Why Jac has no (logical) problem with Hell

[Lapsed Lurker]

Stating my reasoning again, in brief, it goes as follows:

Moral agency requires a choice between good and evil (if there is no such thing as good and evil to choose between, there is no such thing as moral agency), which means that it is logically absurd to suggest that God could have created a world in which good exists but not the possibility of evil. The very essence of goodness is God's nature (on the Christian view), and therefore, to do anything good, fundamentally is to act in accordance with God's nature.

If goodness is acting in accord with God’s nature then God doesn’t have the choice between good and evil since you have defined everything he does as good (and vice versa) so there is no possibility of him choosing anything other than good. This means he is not a moral agent since, according to you, moral agency requires the choice between good and evil which, as said, is not available to God as he is restricted by his inherently good nature. In which case, God’s goodness isn’t in the least bit morally praiseworthy since his goodness is no different than a snake crawling on its belly â€" it’s simply what the thing does.

This will present problems as your reasoning continues...

To act in a way that is contradictory to His nature is to do "evil."

Drowning thousands of children and babies because their parents were evil and disobedient is a good thing to do? (Gen 6:17) Got it.

Everything that we call good is actually in some degree to experience God (and for this, I refer you to the thread on simplicity, in which I've argued that all perfections find their union in God). Therefore, to not experience God is to not experience goodness, which is to say, to experience evil.

False dichotomy. What about morally neutral actions? Am I experiencing God when I brush my hair? If not then, according to your dichotomy, I am committing evil.

Blindness is "evil" because it deprives the eye of its basic function, and therefore, it prevents us from doing useful things like driving down the road. It is not the consequence that makes blindness evil, but the privation of purpose that makes it evil. In other words, the loss of the perfection (intended purpose) is what we mean by evil. Still in other words, blindness is not a thing -- it is a lack of something, namely, the ability to see, and therefore, it is evil.

Your reasoning is self-refuting at this point -

It would certainly be useful if the human eye could take in more of the electromagnetic spectrum than is currently visible to the naked eye, such as taking in infrared light. So, as God effectively blinded pre-technological humans to only ever seeing a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum then, according to your logic above, God committed an evil - he “deprived the eye of a function and therefore prevented humans from doing useful things such as seeing heat signatures of other creatures and objects, for example.” - and as he committed an evil then this refutes your initial premise that God is inherently good. But if you insist that God is inherently good, then depriving the eye of a function can’t be evil, but you have argued that depriving the eye of a function is an evil act. So your reasoning collapses at this point.  

It is dreadfully evil when one man murders another.

That’s a tautology since the term murder already connotes a wrong or evil act. Use a neutral term to avoid the fallacy of poisoning the well.

If you had a time machine and could kill a serial murderer when they were but a child, wouldn't that murder still be wrong, even though it would benefit society? I think so. You may not, but it's a matter of debate.

What’s funny there is that this is typically the defence that Christians use as justification for God killing children and babies during ‘Noah’s Flood’ â€" the children would have grown up to be evil just like their parents, and God, being omniscient, knew that.    

If we are to say that there is a truly objective morality, we must assert that there is an objective reason for saying any given value is the real good. We can only do that if we can point to an ought, which can only be done if there is a real purpose or design, which can only be possible if there is a Designer.

Nope. Objective reasons for assigning values to certain behaviour can be achieved without an appeal to God when society’s have a common goal... which we do â€" survival and happiness â€" and from these shared goals we can ascertain in an objective manner what we ought and ought not to do to maximise one another’s chances of survival and happiness. In some circles this is known as the social contract.
 
If it helps, you can think of it as analogous to nutritional facts that tell individuals what they ought and ought not to eat to maintain their health. No God necessary in either scenario.

A bit of philosophy helps us clarify the relationship between Good and the Designer, but unless we posit goodness rooted in intended design, it just becomes personal choice.

Rubbish. Whilst people do of course have the choice to be unhealthy and live in dysfunctional societies, if they’re trying to be healthy and trying to live in functional societies then it certainly is possible to objectively determine what behaviour is right and wrong for meeting these objectives.

Absent any objectives that create a context to understand morality, morality makes no sense. Never has. Never will. Biblical moral precepts are aimed at pleasing God because pleasing God is thought to guarantee safe passage into the hereafter (survival and pleasure). Cultures that sacrificed virgins on alters to placate their gods were basing such morals on what was thought to guarantee a good harvest next season (full bellies = suvival and pleasure). What sets the different moral codes of these different cultures apart is not the fundamental objective which frames their morality but the knowledge base from which they derived their notion of what was in their society's best interest -

Fred Phelps thinks that the wide-spread acceptance of homosexuality brings the wrath of God on America, and were he right about that then it would certainly be moral to discourage homosexuality, as the wrath of an omnipotent supernatural tyrant would be bad for society. And this illustrates the importance of working from facts about the world and not from articles of faith to arrive at our model of morality, just as we do with nutritional and medicinal facts about what substances we can ingest that have a beneficial effect on our health as opposed to a detrimental effect - few Christians actually believe that their religious faith enables them to drink deadly poison and suffer no ill-effect despite what Mark 16:17-18 claims. They go with the facts, determined by what is demonstrably true. Doing so is the sensible approach.