What I'm saying is reread Plato's Euthyphro. Divine Command Theory isn't an alternative to relativism; it's a version of relativism.

The argument goes:

* If there's an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, then objective evil would not exist.

This is a problem only for belief systems which claim:

* There is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, and also, objective evil exists.

It is emphatically NOT a problem for belief systems which claim any of:

* There is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, and actually, NO objective evil exists.
* There is NO omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, and objective evil exists.
* There is NO omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, and actually, NO objective evil exists.

All brands of atheism are in the last two categories here, and are not contradicted by Epicurus' argument.

Give us another option then.

Here are a few alternatives to objective morality:
1. Evil is whatever you happen to like or dislike.
2. Evil is disobeying religious authority.
3. Evil is violation of civil law.
4. Evil is causing or tolerating gratuitous suffering.
5. Evil is social injustice.

"That’s called a false dichotomy. The alternative to objective morality is not solely the proposition that evil is “nothing more than what you happen to like or dislike.”
Give us another option then.

we still acknowledge that God cannot do the logically impossible.

This atheist has never had a problem with that qualification on God’s omnipotence. Atheists who do have a problem with it are just being silly, in my opinion. (And there are an awful lot of silly atheists out there.)

Free will entails the possibility of doing what is contrary to God's will (this is what we know as evil).

That looks a lot like the divine command theory of ethics. This brings up the Euthyphro dilemma, and I understand that Christians think they have solved it with some help from Aristotle. That solution raises another question, though. Do we know that something is evil because we know that God has forbidden it, or do we know that God has forbidden it because we know that it is evil?

abundant free will is consistent with the presence of evil

OK. But would it be inconsistent with the absence of evil? Must evil actually exist in order for us to be free?

you may not see why free will is better than God forcing us to perform on command

I will stipulate for the sake of discussion: If God exists, I do not and would not wish to be his robot.

Obviously, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God might well do or permit things that I happen to dislike.

Whether a benevolent God would do that might depend on why you dislike those things. There are plenty of things we don’t like for the simple reason that they really are bad for us.

The existence of broccoli and the New York Yankees doesn't discredit God

No, but the existence of pizza with anchovies does :-)

unless I'm such a narcissist as to think that a loving God would create the universe as best suits my own whims.

I can understand a loving God attaching scant importance to my personal food preferences.

Objective evil exists: This is what is obviously meant by the problem of evil.It may be obvious to moral realists. It is not so obvious to us who think Aristotle made some mistakes in his metaphysical theorizing.

Objective morality, including objective evil, cannot exist without God.

Of course not, if you’re an orthodox theist, because if you’re an orthodox theist, nothing could have existed without God.

More specifically, the problem is that is that there's no way to get from statements about how the world is to how the world ought to be without imposing a value system.

Sure. It’s called making judgments. But we human beings do have values, and we have them necessarily, and so we cannot avoid making judgments. Whether we want to or not, we will make them. And what’s more, we will live with the consequences of those judgments, whether we want to or not.

atheistic naturalism denies any such universally-binding moral laws (since they require Divine Authorship).

Yes, we do reject your assumption that nothing can be evil unless God has declared it to be evil.

Why, from a strictly biological standpoint, should the man listen to his genetic hard-wiring when it tells him rape is wrong, and not when it gives him an urge to rape?

Because our genes don’t exert that kind of control over our behavior. Anyone who actually understands evolutionary theory would know that.

The atheist responding argues that both of Craig's premises are false:

Firstly, objective morals could well exist without God. They could be hardwired into our genes as an evolutionary survival mechanism.

The naturalistic claim that we are hardwired with a moral instinct is not a claim that we are hardwired with an aversion to rape in particular. Some of us reject the notion that morality is all and only about learning a set of rules and then complying with them.

You can see this with virtually any sin: man both desires sin, and knows it's wrong.

You’re assuming your conclusion. Sin is a theological concept. Ethics—the study of right and wrong—is a philosophical concept.

Why not act like simply another member of the animal kingdom, a world full of rape and theft and killing.

Because animals are not all alike. Individual creatures within each species differ from all other individuals, and every species differs from all other species, and we humans are no exception. We do not, and we cannot, behave exactly like every other animal behaves.

If the hard-wiring is nothing more than the result of random chance over millions of years, it's not at all clear to me why it would be morally evil to disregard it.

This reveals a gross misunderstanding (or plain ignorance) of evolutionary theory. No characteristic, of any organism, that is produced by natural selection is simply “the result of random chance.”

And indeed, atheists constantly go against their genetic hard-wiring. For example, I'd venture that most atheists use birth control and don't seem to find this immoral, even though it's transparently contrary to both our genetic hard-wiring, and evolutionary survival mechanisms. They're literally stopping evolution from working

That is right. We are claiming that our moral instincts are a product of natural selection. That is different from claiming that natural selection can itself tell us the difference between right and wrong.

a more direct violation of evolutionary hard-wiring is almost unthinkable (except, perhaps, celibacy).

You might want to do some more thinking after studying up on worker bees.

Some of these urges are worth acting upon, some aren't. But to know which to obey and which to ignore is a moral question, not a biological one.

Right. It requires the use of other cognitive faculties that were also produced by natural selection.

The atheist reply continues:

However, objective moral values de facto do not exist.

If this is true, we cannot criticize the Nazis for killing millions of Jews, any more than we can criticize the Yankees for beating the Tigers.

That looks like a non sequitur to me. The distinction between facts and values does not imply any kind of equivalence of all values or value judgments. Our moral preferences are in no ethically relevant way similar to our entertainment preferences.

We don't happen to care for Nazi genocide, but their cultural practices are just different from our American values.

Differences come in many kinds. Some are morally relevant and some are not.

As I said above, if by “evil” you mean nothing more than what you happen to like or dislike, the term is meaningless. So when atheists raise the problem of evil, they're already conceding the existence of objective evil, and thus, of objective morality.

That’s called a false dichotomy. The alternative to objective morality is not solely the proposition that evil is “nothing more than what you happen to like or dislike.”