Divine Definition 

Integrity, Faith, and the Worthiness to Judge

Euthyphro’s Dilemma

Is something good because God commands it? Or does God command it because it is already good?

This is called Euthyphro’s dilemma. It comes from a dialogue by the Greek philosopher Plato, in which Socrates asks whether the gods love what is holy because it is holy, or whether it is holy because the gods love it.¹ It’s an enduring question because there’s a cost to either answer. If God makes a thing good just by commanding it, then anything could become good by decree, even cruelty. Good and evil would be entirely arbitrary. If God only recognizes a goodness that was already there, then something stands above God, and he is no longer the greatest or the highest.

I propose another approach. Instead of choosing between the two answers, I question what they assume, and propose to dissolve the dilemma. The dilemma treats God and goodness as two separate things. I do not think they are. Goodness is not an arbitrary assignment, and it is also not a rulebook outside of God. Goodness receives its content from who God is.

Others have gone this way. Robert Adams, for example, grounds the good in God’s own nature.² But this just moves from God’s commands to God’s character, which only moves the problem. It doesn’t explain how “God is good” is more than saying “God is God”.

My approach is through defining integrity. Here I use the word to name the undivided faithfulness of the Father and the Son. God’s commands express that faithfulness. They do not manufacture it. And when that faithfulness is lived out in history, against opposition and at great cost, it proves that God is worthy to judge (Revelation 5:9; Psalm 82:8).

Put plainly: a judge who makes himself, or his favorites, an exception to his own rules has no right to judge. The Judge who refused to make himself an exception, and who paid for it, is worthy. His refusal is not a step down from his greatness, rather it shows what greatness itself is.

Nothing Greater—and Yet His Word Above His Name

When God made his promise to Abraham, Hebrews tells us he swore by himself, because there was no one greater to swear by (Hebrews 6:13). That echoes Anselm’s famous description of God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.”³ I should reinforce that it is only an echo, Hebrews is talking about God’s oath, and Anselm is talking about logical proof of his existence.

Psalm 138:2 in the King James Version: “Thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.” Many modern translations add an “and” that is not in the Hebrew, so the verse reads that God exalted his name and his word above all else. The King James keeps the Hebrew order. I follow it here, and I have given my reasons in my book The Subjective God.⁴

This seems to produce a paradox: How can nothing be greater than God, while God lifts his word above his name?

The answer is not that some outside concept or authority stands over God. His Word is his own commitment. He is his Word, and he does not use his high position as permission to drop it.

Nothing outside of God forces him to keep his Word, but being unforced is not the same thing as being exempt. His power does not turn a promise into something he may ignore when keeping it gets expensive. We are not dealing with a strong God with a better word standing over him. We are dealing with integrity personified, the wholeness of a Speaker whose identity and faithfulness are identical.

Lord Acton said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If this argument is right, there is one essential exception: the power that refuses exemption (Acton’s letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887). It seems therefore that, although power corrupts all others, absolute power is itself incorruptible (not by definition, but in practice).

The Word and the Son

Christianity connects the exalted Word of God with the personal Word of God in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14). That is a theological link, it is not a claim that every use of “word” in the Bible means the Son.

1 Corinthians 15 adds another layer. After everything had been put under Christ, he—the Son—puts himself under the One who put everything under him, “that God may be all in all” (15:27–28). Paul says plainly that the Father is the exception to what is put under the Son. Again we have a potential paradox: Does the Son’s subjection to the Father cancel the Word’s exaltation? It does not, because they are different movements. Each is doing a different thing, they are not mutually exclusive. The Father stays faithful to his Word. The Son stays faithful to the Father.
These are different phenomena, they do not compete in a zero sum game. The Son’s faithfulness does not shrink God’s greatness. The Father’s honoring of his Word does not shrink his power.

Greatness, then, is not standing alone and asserting oneself. Integrity names an undivided relationship in which neither person gains greatness by betraying the other. This is a claim about the Father and the Son; it is not yet a full account of the Trinity.

Greatness is Before the Measuring Rod

Anselm’s argument is about whether God exists. Mine is about whether God is good and worthy to judge. Anselm did reason from what is better, such as justice over injustice, toward what must be true of God.⁵ But he did not put God under outside standards. He wrote that goodness, wisdom, truth, and life are not separate parts God owns. They belong together in who he is.

So the question I ask is where we start when we talk about what “great” means. Do we start with abstract abilities, like power and knowledge? Or with the concrete character shown in God’s faithfulness? I believe we start with the latter.

Others have started with character. Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, taught that God’s freedom is not the ability to do anything at all, with love added later as a limit. It is the freedom of the One who loves⁶ (which changes how the ‘why didn’t God make a universe in which…’ hypotheticals must be framed.). Hans Urs von Balthasar, another Swiss theologian, taught that the Son’s obedience in history does not bring in something foreign to God’s life. It expresses how the Son relates to the Father.⁷ Richard of St Victor, a twelfth-century monk, argued that perfect love cannot be love for oneself alone. It wants to share love with another.⁸

I take up the same thread but now ask a judicial question: what does this kind of faithfulness mean for God’s right to judge?

The Judge Must Accept His Own Grounds of Judgment

Here is the center of the argument. Anyone who claims the right to judge absolutely must accept the grounds he uses to judge others. 

The Bible shows small pictures of this.
King Darius signs a law, then finds out it traps his friend Daniel. He works until sunset to save Daniel from his own law and cannot (Daniel 6:14–15). Darius is held by his own decree, and he hates it. God is different: he holds himself by his own free choice, so integrity is shown in what he does, not decreed by what he says.
In another scene the prophet Nathan tells King David a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s lamb. David pronounces a harsh verdict, and Nathan answers, “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). Paul states the principle in Romans 2:1: when you judge another for what you do yourself, you condemn yourself. And Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:2 must be true for the Judge as well as all he judges.

This is a necessary condition, it’s not a complete account of what makes a good judge. A judge also needs knowledge, fairness, and the ability to judge rightly. But it is a critical starting point; no amount of knowledge or power can turn self-exemption into integrity.

I am not saying everyone has identical duties. Parents and children, judges and defendants, rulers and subjects have very different responsibilities. A difference becomes an exemption when someone excuses himself from the very thing he used to claim authority over others. Picture, as an example, a ruler who condemns betrayal because kept promises hold people together ethically, then breaks his own promises whenever they become inconvenient. He claims the authority of faithfulness while refusing its demands. Asserting that he is too powerful to be punished does not remove his hypocrisy.

Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, offers a helpful distinction. A king may be beyond the coercive force of his own law, because no one can make him obey it. But he is still under its directive force, because the law still tells him what he ought to do.⁹ Aquinas was talking about human rulers, so applying this to God is an analogy. Still, it makes the point: “no one has the strength to force me” is not the same as “I am free to ignore it.”

It also shows why refusing exemption is a real act, a phenomenon. Choosing to stand under his own Word cost him something (Philippians 2:6–8), free does not mean arbitrary; the freedom of the One who loves is free precisely in being faithful. The absolute Judge surely cannot rest his worthiness on the privilege of never being judged by his own standards.

Who Is Worthy? Revelation 5

In Revelation 5, John sees a scroll that, on opening, sets God’s plan for judging and redeeming the world in motion. John then hears the question, “Who is worthy to open the scroll?” (5:2). No one in heaven, on earth, or under the earth is able, and John weeps (5:3–4). Then he is told that the Lion has conquered. He looks and sees a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain (5:5–6). The new song says, “Worthy are you … for you were slain” (5:9).

It’s hard to ignore the word worthy for this thesis. The Lamb is not worthy because he is the strongest. He is worthy because of what he did.

Psalm 82 gives the other side of the picture. God stands in the council of the gods and charges them with judging unjustly and favoring the wicked (82:1–4).¹⁰ They are judged by the very standard they were supposed to uphold. The psalm ends with a prayer: “Arise, O God, judge the earth” (82:8).

Isaiah 14 gives us insight into the motives of a rival to God’s throne of justice (I read from verse 12 to 14, at least, to be referring to a non-human ruler). He wants the highest throne without standing under what the Most High stands under. That is exemption as ambition. (14:13-14).

Together these texts give us the pattern: all rival judges fail, and only one is found worthy. That is the Bible’s own picture of why the Judge can be only one. Whether any other being could pass the same test is a separate question I will come back to at the end.

The Judge Who Became a Man

Who is the Judge? John 5 says the Father has given all judgment to the Son, and gave him “authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man” (John 5:22, 27). Paul tells the Athenians that God will judge the world by a man he has appointed (Acts 17:31). Hebrews says the Son was made like his brothers in every way and tempted as we are, so that he could be a merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:17–18; 4:15).

The Judge shares the condition of the judged. That is non-exemption, stated in Scripture. The Father “did not spare his own Son” (Romans 8:32). This is not to say that the Son was found guilty in any way, quite on the contrary.

Job: Is Fidelity Transactional?

The book of Job opens with divine judgment under ethical challenge. God commends Job. The accuser does not contradict God’s commendation, but turns it into an accusation against God, he answers, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (Job 1:9). He points to God’s protection and blessing, and he predicts that if they are taken away, that Job will then curse God to his face (1:11). And that prediction fails.

The accuser’s words question Job’s untested motive, but I read the charge as aimed at God. God credits Job with integrity, and the accuser replies that God has bought the look of integrity by special favors granted to Job. That is a charge against God’s integrity. It says the relationship is nothing more than a trade: God supplies the benefits, and Job supplies what looks like loyalty.

Notice what the accuser does not do, he never names a time Job has failed. He predicts a future failure and uses it to attack God’s ethic in his present praise of Job. So the trial he proposes tests two things at once: Job’s faithfulness when his special protection is removed, and, more importantly, the integrity of God’s judgment. The accuser accuses God through Job, and God answers the accuser through Job (Job 40:2).

(I use “the accuser” to highlight the figure’s role rather than treating the term as a personal name.)

The word for Job’s integrity is tummah, from a Hebrew root meaning whole or complete.¹¹ God says Job “still holds fast his integrity” (2:3). His wife urges him to let it go: “Curse God and die” (2:9). Job vows he will not relinquish his integrity until he dies (27:5), and he asks to be weighed on honest scales so God may know it (31:6). Integrity, in Job’s own book, is wholeness. It is the same picture I am using here: whole against divided.

Of course none of this means everything Job says is correct. God both challenges Job, and also says that three of his four friends have not spoken rightly about him as Job has (42:7). Job’s witness is not flawless theology, but it is faithfulness that lasted through the test the accuser said it would fail: “In all this Job did not sin” (1:22; 2:10). James remembers his steadfastness (James 5:11).

Faith Is Not For Sale

If faith is a trade, its basic question is: what will I get for my loyalty? I propose a different question: whose character can I trust, and what will it cost me to line my life up with it?

This does not make rewards unimportant. Hebrews 11:6 says God rewards those who seek him. But faith is not made out of the reward, neither is it offered in exchange for the reward. A relationship that is only an exchange of benefits ends when the benefits do. This also does not make lament a failure of faith. Job protests, argues, and demands an answer, and God accepts his prayer for the very friends who added insult to his injury (42:8). Faith does not require explaining every event. It requires that the relationship is not used up by an exchange. Indeed if every event was explained, how then would faith be achievable? A critic may say God traded Abraham’s faith for righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3). But Paul says the opposite. Wages are what you are owed for work, he writes, and righteousness was counted to Abraham as a gift (Romans 4:4–5). Notice, too, that the promise came first (Genesis 12), before Abraham had done anything to earn it. When he believed, he had only God’s word. His body was “as good as dead” (Romans 4:19), and he would die without receiving all that was promised (Hebrews 11:13). Faith trusts the giver without turning his promise into wages owed for allegiance.

Faith then can become witness (Isaiah 43:10, Revelation 12:11). It does not make God good, buy his favor, or give him authority. It testifies to the character of the God the believer has come to trust.

On Job’s cost

This raises a new question: why should Job bear the cost of an accusation aimed at God? Naming a trial does not by itself justify its cost, as I just said, we must not treat Job’s suffering—or the deaths around it—as expendable evidence in a successful demonstration.

The Christian answer does not stop at the claim that God permits others to suffer faithfully. It goes further: the Judge himself pays the cost. The Father did not spare his own Son (Romans 8:32). The Son shared the condition of those he would judge, being made like his brothers in every way (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15). The cross is not a later cancellation of Job’s harm, nor is it a formula that silences protest. It is the enacted proof that the One who requires faithfulness does not exempt himself from its price. It is also prior to any other suffering (1 Peter 1:19–20), so that all other faithful suffering is a part of becoming united with Christ for the Christian (2 Timothy 2:12).

Job’s integrity therefore stands as real witness, not as disposable proof. The God who answered the accuser through Job is the same God who already has answered every accusation against his own character by refusing exemption at the cost of his own life. The particularity of Job’s suffering is not erased; it is gathered into a larger fidelity that God himself has borne.

Vindicated Worthiness

Declaring that you bind yourself is not the same as being faithful in action. A promise has to hold when keeping it costs something.

In the Christian account, the Incarnation and the cross show exactly this. God does not answer suffering only from the safe seat of an untouched ruler. The Judge’s relationship to those he judges includes giving himself. This does not mean suffering alone proves goodness. People suffer for cruel causes. What matters is the character shown through the suffering.

Romans 3 puts God’s righteousness in a courtroom frame, in the dock, so to speak. Paul asks whether human unfaithfulness cancels God’s faithfulness (3:3). He says God is justified in his words and prevails when he is judged (3:4, quoting Psalm 51:4). Later he says Christ’s death shows God’s righteousness, so that God is “just and the justifier” of the one who has faith in Jesus (3:25–26).

I call this vindicated worthiness. God does not gain goodness from outside through the trial, no outside court gives him authority he lacked. Instead, the faithfulness he claims is shown to be real under real opposition. A promise kept is not only information about the promise-maker. It is a phenomenon, something he has done.

So the vindication is legal and ethical, not only a change in what the audience believes. The charge against him receives an answer in action.

This does not explain every instance of suffering. Let’s be honest, some suffering comes from plain stupidity. But the cross changes what sovereignty means: being supreme does not mean being absolved from the cost of faithfulness. This also is not a formula that silences Job’s protest.

Dissolving the Dilemma

Now back to Euthyphro’s dilemma. A critic may ask: is the faithfulness of the Father and the Son good because it is theirs, or are they good because their relationship is faithful?

The first wording suggests that any character would be good simply by belonging to the supreme being. The second suggests faithfulness is an outside standard they happen to meet. I reject both.

A far better answer than one of each is that Integrity names this concrete divine faithfulness. It does not give goodness to an otherwise blank deity. I call this an identification, it is more than a definition. Does this identification shed light on truthfulness, promise-keeping, love, justice, and the refusal of exemption? Does it also explain why power alone cannot make betrayal good? It does, because each of these is a form of faithfulness, and betrayal is a breach of faith whoever commits it.

A critic may still say I have only moved the problem. That is a fair question, and it faces every account like Adams’ that grounds goodness in God’s character. I cannot answer with “God is good because God is God.” I have to show the moral content of the life I am calling good. The answer is the cross, God’s enacted faithfulness. This approach is phenomenological: we learn what integrity means from what God is seen to do, not from a definition handed down in advance. Nor does it appeal to a morality above God.

This is worth stating another way. When the accuser, the council, and the witnesses treat faithfulness as the thing that matters, they are not looking at an ethical rulebook outside of God; they are recognizing what God has shown about himself, as creatures made in his image (compare Romans 2:15). Recognizing a standard is not the same as creating it, and it is not the same as being ruled by something above God, even something ideal and conceptual.

Who Else Has Walked This Road

Others have carved trails into these theologies.

The courtroom itself has a long history.
John Peckham’s Theodicy of Love argues that the great conflict is a dispute over God’s character, with charges made in a heavenly court, and that God answers by showing his character rather than by force.¹²
Behind Peckham stands the Adventist tradition of Ellen White’s The Great Controversy.¹³ That tradition even names a charge close to mine: that God demands loyalty and obedience from others while practicing no self-denial himself. It answers with the cross.¹⁴
N. T. Wright reads Romans as the story of God proving himself faithful.¹⁵
And Karl Barth wrote that on the cross the Judge was judged in our place.¹⁶

On evil dividing itself, Plato saw the problem long ago. In the Republic, Socrates argues that even a gang of thieves can only act together if they treat each other justly.¹⁷
Today the “evil-god challenge” asks whether perfect goodness and perfect evil are truly symmetrical. Stephen Law raised it, Ben Page and Max Baker-Hytch distinguish several kinds of symmetry, and Carlo Alvaro argues that an evil creator makes no sense given its motives.^18,19,20

My contribution is far narrower than discovering any of these. It has three parts:

1. Naming non-exemption as the test of fitness to judge.
2. Showing how rival claimants fail it. 
3. Asking whether evil’s failure is necessary and not only common. 

Peckham and the Adventist tradition frame the conflict mostly as one about God’s character and government. I frame it as one about the standing of the Judge. For my earlier case that the standard comes from God’s own character, see “Defining Ethics by the Divine Telos” (a rebuttal to Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension in the Akedah).²¹

Can Evil Be Whole?

The positive argument I have articulated raises a negative question: can evil be absolute without being divided against itself?

Many evil claimants, perhaps all, are recognizably hypocrites. They demand loyalty while betraying others, appeal to justice while shielding themselves from it, or praise truth while twisting it. But examples cannot prove that every evil claimant must fail this way.

Three claims must be argued separately:

• Every evil claimant to absolute judgment exempts itself.
• Every evil agent is hypocritical.
• Every evil act expresses hypocrisy.

The first is the direct target of my argument. The others are wider claims that need more defense.

The key question is not whether evil uses goods. It is why evil must invoke grounds of authority that condemn something it still allows itself. That is the bridge between noticing hypocrisy and proving a necessary division inside evil.

The Hardest Cases

The honest egoist. If he claims no ethical authority and no right to judge, he is not a rival for the office I am discussing. That limits my argument’s reach. It does not prove that all evil is hypocritical.

Impartial malevolence. This is the hardest case: “Everyone deserves suffering, including me. I claim no exemption.” We cannot dismiss him just because judgment should tell people apart by what they deserve. He might allow different amounts of suffering while holding that everyone deserves some.

Here is my current answer, and I offer it to be tested. Saying “including me” costs nothing if it is only said. Suppose the sentence is truly carried out on the judge. Then who will carry it out? An absolute judge has no one above him. So either the words are only words, and he is exempt in practice if not in sentence, or the sentence is actually enacted, and the office is thereby empty. Only in the Christian account does the Judge bear the sentence himself and stay Judge, precisely because he bears it for others, not against them, while remaining perfectly innocent. That is the difference between declared fidelity and enacted fidelity again.

On the necessity of evil’s self-exemption

As I stated in the previous section: the hardest case is the one that claims impartiality: “Everyone deserves suffering, including me. I claim no exemption.”

At first this appears to meet the test. Yet absolute malevolence cannot sustain the very impartiality it asserts. Impartial application of a standard is itself a form of integrity—an ethical good. Absolute evil, by definition, excludes every ethical good. The moment it maintains real impartiality, it has already ceased to be absolute in its evil. The moment it remains absolute in its evil, it will exempt itself, its instruments, or its preferred intensifications of harm the moment impartiality becomes inconvenient.

What looks like impartial malevolence is therefore unstable, a theoretical figment rather than a fact. It is either not absolute or not impartial, they are mutually exclusive by definition. In either case it fails to supply a coherent rival to the non-exempting Judge. The appearance of an integral absolute evil collapses under its own description. That is why the pattern of self-exemption among claimants to absolute authority is not merely frequent; it is structurally necessary.

There are still questions. What grounds this claimant’s idea of desert? Does that ground depend on a commitment he breaks? Until they are answered, the claim that evil always exempts itself remains a proposal under examination.

Does Goodness Need Evil?

A reader may ask: if goodness is seen to be undivided only by watching evil divide, does goodness need evil to show what it is? And when evil is gone, is goodness still absolute?

The answer to the first question is no. The trial shows the Judge’s integrity; it does not make him faithful. The Father and the Son were faithful to each other before creation, before any accuser (John 17:24). “Undivided” is a negative word for a positive fact (made useful from our point of view), as “infinite” is. The positive facts of undividedness are wholeness, promises kept and love given, and they would be true in a world where no promise was ever broken. If anything depends on anything here, evil depends on goodness, borrowing its trust, truth, and loyalty to work at all — as even thieves must keep faith to steal together. Goodness is relational, not relative. In that way goodness is better at being good than evil is at being evil. Therefore the answer to the second question is, yes, goodness is absolute.

What does depend on evil is the office of Judge, and the form faithfulness took on the cross. No one needs a judge where there is no wrong (just as the law was added because of transgression—Galatians 3:19). But a verdict does not expire when the last case is closed. When the accuser is gone, the same fidelity endures, “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), and the song that remains is about the Judge: “Just and true are your ways” (Revelation 15:3).

Divine Definition

The layers of this argument need to remain separate.

First, no claimant is worthy of absolute judgment who reserves exemption from the grounds he uses against others.

Second, the Christian story identifies God’s costly faithfulness as proof of his worthiness to judge, and Scripture pictures no rival who passes the test (Revelation 5:2–5; Psalm 82). That is a claim from inside the biblical story. Whether any other being could pass the same test is a comparative question, and it deserves its own paper.

“Divine definition,” then, does not mean a mere word-game or an arbitrary decree. It means that goodness receives its content from the divine faithfulness that integrity names. Faith lines up with that faithfulness as an identity not a transaction. Judgment expresses it. The trial enacts it under real opposition.

The Judge’s refusal of exemption is not a step down from his greatness. It shows what greatness itself is.

References

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), except Psalm 138:2, which is from the King James Version.

1. Plato, Euthyphro 10a, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
2. Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. Anselm, Proslogion 2, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
4. Kendall, R. T. Word and Spirit: Truth, Power, and the Next Great Move of God. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2019;
   Alan R. Jones, The Subjective God: The Holiness-Purpose Connection (Independently published, 2015), 77–78, 94–95.
5. Anselm, Proslogion 5 and 18, in The Major Works.
6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, The Doctrine of God, §28, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957).
7. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4, The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).
8. Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, bk. 3, in The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 96, a. 5, ad 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947).
10. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), on the divine council reading of Psalm 82.
11. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000).
12. John C. Peckham, Theodicy of Love: Cosmic Conflict and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
13. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1911).
14. “God on Trial,” Ministry, May 1982, https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1982/05/god-on-trial
15. N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 10 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), on Romans 3:21–26.
16. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, §59, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956).
17. Plato, Republic 351c–352c, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. Cooper.
18. Stephen Law, “The Evil-God Challenge,” Religious Studies 46, no. 3 (2010): 353–73.
19. Ben Page and Max Baker-Hytch, “Meeting the Evil God Challenge,” Philosophia Christi 22, no. 1 (2020).
20. Carlo Alvaro, “The Incoherence of an Evil God,” Religions 13, no. 1 (2022): 54.
21. Alan R. Jones, “Defining Ethics by the Divine Telos,” Mesotopia, August 2025, https://www.mesotopia.grouplands.com/latest/purpose-meaning-and-existential-concepts/defining-ethics-by-the-divine-telos 
22. Bret W. Davis, “The Kyoto School,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school