Is Anything Evil? Does Evil Exist?

Rob writes:Perhpas you can begin to perceive how interrelated these recent posts of mine are. I hope someone catches the Spirit of it, for it's purposes are honest and pure.

Rob,in my thread writes:And that has been my most difficult struggle; to realize that I cannot persuade anyone. That the truth is nonsense to them. It absolutely kills me, and seems so unfair...

STR writes: The first step in answering the problem of evil is this: We've got to get clear on what this thing "evil" actually is. It does seem to follow that if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then God created evil. This is a valid syllogism. If the premises are true, then the conclusion would be true as well.The problem with that line of reasoning is that the second premise is not true. Evil is not a thing. The person who probably explained it best was St. Augustine, and then Thomas Aquinas picked up on his solution. Others since them have argued that evil has no ontological status in itself.Let me give you an illustration to make this more clear. We talk about things being cold or warm. But coldness is not a thing that exists in itself; it has no ontological status. Coldness is the absence of heat. When we remove heat energy from a system, we say it gets colder."Cold" isn't a thing. It's a way of describing the reduction of molecular activity resulting in the sensation of heat. So the more heat we pull out of a system, the colder it gets. Cold itself isn't being "created." Cold is a description of a circumstance in which heat is missing. Heat is energy which can be measured. When you remove heat, the temperature goes down. We call that condition "cold," but there is no cold "stuff" that causes that condition.Same thing with a shadow. Shadows don't exist as things in themselves; they're just the absence of light.Evil is like that. Evil isn't like some black, gooey stuff floating around the universe that gloms onto people and causes them to do awful things. Evil is the absence of good, a privation of good, not a thing in itself.So donut holes don't exist; they're just the absence of donut. Shadows don't exist; they're just the absence of light. And evil doesn't exist; it's just the absence of good.

Archer writes:Reality is reality. It includes good and evil. It also includes light and dark, life and death, yin and yang, Elvis and Elvis impersonators.Insisting that 'darkness is only the absence of light, impersonators are only the absence of Elvis' doesn't change any of this. Reality would still include both the 'presence' and 'absence' states of whatever it is you're talking about.

Archer writes:Reality is reality. It includes good and evil. It also includes light and dark, life and death, yin and yang, Elvis and Elvis impersonators.

purpledawn writes:Good is not a thing either. So good doesn't exist; it is just the absence of evil.In literature and speech people personify objects, abstract concepts, and human emotions, opinions, and personalities to name just a few. Evil is an descriptive word that has been personified.What is deemed evil or good, as has been mentioned already, is relative to the person or group using the word.