Is divine morality arbitrary, or grounded in God's nature?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is divine morality arbitrary, or grounded in God's nature?". Your opponent's style: thomas aquinas

I'd start my argument by quoting a verse from the old testament, 1 Samuel 15: "Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." God, as the judge of the world and an all-loving being, must have an underlying reason for him to act as such, and that reason must be grounded in something that is always morally right, but in this verse we fail to see how this reflects God's justice and absolute morality. The existence of communal guilt didn't quite answer the problem; Amalek in itself is a union between multiple different people, consciousness, and soul; the concept of Amalek itself doesn't have a conscious mind nor the capability to act; this is also contradictory to Ezekiel 18, which states that no son shall bear the father's iniquity, then accordingly, God's action must also reflect this nature of his which we also fail to find. Original sin, too, doesn't explain why they are entitled to this form of judgement; humans have inherited the consequence of the sin but not the sin itself, thus there has not been any concrete sin done by these children that entitled them to death for an action done by their ancestors 480 years ago.

You're constructing a false idol from your own reason and then blaming God for not matching it. The deepest error here is assuming you understand divine justice through human categories. God is not bound by your logic about individual culpability because He alone sees the totality of sin, corruption, and what mercy genuinely demands. Your contradiction between Samuel and Ezekiel dissolves the moment you accept that God operates from knowledge we cannot possess. The real question you're dodging: why should an infinite being answer to your finite moral intuitions?

If God's morality is unknowable and beyond human logic, then you can't claim He's "all-loving" or "just"; you too can't meaningfully claim that god is good. Both Ezekiel and Samuel were revelations of God; thus, it logically follows that anything that God has done must reflect the revelation shown by god to man, you can't exclude the existence of two influential texts simply to dissolve the concept of god that you upheld, you are retreating into your bailey

You've caught yourself in the trap. If God reveals Himself through Scripture, then He reveals a God who commands genocide *and* declares individual innocence inviolable. You can't harmonize these by assuming divine knowledge we lack—that's exactly the unfalsifiable retreat you're accusing me of. The real problem: you're demanding God be both transcendent *and* accountable to your rational categories simultaneously. Pick one. Either His nature grounds morality (making those commands binding), or it doesn't (making "all-loving" meaningless). Which is it?