Interestingly, in other instances Christians prefer the argument that evil does not actually exist but is the mere absence of good, "like darkness is the absence of light".
Those two notions combined would result in the argument that darkness is a prerequisite for there to be light. Which doesn´t make much sense, does it?
The actual problem with the argument "there needs to be evil for there to be good" is that it merely addresses a language problem. Something doesn´t change its value just because there is something else. 100$ remain 100$, no matter whether we compare them to 10$ or 1000$.
The quality of a movie (what it is) doesn´t change just because there are other (better or worse) movies to compare it to.
Gods nature wouldn´t change if there were no satan, would it?
Thus, the logical argument merely is: "If there weren´t anything that we can call "evil", we couldn´t (or wouldn´t) call something "good".
What we call something does not affect its nature, though.
You are my favorite person on this whole forum.
To the OP:
Right. So the fact that evil exists is explained away by the fact that good couldn't exist without being the opposite of evil. People can choose to reject God, because the choice has to exist for people to choose to accept God. Therefore, God is loving and wants people to be free of sin, but the conditions for this to happen inevitably sometimes result in the opposite scenario occurring. So... if God is the supreme being who created absolutely everything, and defined the laws of the Universe, why didn't God just create a universe where good could exist without evil? Where people could just accept God and be happy, without the need for Hell? Why didn't God just create Heaven to start with, instead of requiring that people pass the test of Earth... God didn't create evil, but why does it have to exist nonetheless? If God can do anything, why couldn't he just create a universe where the only force was the force of good/love?
I suppose you could argue that as the Bible suggests that God has a definitive character, then these 'laws' are not defined by God, but are God. Therefore, it is impossible for them not to exist, because they are part of the highest power.
I'm unsure, though. Any thoughts?
Sure. Many of a more conservative stripe will brand me a heretic, but I've found little to no use in many orthodox teachings, the motifs of which I can't seem to square with the apparently 'obvious' motifs of the Bible. I've read and listened to people talk about a God whose love 'knows no bounds,' yet is perfectly content with sending people (or "allowing people to send themselves," depending on which preacher has been doing the hammering on your brain) to hell for time everlasting. Or a God who desires a relationship with you, yet you cannot hope to affect him in the slightest. Or a God who tells you to love your neighbor as yourself and forgive others seventy times seven times, yet 'grimaces in approval' when a group of us band together to 'administer justice' to the wayward. Or a God who wants you to feel convinced that he exists, yet offers no examples of apparently-supernatural causation which would effect that kind of conviction. I could go on.
What to do? Listen to atheists and agnostics. I've learned at least as much from them as from Christians. Many Christian theologians and philosophers are content to choke plausibility out of the dilemmas that atheists present them with, but I've never found forced answers attractive. (On the other hand, many atheists have made silly philosophical mistakes--see Dawkins, et al.) The trick is to sift the arguments of one against the other with an open mind and compare them to experience, both yours and the experience you hear of others having.
I
speculate the following:
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Good and evil should be explained this way: The degree to which not-God (that would be you and me) bends his or her will to God's will is the degree to which we should call not-God's behavior 'good.' The degree to which not-God pursues activities and mental indulgences antithetical to God's will is the degree to which we should call not-God's behavior 'evil.' God's will for not-God, however, is ultimately the same thing as what not-God wants for himself or herself: love, security, the fulfillment of personal dreams, the absence of suffering, adventure. So we understand that the not-God who acts counter to God's will has yet to understand the self-destructive ramifications of his or her behavior ("self" being understood in the dual sense of personal self-destruction as well as species self-destruction; the latter, of course, inevitably contributing to the former). This is the basis of an ethic based on relational love.
God desires that all sinners be reconciled to himself
as such and possesses the unstoppable power to achieve what he desires. Therefore, it follows that,
barring any exegesis to the contrary, all of us capable of loving God will be reconciled with him following a finite amount of time and a corrective punishment for the unrepentant. (This exegesis represents a huge point of contention, I know. I would point you to some of the writings of Thomas Talbott in its favor:
http://www.willamette.edu/~ttalbott/theol.html , as well as his book
The Inescapable Love of God) This is the basis of an ethic based on relational love brought to its logical conclusion.
God gives us the ability to make choices within the predetermined bounds he set up. Think of the Plinko game on The Price Is Right (I might be getting too old...): While the chips dropped into the slots
must make it to the tray at the bottom, how they get there is, to anthropomorphize, up to them. Similarly, we all
must desire a loving relationship with God eventually because, once delusions pointing to a disparity in the will of not-God and the will of God have been shattered, our natural craving for love draws us toward it virtually automatically. The manner in which we express that love, how long it takes us to identity its source in God, and how often we defy it in apparent self-destruction, is up to us.
God has the power to find out anything he wants, yet he doesn't exercise it in all conceivable situations as that would undermine his (at least potential) relationship with you. The idea of
personal relationship divorced from the ideas of
process & discovery is rendered sterile. God has
hopes for you. God
suffers when you hurt yourself. God
feels thrilled when you accomplish something you've been working on. This is the basis of an ethic based on
relational love manifested.
Similarly, God didn't "create evil." God created several beings (Lucifer, Michael, etc.) who were capable of self-destructive behavior and he
chose not to find out how they would fall down the Plinko slots in order to cement his
relational status with them. They failed God and they failed themselves in equal fervor, and the world has felt the ill effects ever since. (Exactly how much God restricted, for relation's sake, his knowledge of the probability of their rebellion is up for questioning.)
And since I'm already on a tangent, I'll mention a couple of unrelated points. First, our notion of "love" doesn't
directly apply to God. Yes, I know that it says all throughout the Bible that "God loves us." But this must represent an abstraction. We use the word "love" in day-to-day language to represent 'concepts' which represent particular types of experiences that we've had. All of our experiences of love, however, have been with human beings (and pets!). And the love experienced by all human beings is inextricably tied up with physical processes in our brains. Therefore, our 'idea' of love cannot be divorced from epistemic content of a
distinctly physical variety. Seeing as God has no physical parts, this concept of ours that we call 'love' cannot
directly apply to him. What we can say is that love approximates God's orientation toward us, as that allows us to make sense of both God the Son's example (brain) and God the Father's ontological status (no brain). I mention this to make the point that we should allow a little bit of room when we claim things like, "If God loved us, he wouldn't do that!" as that would represent an at-least-slight conceptual misapplication.
Second, and relatedly, we cannot currently experience God
as such. We cannot see him, we cannot hear him, we cannot touch him, etc. So if we have no experience of him
as such, we can have no
concept of him
as such, and thus the
term 'God,' in so far as it refers to
God as such, has no content. When we use the word 'God' in this sense, we really aren't saying anything meaningful (think of saying, "I believe in [sound of fish gulping]"). This is one of George Smith's objections to theism, and I think it has merit. But the same objection could, perhaps, be leveled against gravity. The gravity that "exists" between the sole of your lifted foot and the earth beneath it cannot be 'sensed'
as such. It can, however, be experienced in terms of its causal relationship with things that
can be sensed as such (we all feel 'stuck' to the ground). I propose that something similar to this causal relationship represents, alongside the natural parts of the life of Jesus, the content that fills our 'concept' of God.
An example of this causation: Bob has been praying all month for the money to pay his rent. He hasn't got nearly enough, and he's been feeling very frustrated about it. The night before he has to pay, however, he wakes up, sees his clock say 2:00 AM, and
experiences in a non-sensate way that he should then pray for his rent money. He argues with "God" in his mind and tells him that he's been doing that all month, and that there's no point. The
non-sensate experience does not relent, so he starts praying. After a few moments, he goes back to sleep. Tomorrow morning he gets a call from his neighbor, Jim, who tells him,
before Bob mentions anything, that he woke up in the middle of the night last night, saw his clock say 2:00 AM, and
experienced in a non-sensate way that he should start praying for Bob's rent money. Jim tells Bob that he's not sure if he needs any money for his rent or not, but during his prayer he
experienced in a non-sensate way that he should pay for it this month. Bob feels blown away, tells Jim that he had been praying for rent money all month and had the exact same experience last night, graciously receives the money, and pays the rent on time.
This is a blow-by-blow true story involving my dad (whose name isn't actually Bob) and a neighbor of my family's (whose name isn't actually Jim) several years ago. My family and I have had many experiences like this throughout the years, and we've heard of several others that seem even more fantastic (look up a book on amazon.com called
Always Enough for one couple's documented experiences of that type). In fact, during the time that we lived in that house, almost every month's rent was paid in a similar fashion.
_______________
/speculation (except for the true story, which obviously wasn't speculated.)
Sorry for the length. I'm pretty sure this is the longest post I've ever written.
I think you'll find answers, but I don't think you'll get them by rehashing old omelette's.
