I appreciate the candour.
Thing is, this is replaying the mediaeval debates between Realists and Nominalists. Tell me, when you say evil is Real if in human consciousness, obviously you are assuming levels of 'reality' here. Or is Bigfoot real? As real as a Gorilla, say? Both functionally only exist as concepts; as most people have never really seen a Gorilla, some claim to have seen Bigfoot also, and even if you have seen either, that activity is sense-mediated. Why is someone's subjective experience of a Gorilla more real than another's of Bigfoot, or at what point does intersubjectivity switch from delusion or illusion to objective fact? Things that most people see as 'objectively' real, such as a table say, are still merely a mental simulacrum made from the sense perceptions. We'd go so far as to say that in a sense the table is not, but rather an illusion of the particles it consists of acting on light or pressure receptors, which our mental process has constructed into an image in the mind. So how real is Evil, then? Does it have intersubjective valence? If so, how would that be validated? For that matter, what is Consciousness anyway that somehow acts as the medium for this Reality of evil? What of subconsciousness? Or archetype and cultural conceptions both arise somewhat out of?
I am being a bit obtuse, for which I apologise. You agreed that Evil is thus rendered merely a human construct, which can thus not be really justified beyond 'I say so', a nice formulation of Nietzsche's Will to create your own morality, really. However, as human experience is incorribly subjective, and as Science progressed become more so (with primary characteristics of increasingly becoming secondary, as optics first did with colour become observer dependant, then Relativity for length and time, and Quantum theory requiring the Observation altering the observed itself), the difference between what exists 'only in human consciousness' (whatever that means) and what exists, is decidely thin. We functionally treat what amounts to a mental simulacrum as Real routinely. Sufficed to say, to accept this as Real requires a way to accept some Intersubjectivity, which requires an assumed metaphysical framework to account for it.
In my mind, I have direct experience of a moral intuition, which tells me torturing a child worse than not doing so. This is clearer and more obvious to me on reflection, than the existence of a table that I know to be merely a mental model projected of particles mediated by sensory neurons receiving supposed stimuli, or the existence of a Gorilla I take on authority from experts and imagery I have seen. You need not agree with me, but it is obvious to my mind that Evil is, that it isn't primary to existence, and denying the problem of Evil in its theologic sense merely kicks open the question of how anything can then be intersubjectively validated or whether any meaning bears any relation beyond a merely nominally ascribed one then at all.
My point is simply that this doesn't solve a problem, except by creating umpteenth more, while the original proposition is not safely able to be set aside anyway thereby.
