I can -- but honestly, if we cannot agree that the deliberate killing of 99.9999% of all life on the planet would accurately be described as an act of atrocity by any rational, moral being, then I don't see the value of further conversation.
You probably don't mean for it to be the case, but from my view, assuming the dogmatic moral position that you imply here is a cop out from having to face, and do, heavy rational lifting. I could be wrong, but it almost sounds like you just want to use a verbal bully-tactic to establish your unknown ethics as beyond the human pale of argument. I'd expect as such from a Platonist, but not from an atheist.
Nevertheless, I will do so -- strictly as an intellectual exercise:
A God that can drown 99.9999% of all life on the planet solely to wipe out a single race of people can easily command His followers to commit acts of similar morality, albeit on a smaller scale... yes or no?
Maybe it's just me, but it appears we're at a philosophical impasse here, TLK. I can't answer your question because, like so many Christian evangelicals, you too are arbitrarily putting fences around what kinds of questions get to be asked and how they can be answered. To me, this kind of articulation of questions sounds like a communistic measure of subterfuge, an attempted preventive measure of sorts.
But here's the rub with me in all of this: I'm neither going to allow Plato into the Axiological hen-house, nor am I going to allow a dogmatic secularist to present a "just so" position as to what constitutes correct and sane thinking in Modern terms. No, as an Existentialist, I will rather only assume that
neither of us fully knows all we could know or should know about about human morality in our shared world and that we both have to start from Ground Zero, especially if we're going to attempt to morally evaluate an Invisible, Transcendent, Holy, All-knowing, and Almighty biblically expressed divine entity who is our Creator and whom neither of us can capture and interrogate, let alone prove is Real.
With the above in mind, it seems to me that in order for me to be able to adequately and fully "judge" such a divine entity, I too would have to be a similar sort of divine being. The problem is--and I'm not sure if you share my axiomatic posture on this--
I know that I am not a divine being of any sort, whatsoever. And my self-reflective human limitations prevent me from being able to say whether or not a biblical God of the sort I've summarized above is being "atrocious" if He were to decide that some Noachian period people and some other organisms needed to be removed from the face of the planet as a form of corrective punishment.
Now, obviously, if we were to consider a more usual, human level case of atrocious behavior, perhaps one in which a mere fellow human being is concerned, maybe one concerning some Russian dictator who invades other countries and wantonly mets out death and mayhem, in
that instance I think I COULD very well morally judge that other human being for atrocities committed. I think you could, too.
But to morally evaluate a Biblical God? I can't honestly say that my epistemic prowess is such that I could, especially not in the same way. It would be at this point, then, that if further delibrative pressure is placed upon me to judge God anyway, I will ask: By which Ethical system? Is there an Absolute I must use? Do I need to burn my copy of William S. Sahakian's book,
Ethics: An Introduction to Theories and Problems, [among other ethics literature] since merely to hold this book in my hands seems to indicate that the jury is still out on exactly which moral paradigm and which ethical system is paramount and the one that all of us MUST adhere to and comply with?
