” for us to do it. But if it’s arbitrary, it’s not really good, is it?

The second possibility is that God knows that a thing actually is good, so He says it’s good. But if that’s the case, then God is using another standard by which He can recognize what “good” is. That would mean there’s a standard above God, meaning there’s something greater than God that He has to conform to in order to be good.

Which do you choose?

Philosophers refer to this as the "Euthyphro Dilemma" and it's a direct challenge to God as the grounding of morality. Here's my answer to the challenge: