Borrowing for your argument

This discussion makes me wish I'd put more effort into the Symbolic Logic class I took in college (hey, I was a first-term Freshman way back then... I didn't take anything too seriously...)

Suppose an atheist argues for the nonexistence of God from the fact of natural and moral evil. For any such argument to be probative, the fact of evil must be an objective fact; otherwise it cannot be adduced in support of the objective nonexistence of God.

Suppose further that without God there is no objective good or evil. Then one might try to show that the atheist cannot argue from evil to the nonexistence of God without presupposing the existence of God as the absolute standard of good and evil.

C.S. Lewis also discussed the objection based on the existence of evil in his book Mere Christianity.

Pure atheism, taken undiluted, seems to promise ultimate individual freedom, but always leads to oppressive collectivism for there are only two ways to derive a social/moral code: either through divine sanction or utilitarian calculation. Action on utilitarian grounds is situationally dependent and ignores objections based on individual loss, suffering or abuse. It acknowledges no objective right or wrong on the individual level. It is relativism, not morality. Thus, any atheist arguing against God's existence based on the perception of evil in the world is borrowing some of God's attributes--His standards of holiness and consistency--to attack him!

Christianity's critics like to bash the faithful for historic abuses committed in the name of Christ. Regrettably, those cannot be denied (though they are often exaggerated for effect). But they pale behind the track record of regimes like the French Revolution, Fascism and Communism--atheistic, anti-Christian systems that recognized no limits to their power to pursue some imagined secular paradise on earth. So while those critics can logically point out the failures of the Church to adhere to its own teaching, they cannot then independently label anyone's activity as evil without borrowing from the very moral code they refuse to acknowledge. Why? Because the Code leads to the Author. Vox sometimes refers to this as moral parasitism, and I think it a fitting term. The objection to God's existence based on the existence of evil, then, is more irrational than it first appears.

(HT: Evangelical Outpost)