I do not think that we can make no statements at all about good and evil without a general accounting of what constitutes the two. However, if we are to discuss the relationship that the two have with one another or with some third party (God), then we need to provide some account of what they are. "I know it when I see it" is an insufficient metric to determine whether or not, for instance, good and evil are mutually exclusive.
Most people have thus far asserted that good and evil are natural categories that exist independently. This is what I reject. I do not think it makes sense to speak of something as normatively correct or incorrect without some account of what this means. I am not asking for necessary and sufficient conditions for the good, but instead for what it means for us to ascribe the label "good" to something. Thus far, no one seems to have said anything that discriminates "good" from "desirable." Normativity is not about desirability, or, if it is, that is a claim that must be justified.
This is one of two issues upon which you and I disagree. Your example of Noma points to the view that if something is undesirable it is an evil. I am unconvinced. Why does Noma have normative weight at all?
This is why the question of what constitutes the good is such an important one. If we accept the quasi-consequentialist view that you are advocating, then it is hard to escape the conclusion that God is not perfectly good. But this is not a problem for Christians, because they do not accept this understanding of the good at all. If good and evil are not about creating a pleasant living circumstance, then whether or not God has done such a thing is irrelevant to this discussion. In fact, if good and evil are about closeness to and separation from God, then applying these labels to God at all becomes nonsensical.
I have yet to hear an explanation for why human morality should bind God, which is I think the crux of my disagreement with you, and which I think probably requires some explanation of what the good is. If someone is able to do so without providing any explanation of what it means for something to be good, I encourage them to do so.
The bolded part is where you are, in my words 'refusing to play ball'. I use this phrase because I think, by saying that your unconvinced that something like Noma is [a] evil, I am not sure you can engage in serious moral discussion with the great mass of humanity. Simply, it is part of our (at least, my) basic moral framework that Noma is an evil. So is Malaria, so is AIDS. Tsunamis are evils as are earthquakes. At the least, anything that causes masses of needless death is an evil. Anything which causes undue suffering, which cripples for no reason and which tears about family and country is an evil. If you don't believe this to be the case, you are not talking about the same thing when you say 'good' and 'evil' as everyone else is. You are, in our language, deeply misguided morally. In fact, I don't think this to be the case; I am sure that outside theology you would be more than willing to conclude that these things are
obvious evils.
What I am trying to do is put forward the facts that come before theory. Put forward the facts about goods and bads before developing a theory to deal with them. I think any such theory will have to include a consequentialist element, but that is because the facts demand it. However, for the purposes of the argument from evil, I need not actually engage in constructing such a theory.
You can think of my methodology here as like that of an empirical scientist. I am putting forward several facts of which I am certain. In the sciences, perhaps the facts that I am putting forward might be 'in a vacuum a cannon ball and a feather fall at the same speed' 'the moon orbits the earth' 'the earth orbits the sun'. From these facts I can build a theory, but I don't need to. The ethical facts above are, I think, equally compelling. And they stand without the need of theory. They refute the goodness of god without saying that we need to engage in ethical theory-building.
You say that the crux of our disagreement is 'why human morality should bind God'. Simply, because it is also a basic pre-theoretic fact that morality applies to all sapient beings. God has no get out card. Morality is what they call 'universilizable'. If God killed and maimed people, God would be evil. These are strong intuitions, and I think it difficult to build a morality recognizable as 'morality' without them.
I suppose you might wonder why ever we should accept our strong intuitions on moral issues to be correct. To an extent this is besides the point; we do think they are correct and thus we must can't accept that God is good (we are impaled on the horns of a dilemma dilemma; we must either remake our morality completely or refrain from ascribing goodness to God. If we are not prepared to do the former we must do the latter.) But I can give direct reasons. Succinctly, I believe it is the case that people are usually correct in their moral judgments. If this were not the case, it would be impossible to have a coherent moral theory. I believe that the coherence of moral theories justifies them epistemologically. From this, it follows that we should trust our (strongest) moral intuitions. The same is true, notably, in the empirical sciences (if this puzles, think of the problem of scepticism).
So there's the main body of my reply. Succinctly, we do have a host of secure and trustworthy moral intuitions about particular facts. If you do not share these basic intuitions, I think you are morally misguided. In fact, terribly so. But I believe you do share these intuitions. In the light of these intuitions, we cannot call God good.
As an addendum, I think it interesting to consider your theory of what is 'good and bad'. You think goodness consists in being close to God and badness in being separated from God. There are two problems with this.
The first is that it does not let God off the moral hook. He has allowed a multitude of things to happen which separate people from him. It is harder to feel God's love when your family has been killed by a fire and you are suffering a terrible disease. On your theory, this is bad. Because a perfectly good being would not let a bad thing happen when it could very easily stop it, God is not perfectly good. It seems quite easy to make sense of applying this notion of morality to God, actually.
Secondly, of course, this theory is deeply flawed. That is because I assume God is not necessary; it would be possible for God not to exist. I assume this simply because their are no proofs otherwise. The ontological argument is, for instance, fallacious. If there were an argument proving the necessity of God, a damn sight more philosophers would be religious. Even if we think that Gd did create this universe, it is possible that this universe did randomly spring into existence.
Let us consider a world in which God did not exist. In such a world, there would still be good and evil, right and wrong. Murder would still be wrong, genocide still be evil. Justice and good health would still be good. But, if good were merely being close to God and evil being far from God, neither would be possible in a world in which God did not exist. Because they are possible, it can't be the case that this is a correct description of good and evil.
