However, atheistic scientists are scientists that tend to objectively analyse the truth value of things including religion; they precisely align with the scientific endeavour of disregarding religious endeavour. This contrasts non-atheistic scientists on this matter, who disregard or "turn off" scientific endeavour while analyzing religion. — VoidDetector

Well, sure, if that's how you want to define "atheistic scientists" and "non-atheistic scientists." This the layout of your argument:

1. If a scientist objectively analyzes truth values, then they are an atheistic scientist.
2. If a scientist "turns off" scientific endeavor while analyzing truth values, then they are a non-atheistic scientist.
3. Religion has truth values.
4. Therefore, if a scientist objectively analyzes religion, then they are an atheistic scientist.
5. And therefore, if a scientist "turns off" scientific endeavor while analyzing religion, then they are a non-atheist scientist.

Your argument, while valid, it is not sound, because it conflates many definitions that are otherwise by and large agreed upon in philosophy. I'd like to offer these alternative definitions:

scientist-- a person who objectively analyzes truth values of concepts within the scientific realm.
scientific realm-- the plane of existence that includes everything that operates within the known laws of nature; the natural world.
atheistic scientist-- a scientist who concludes that there is no convincing philosophy for believing in the existence of anything outside of the natural world; denies the existence of the supernatural.
non-atheistic scientist-- a person who objectively analyzes truth values of concepts within the scientific realm, and also believes that a convincing philosophy exists that posits the possible existence of the extra-natural (supernatural).

Using these definitions, your first and second premises fail. If a scientist "turns off" scientific endeavor in their search for truth within the natural world, then they are no scientist at all. If a scientist "turns off" scientific endeavor while establishing a personal philosophy regarding the extra-natural (including whether or not it exists), then they are simply someone who is aware of accurate definitions in philosophy.

Your argument begs the question, looking at the disagreement between religious and non-religious scientists and calling religious scientists wrong because you believe the extra-natural doesn't exist. Religious scientists are not those who ignore or "turn off" science, but rather are simply scientists who also hold the belief that someone exists outside of the science that they so diligently study. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, but are actually two separate studies. Those who conflate the two, on either side, are uninformed about the definitions of their own viewpoints.

The qualities that make a being the greatest conceivable being (GCB) the greatest can go on forever just the same as the number of trees on the island. It is greater for a being to be able to lift one-thousand pounds than nine-hundred ninety-nine, and greater than that to lift one-thousand and one. Weight can go on forever, even once the being can lift everything in the universe, it is still conceivable to add another pound, and then another. The same goes for speed. These are both attributes that, just like the number of palm trees on an island, can go on forever. — Marc fromPHIL527

The difference between the GCB and the island is that the GCB is not finitely bound while the island, by definition, must remain finite. So it isn't that the GCB has the attribute of "being able to lift 1,000,000,000... lbs" but it has the attribute of "having maximal strength." Maximal strength isn't an ungraspable concept if the being is not finite. This is why, on the other hand, the island can't have the attribute of "having the maximal amount of palm trees."

This idea of maximal strength is based on the GCB's omnipotence.
1. To have power is greater than to not have power.
2. To have maximal power is therefore maximally great.
3. Therefore, the GCB has maximal power.
Having maximal power means that the attribute the GCB would therefore have would not be quantified, but rather simply "can lift the maximal amount of weight that can exist."

The island, on the other hand, has no basis for applying the same argument to itself.

You mention this yourself later in your argument:

Some person might say the greatest being can move faster than anything, and some say he is maximally strong, but those two attributes can fall under the larger category of physical ability. — Marc fromPHIL527

There are some problems with even applying maximum power to the GCB if the definition of GCB includes that it is a spiritual being. Then, physical ability would not apply. But that's a separate argument.

To summarize, I think your objection to the GCB argument fails because the island and the GCB are still non-analogous. But I agree with your overarching conclusion that the GCB and the island are different because everyone can agree what maximal greatness would look like in a being, whereas greatest island seems arbitrary.

is that statement you just made a factual matter?

What is your basis then for determining the weight of each parent's opinion?

Anyway, part of that orthodoxy is the assertion that males have all of the power and receive all of the benefits of the dominant system, females benefit in no way from that system and are brutally oppressed by it, and, therefore, no organized movement fighting for the rights of males is needed.

Well, if it is true that women's liberation covers all oppression and nothing else is needed then there should be nothing found outside of women's liberation that is not also found inside women's liberation. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Such blatant straw men are unnecessary. There are outliers to almost every group, and feminist philosophy is no exception. So I have no interest in defending the views of anyone who makes the sweeping generalizations you claim all feminists make--that all power and all benefits go to the men, and there are no benefits for women. I therefore won't accept your hypothetical in the first place because I, as a member of this "orthodoxy," don't think women's liberation covers all oppression ever in the entire world. To say otherwise is a straw man that deviates greatly from the mainstream view.

Now let's breakdown the content of your main argument that men also need activism to gain equality:
1. If there is oppression against men, then feminism is wrong.
2. If a woman has a child without the father's knowledge, he did not have an opinion regarding the existence of that child.
3. If he did not have an opinion regarding the existence of his child, then he cannot be fiscally responsible for the child.
4. If the woman then demands the father is fiscally responsible, he is oppressed.
5. At least once, a woman has had a child without the father's knowledge, and she has demanded that the father is fiscally responsible.
6. Therefore this is oppression against men.
7. Therefore, feminism is wrong.

I want to deny the third premise of your argument. Why does the man need to have an opinion regarding the existence of the child in order to be fiscally responsible for the child? The creation of a child is not 50/50 man/woman, and therefore their opinions over the child's existence does not carry equal weight. For a man to do his part to create a child takes, let's say, 15 minutes. For a women to do her part to create a child takes 9 months. The ratio of 15 minutes to 9 months is 1/25000. So the man's opinion regarding the child's existence carries 1/25000th the weight that the woman's opinion carries--this is just a fact of biology.

So far, all I've established is that sex has consequences. For men, the consequence is 15 minutes = 18 years of fiscal responsibility. For women, the consequence is 15 minutes = 9 months of physical responsibility, then 18 years of fiscal, emotional, mental, and physical responsibility. Still seems like the woman is getting the short end of the stick out of these two options.

I think the goal of your example, while unsuccessful, might have been to establish that women can coerce men into reproducing a child, which is true. Reproduction coercion is a feminist issue, and the mainstream "orthodoxy" is that all reproduction coercion is wrong--whether the man coerces the woman or the woman coerces the man. Any manipulation or deception taken to cause the existence of a child is clearly wrong because of the fact that both adults are responsible for the creation of the child. Deceiving someone into responsibility that they did not freely choose is wrong--and so feminism fights against this oppression (that both men and women are subjected to) in order to create equality between the sexes.

If God did have this knowledge, and still made humans the way she did, then she is not omnibenevolent. — Yajur

I'd like to argue against your conclusion by denying this premise. Here's my counterargument:

1. God is omnibenevolent.
2. It is better for people to exist and receive maximal love than to not exist.
3. Therefore God created people in order to be the recipients of her maximal love.
4. It is better for the people to be able to reciprocate the love than to not be able to.
5. The ability to reciprocate God's love requires free will.
6. Therefore God created people with free will.
7. Free will is only possible if one can make real choices between multiple options.
8. Humans must be able to choose between good and evil then.
9. One cannot make a real choice unless all options are real options (all options exist).
10. Therefore, evil must exist.

So, evil must exist in order for humans to have free will, and free will actually aligns with God's omnibenevolence more so than not having free will. I offer the following to support my premises:

Premise 2: it is better to exist than to not exist. It is better to be loved than not to be loved.
Premise 3 follows from this under the assumption that God is the GCB and will thus always choose the better of two options.
Premise 4 uses the same reasoning as Premise 2.
Premise 5 is based off the definition of free will that I lay out in Premise 7: free will cannot exist without the ability to make a real choice between multiple options. In order to truly reciprocate someone's love and love them back, one must have the choice to not love them as well. Forced love is not love.
Premise 8 just applies the general definition of free will to the circumstance of choosing between good and evil.
Premise 9 states that the ability to choose is contingent on the options actually existing--if evil didn't exist, I could not choose to do it. If I can't choose to do evil, then I'm resigned to doing good, and therefore not choosing it of my own free will.

Hopefully, this shows how God can be omniscient and still choose to "make humans the way that she did."

To your rebuttal of premise 3: your attention shifts because your attention is limited. Your states of being change because you are mutable. The GCB would not have a limited attention, and would be immutable, and therefore would not experience anything analogous to your example.

Let’s go ahead and define time as the fundamental unit measured by a clock, then. How then could we measure time without clocks? Without the existence of clocks, time would be immeasurable according to your definition. Immeasurable time, then, leads us back to the same question I posed earlier: if the point of time is to measure something, and there is no way to measure anything, because there is nothing to measure, then time has no purpose for existing.

I agree that we run into problems attempting to understand timelessness when we ourselves are bound by time. But that does not mean that nothing can be known about timelessness, or at least postulated within the rules of logic that we know. My whole argument hinges on the assumption that something did exist outside of time; namely, the Greatest Conceivable Being.

I'm only using references to time-- "when," "before," etc.-- because we are temporal beings who cannot think outside of events in relation to time. Perhaps a better word would be "outside"-- outside of the creation of the universe, which obviously includes time, the GCB still existed, otherwise it would not be greater than the universe.

Clearly, we cannot even argue in an atemporal sense, because even the act of using verbs assumes a relation to time. But that doesn't mean we can't try to understand, or at least think about, what it would be like outside of the existence of time.

Yeah, thank you. That was circular. I changed the argument a little; hopefully that helps.

It makes sense that the world is designed so perfectly for our living that it would seem as if there was a Creator that designed it for us, but at the same time, it would still be possible in the atheistic many-universe hypothesis that we live in a world created by chance. — Play-doh

If you're granting that the appearance of fine-tuning in this world makes it possible that a Creator exists, then, and if you equate that Creator with the GCB, you're granting that a Creator exists for all possible worlds according to the modal ontological argument:

1. If it is possible that the GCB exists, then there is some possible world in which the GCB exists.
2. The GCB is a necessary being, by the fact that it is greater to necessarily exist than not.
3. If the GCB exists in some possible world, then, it necessarily exists in all possible worlds.
4. The GCB, then, exists in all possible worlds.

And that makes sense, given the definition of GCB: if it existed in only this world, and there were many universes, than those universes would be outside of its power. But as the maximally powerful being, nothing can be outside of its power.

So either you have to claim that the Creator of this world is not the GCB, or grant that the Creator exists in all possible worlds. But how would a Creator of this universe not be the Greatest Conceivable Being? The Creator would, at the very least, have to be the Greatest Conceivable Being of its universe, because it would be greater than everything conceived in that universe. But going back to the argument above, if it is the GCB in one world, it necessarily is the GCB in all possible worlds.

Your response to premise 1 misinterprets Yajur’s original claim: He is not stating that the good does truly not outweigh the bad, only that we often lack the ability to see how the good could outweigh the bad. He then reasons from that to premise 2: because we so often cannot see how the good outweighs the bad, it is at least likely that the good does not outweigh the bad in every single instance. This is supported with nearly unlimited antidotal examples of sad events that all center around the same theme:

1. The good always outweighs the bad if the bad event has a good purpose.
2. Suffering is a bad event.
3. Suffering has a good purpose if it has the potential to positively impact a life.
4. If no one witnesses the suffering, and the sufferer does not survive, then suffering does not have the potential to positively impact a life.
5. Possibly, no one witnesses the suffering, and the sufferer does not survive.
6. Therefore it is possible that the suffering did not have the potential to positively impact a life.
7. Therefore it is possible that the suffering does not have a good purpose.
8. Therefore it is possible that the good does not outweigh the bad.

Notice the point of these examples are not to prove that we cannot see how the good outweighs the bad all the time — simply that it is possible that the good does not always outweigh the bad.

You also state that maybe, “you cannot have the good without the right amount of bad.” But if we’re assuming an Greatest Conceivable Being as the one in charge of creating good, I fail to see how the existence of good necessitates the existence of some amount of bad. Take the God we’re assuming— He is Maximally Good without any bad, so clearly bad is not required to exist in order for good to exist. Of course, different rules apply to humankind, because we are not Maximal Beings, but then you wonder why God would even create us at all? If Maximal Good existed before humankind, without any bad, why would God then increase the amount of bad to exist by creating humankind?

Additionally, would an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God “have a higher priority than keeping sad events to a minimum?” If he has all possible power, and he has all possible love for all living things, there is no reason he would not try to keep sad events to a minimum.

You do raise a good point that it is possible God just isn’t omnibenevolent then. Would that fit all the requirements of being the Greatest Conceivable Being, though? For loving is greater than not loving, so it would be the greatest to love maximally.

If Individuals can freely choose their actions, then there can’t be any foreknowledge of what they are going to do — lupac

Let's say that you're talking to one of your best friends, and as they're talking, you realize that they are about to say one of their common catchphrases. You know with confidence that they're about to say this catchphrase--and sure enough, they say it two seconds later. Did you, through your foreknowledge of their speech, impede their free will? Certainly not.

Now think of how much more certain God is, through his foreknowledge. The only difference in my analogy is that God does not doubt his knowledge of our decisions, like you might maintain an ounce of doubt that your friend could say something unexpected instead. This difference in analogy does not impact the conclusion, though.

God can know what we will decide, the consequences of each decision, and all the processes and thoughts that led to our decision. But how does this knowledge exclude free will? God, in his omniscience, would know every detail about every detail of our lives. He would therefore know every emotion, passing thought, dwelt-upon idea, and influence that impacts our decisions. This omniscience is what allows him to have foreknowledge of our actions; but it does not change our free will. If God were communicating the contents of his foreknowledge to us ("I am God, and I know you will eat cereal for breakfast because I know everything") that would change the outcome because he would actively be influencing our decision-making process. But simply knowing the decision based of his perfect and complete knowledge of everything we draw upon to make our decision, including our personalities and preferences, does not negate free will.

How can there be any place God is absent from if He's omnipresent? — Empedocles

God’s presence is not as one-dimensional as the presence of finite material beings. Biblically, there is a difference between God’s fully glorified presence and the presence that became incarnate and took on the sins of the world in Christ. This is why God told Moses that no person, due to their sinful nature, may fully see Him in His complete glory and live, and yet the New Testament instructs Christians to lay all of their sinful thoughts at the foot of Christ for Him to take captive.

We see more evidence that God’s glorified presence cannot coexist in the presence of sin through the ritual of the Holy of Holies in Jewish tradition. In this practice, just in case a priest entered the Holy of Holies with unconfessed (and therefore unforgiven) sin, he had a rope tied around his ankle so other priests would be able to draw him out of the glorified presence of God if he were struck dead in his sinful state. 

This example is consistent with what we know from the definition of God as the Maximal Being. Maximal Moral Goodness—the complete absence of sin—could not, by definition, be tainted with any sin, no matter how small. Therefore, God does not present Himself in His full glory in the presence of sin because to do so would be to remove any capacity for free will. If His omni- attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence) manifested themselves in all dimensions, as it would require to have God’s fully glorified presence be “omni,” then no human would possess the capacity to choose to act outside of God’s own will. We would be robots, incapable of choosing to love God, and thus negating the purpose of our very creation.

There must, therefore, be a difference between God’s fully glorified presence, and the presence that is everywhere—even in Sheol, as David penned in the Psalms. In Hell, there is, at the very least, the removal of God’s fully glorified presence, because it cannot coexist with sin.

We can further debate the interpretation of David’s psalm—perhaps he claimed that God would follow him even to Sheol because God knows that David loves Him—to help determine whether it aligns Biblically to believe in annihilationism, and to therefore believe that hell includes the removal from all dimensions of God’s presence. But, at this point, I think it is safe to conclude that, at the very least, “hell” is absence of God’s glorified presence.

I'd like to reply to your first premise, "If God is all-loving, he would not have created hell."

In objecting to this conditional, I first want to define "hell" as the separation from the presence of God. Therefore, hell is not something created but is rather merely the natural result of God removing his existence from a place. In the same way that darkness is not a material thing, but is simply the absence of light, hell is not one of God's creations, but is just the absence of his presence.

Ok, but that still does not answer why an all-loving god would allow for the existence of hell. This is where I bring in, as Sam26 put it, the “tired free will argument.” Let’s start with what we’ve already assumed: an all-loving god.

If God is all-loving, then he wants what is best for every person.
What is best for other people is not hell.
Therefore, God does not want people to go to hell.

If God does not want people to go to hell, they either go to hell because they are acting outside of his control, or because he allows them to go to hell regardless of his wants.
God is all-powerful, so people do not act outside of his control.
Therefore, God must allow people to go to hell regardless of his wants.

This is where free-will comes into the argument. This is my basis for believing in free will:

As the Maximally Good Being, God deserves to be loved more than any other being in the universe.
So, God deserves to be loved by the people he created.
Because he is also omniscient, God knows that he deserves love, and therefore wants people to love him.
So, when he created people, God must have designed humankind with the capacity to love him.

Forced love is not love.
So, God cannot force humankind to love him.
Humankind must, therefore, be capable of freely choosing to love God.
To have the capacity of free choice is to possess free will.
Therefore, humankind must possess free will.

Because free will includes the capacity to choose to love God, it also includes the capacity to choose to not love God. In the Judeo-Christian religion, to not love God is to sin, so people who do not love God are sinners. God cannot be in the presence of sinners, so those who do not love God cannot be in his presence.

Through this argument, we can see that God only had two options other than allowing for people to go to hell: (1) go against his nature, and be in the presence of sin, or (2) get rid of free will, and, by extension, the capacity for people to love God. God cannot act outside of his nature, so he could either destroy free will, or allow people to go to hell.

This is how an all-loving God can coexist with hell.