How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Acrobat]

Goodness and Badness of x, is more like saying the roundness or yellowness of X, or the light or darkness of X, than the disgustingness or prettiness of x, or the taste of x, or the feeling of x.

I'm pondering how to get past the current stuckness of this conversation.....

Maybe we could address some other traditional questions about the Good, and let people hate those instead. 

For example, do a good medicine, a good painting, and a good person, have some quality in common? Is the goodness of each of these something they share, or is each good in its own way? 

I think that Plato and Dante would both say that each of these things "participates" in the Good in its own way, reflecting or embodying some aspect of the entire Good. And pointing us eventually to the highest Good. 

Probably your opponents here will disagree with that. 

I haven't worked on this much, but I think we can make a case that each of those things does share a mutual type of goodness, if we define goodness as that which encourages human thriving. A good medicine obviously makes people healthier, and health is better for thriving. A good painting, in this view, would be one which enriches the lives of those who see it -- challenging, surprising, delighting. The painting's goodness would be less a practical goodness, nearer to autotelic, but is still good because of the affect it has on human life. A good person is good in relation to others -- bonum est diffusivum sui. It would be hard to say that a person who was only good to himself was very good. 

So given all that, I do think that the goodness would be a quality in the object. It would often be perceptible to us. Of course there would be disagreement and mistakes -- a medicine might prove to have unknown side effects, for example. A movie which at first strikes us as good might tend overall to flatter its audience and make people stupider. (A lot of them do.) 

Though your interlocutors here continue to think of God decreeing the Good like laws, theologians would say that God is the sum total of all the good aspects of all the things in the world (plus infinity). This is what Dante says. So you are correct, I think, to say that God couldn't reverse goodness and declare by fiat that the Holocaust was actually good. Because there is no possible world in which genocide encourages human thriving.

I think this view is probably accurate, but I generally reserve and think of the notion of good, when used in a moral sense, but not just contained in the expression that supporting human flourishing or well being is good, but also in the way we say kindness is good, honesty is good. Or when I look at my daughter sweetness, purity, innocence as good. There's some similarity of meaning here, that's hard to define.

But regardless of how it's defined, we recognize Good is a thing of objective truth, it's out there and not just in our head, or an expression of our feelings, of our likes and dislikes.

The objectiveness of Good appears self-evident to me, as self-evident as the sun outside my window. It also was never not self-evident to me, there was no point in which I didn't believe this, and somehow came to believe it.

Some atheists philosophers like Alex Rosenberg, would say this perceptions of moral objectiveness, is just an illusion, much like is said of free will. But no one here seems to be of this opinion.

They seem to recognize it as truly objective, but there's just more reluctant, reticent to confess as such. I find this reluctance interesting, a lacking of confidence, not so much in objectiveness of good being true, but in confessing it. I'm not sure how to explain that, but it's interesting.

In addition the meaning of Good is not described by their particular moral theories or philosophies, but rather it's presupposed, in the overarching elements of these systems. Supporting human well being and flourishing is good, harming or hindering this is bad.

Though good and bad are objective truths, they also appear to remain undefined.
Also while their moral systems primarily use good and bad in regards to actions, there seems to a similarity in meaning of good and bad here, if we used it in regards to motivations, intent, or character. There's a similarity in the meaning of good, when we say someone did something good, and someone is a good person. In fact the latter seems to be a more fundamental sense of good than the former. I want my daughter to be good, more so than do good. Doing good should flow from her being good.

That goodness we all seem to perceive objectively, appears to be about being. Perhaps even being itself. All of us seem to recognize this fundamental reality at some level, even if we do so blindly. It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, one feels the leg, and mistakes it for a tree.