Many theists do that. Somehow the concept of Good becomes some mysterious quality we mere humans cannot understand. A good example is Martin Luther. His book "Bondage of the Will" tells us that reading the Bible carefully demonstrates there is no free will. But if there is no free will where does moral evil come from? God. Luther whines he wishes he had not been born a man who had to face this dilemma of God creating all moral evil. And then abandons reason and rationality. God is inscrutable, incomprehensible. The problem is that the Bible tells us that God IS just, God IS fair, God IS compassionate, God IS merciful.

I call this the sub-goodness of God argument. The supposed trustworthy revelations of the Bible make many such claims God has these sort of sub-goodnesses. The rhetorical games people have been playing ever since Paul does not work. See Romans 11:33.

It is hard to square the claim that God is simple and necessarily good and God creates all the metaphysical necessities and laws of the Universe.
Trying to undermine C. and D. by denying God is good as we think of good, runs afoul of my little sub-goodness argument. The idea of a simple God with necessary attributes including perfect goodness is not a good one. Naturalism has thus not been eliminated as a viable state of affairs.

I think you may overstate in your last paragraph, but some good points.

Do you think that some apologists try to rebut C and D by fallaciously exploiting non-univocal senses of terms? Or do you think they avoid equivocations or other fallacies in so doing? E.g. can they consistently affirm what the Bible teaches and deny that God is good in the sense of His having moral duties?

Descartes in his letters to Mesenne takes this concept to it's logical conclusion. God creates the material world, and thus creates not just nature and it's secondary cause, (as stated by William of Okham) but the metaphysics and logic, the laws and rules of the Universe. God could have made 2 + 2 = 5 had God so desired.

But if God's goodness is a necessary attribute of a simple God without parts, where does moral evil come from? A good God could have create mankind with a good moral nature, such as God enjoys, a free will as God enjoys and man would never do moral evil. Any possible objection that could be made by theologians as to why this cannot be so is not viable, because God makes the rules and can have any state of affairs God wishes. A good God would want perfect moral goodness.

Thus this simple, perfect being God concept goes down in flames. Either God:
A. Does not exist. Naturalism rules
B. Does not make the rules and laws of the Universe. Naturalism sneaks in through the back door
C. God Is not good which makes Christianity et al false and the Bible not true, trustworthy revelation.
D. God does not care about us, again, not consistent with revelations from God.

The idea that naturalism is impossible is not true. The best the anti-naturalist can do is abandon the idea that the Bible etc are true revelations and abandon C. and D.

The idea that God is the underlying cause of all, is simple, and has necessary essences in the end collapses and cannot be true. We see no supernatural realm, but see a material one all around us.

That is funny. I could swear that this type of argument from you falls exactly into the kind of "logic" I am refuting:

>"And so, we "indirectly" observe that our senses work only when our biological sensory organs and nervous system exist and are functioning normally. And this leads to the logical conclusion that what seeing is, for example, is light hitting the eyes and affecting the brain. We further know that the lens of the eye flips the light rays on the retina. But we don't see things upside down, therefore, and with other similar observations, we conclude that what we experience is an image the brain is compiling." BGA

None of your statement here makes any definitive sense unless you are assuming precisely the sorts of things I was critiquing in my article and in your own statements, like this one.

What in heavens name do you mean by "indirect" observation with respect to observation of the physical mechanisms of the body and the world? If you mean we are merely going from internal images to external things, then you are engaged in the very self-contradictory reasoning I described many times above.

Are you now starting with internal images and using them to "indirectly" argue to the external world. But then, you use the physical nature of the external world to show that what we know is not the external world, but only internal images! Are you coming or going?

This may not be circular reasoning, but it surely is amazingly confused thinking!

>We assume that we have direct scientific knowledge of the external world.

I don't. I assume that the experience I have of experiencing is generally accurate, it's not scientific and I assume nothing about directness or indirectness.

>Yet, such direct scientific knowledge (assuming materialism/physicalism)

Materialism/physicalism is not assumed either.

>necessarily implies that we cannot have direct scientific knowledge of the external world, but rather that what we actually know is only internal neural patterns or images.

But since I haven't assumed direct or scientific knowledge I don't see any contradiction.

Although I have a doctoral minor in symbolic logic, I must confess that I have had a lifelong dislike for formal logic itself.

Strictly speaking, the problem I have been describing is not circular reasoning, except in the looser sense that the conclusion "circles back" to the initial premise by actually contradicting it! It does NOT assume what you are trying to prove, since the only thing it proves is something that contradicts the initial assumption. Namely, it proves that what we actually know (internal images) is not what we began by scientifically assuming (direct knowledge of physical phenomena).

Here would be the form of the argument as I see it:

We assume that we have direct scientific knowledge of the external world.

Yet, such direct scientific knowledge (assuming materialism/physicalism) necessarily implies that we cannot have direct scientific knowledge of the external world, but rather that what we actually know is only internal neural patterns or images.

Therefore, our conclusion contradicts the initial premise.

It is something like the illicit self-referential statement: This statement is false. If it is true, it is false. But, if it is false, it is true.

If what we assume about our direct scientific knowledge of the external world is true, then having direct scientific knowledge of the external world turns out to be impossible.

That, strictly speaking, may not be circular reasoning, but it is just as deadly.

>Now do you see how hopelessly circular all this reasoning truly is?

No, I'm sorry. I think the way to show argument is question-begging is to lay it out as a syllogism and note which premise is the same as the conclusion, isn't it?

Perhaps you could do this?