Do we really need both good and evil?

[keytoad]

I am new to this site and have only listened to the first two podcasts which dealt with morality. But this was enough to have already formed a question. That question is Do we realy need both good and evil? Christians would say yes. As a once firm believer in the inerrancy of the bible, believing in the necessity of evil as a part of God's plan for the universe was essential. Mostly due to the fact that the bible plainly states that God creates all things including evil, and it gave an answer to the big question of "why did or would God create evil and how can a being who is perfect in Love such as God even do so?" If evil had a purpose than i could understand God creating it. It also largely plays into the doctrine of freewill which obviously needs both evil and good but that is a subject all its own.
So my original belief went like this; Yes evil is nessesary to knowing good since you can't know good without having the opposite of it to compare it with. Also evil is a big part of God's plan in leading us to good in that, having evil in the world can and does steer us toward good. These seemed like good answers to my big questions.
But now i have begun to see things in a bit of a different light as my search for truth goes on and i have begun to move away from my literalist interpretation and inerrancy of the bible stance. The perverbial cat is out of the bag and pandora's box has been opened so to speak. I have now begun to think things thru without my previous narrow mindedness and preconcived notions. And i must say i like it and even feel good about it!
So then "do we really need evil to know good?.........NO, I say we don't even though my bible teaching says otherwise.
I can and do, feel and experience all of the good things that happen in my life completely independent of evil. That is a fact! I don't need the evil at all, and neither does anyone else! In fact the further away from the evil i am, the more good i experience! So where does this leave us Christians and our God? It leaves us holding the bag in regards to evil. God made evil unessisaraly with no seeming pupose other than to destroy his beloved creation and worse yet the bible goes on to say he will blame us for what this evil has done to each of us! In light of this i am quickly realizing that we REALLY DON'T need evil!

So what do you think? Is evil nessesary? Do we need it or could God have made just the good? I say Yes he could have and the bible has NO good explanation as to why he didn't! Maybe you do! Thanks for the help, I am here to learn.

BTW, hope this question isn't to descriptive and long. like i said it's my first one so if this is to much let me know and i'll try to keep it breif next time.

[Emery]

Welcome keytoad! I don't think good and evil are things that can be directly created, rather they are descriptions of our actions when set against a specific template. And if that template is what Christians say their god requires, then we will often fall short. So good would describe those actions that match the template, and bad would be those that don't.

Given our limited knowledge and our free will, I submit there will always be times we don't meet the actions in the template, hence there will always be evil. So I don't think God creates evil, rather evil is merely a description of some of our free will actions.

The only way to eradicate evil and retain free will is to remove all the rules. But that would only remove evil as to what God considers evil. It would not change what humans regard as evil, since we will still have our own rules and expectations of behavior, and we will still break them.

Does that make sense?

[yjoeyh]

Hi keytoad,

Thanks for the post. It sounds like a really good question. I don't think that evil is really necessary in the way you are asking, but I do think that the possibility of evil is necessary in order to give the idea of "good" any meaning. How could someone do anything good unless they had a real opportunity to do something that wasn't? Then I suppose one could argue that if evil is possible, then it must also be ontologically necessary. I think that's called Axiom S5.
I also liked Emery's response, although I would not say that there is really a distinction between what God considers evil and what men do.

[Aaron]

It would not change what humans regard as evil, since we will still have our own rules and expectations of behavior, and we will still break them.

I took an Ethic's course in college a couple of years ago. The first day the professor made a statement something like this, "everyone knows murder is wrong, but what about premarital sex? Who says that is wrong? Christians? Is our legal system based on Christianity?". The class got into a big long discussion about all kinds of different things that I'll not go into here, but along the course of the discussion we got onto the subject of incest. The professor then said, "well the laws against incest make sense since we know that incest leads to dysfunctional offspring". What the professor said that day has stuck in my head since. I think he pulled a fast one on the class (aside from the fact that he brought up the subject of premarital sex in a college classroom - crafty).

Emery you asked once why I thought homosexuality was wrong (and I’m not directing this specifically at Emery, I’m talking to anyone). I couldn't come up with any good reasons like the professor did for why incest was wrong. You then said that because there were no reasons why it is wrong it therefore isn't wrong. I have since figured out how the professor pulled one on us.

Who says murder is wrong? Who says producing dysfunctional offspring is wrong? Perhaps society says its wrong, but that's subject to change. You might think I sound crazy, but think about it. A hundred years ago in America homosexuality wasn't a socially accepted lifestyle, so since society said it was wrong then it was wrong, right? Back in the Inquisition supposed "Christians" were doing a good thing by torturing people for heresy. Stoning adulterous women was a good thing at different times in our history.

You might say well there is a difference here! Incest is wrong because you are producing dysfunctional offspring, murder is wrong because you are forcing you will on someone else, stoning women is wrong because that is just plain barbaric! Well I say those reasons are garbage. Quit forcing your will on me by telling me I can’t murder someone. Don’t tell me my practice is barbaric, I think your practices are barbaric. Don’t tell me my family is dysfunctional, I think your family is dysfunctional.

I should have stopped the professor the second he made that claim about murder. I should have asked on what authority he was making that claim. I don’t mean to sound difficult, but I think the issues I’ve raised are legitimate. So I have a question. Since what society accepts as right or wrong changes, how do we know we are heading in the right direction?

I’m stuck here, I too think murder is wrong, and incest and stoning women for adultery, but I’m stuck on the principles here. On what authority are we making such claims?

[Matt]

Aaron,

I'm not buying your ethics professor's argument against incest, either. I would have been tempted to raise my hand and say that I was a product of incest (I'm not) and ask whether he thought I was dysfunctional.

[mikedsjr]

Keytoad,

Welcome aboard. And now to jump right in....To start off, You are wrong to say God created evil. You would have been correct if you stated, "God allowed evil to happen". You are also wrong that you can do, feel and experience all of the good things that happen in life and be completely independent of evil. It is absolutely positively impossible from what scripture says, UNLESS you are in the will of God. Even so, you once did live this. We all have as Romans 3 says that there is none righteous (all are evil), there is none that seek after God (evil), There is no fear of God before their eyes (evil). You need to define evil from God's perspective and you seem to be defining God purely from a human to human level. I'm not quite sure what level to evil you are defining your term? If your level of defining evil relates only to murder, rape and child molesting then you havent grasped scratched the surface of scripture except in some superficial means.

Examine what John says evil is in 3 John 1:9-11

I have written something to the church, but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, talking wicked nonsense against us. And not content with that, he refuses to welcome the brothers, and also stops those who want to and puts them out of the church. Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.

Evil here isn't a killing. Evil here is the distortion of God's message through church authority system. Yes, there is plenty of this evil going around today too within churches. Its not socially acceptable to call it evil today. You're looked down upon as, "who are you to tell my church what to believe", which also seems to fit nicely to the topic of the recent podcast. Any church group that says this, typically is just like Diotrephes, evil.

But evil at its core is rejection of God and His glory by disobedience to Him. So yes, a person can experience all of the good things that happen in life and be completely apart of evil.

[Emery]

Hi Aaron, good to hear from you again. I'll address your question with a question:

Why should God care about human welfare?

[humanguy]

To start off, You are wrong to say God created evil. You would have been correct if you stated, "God allowed evil to happen".

Wait just a damn minute. God didn't create evil but he allowed it to happen? Where, pray tell, did evil come from if God didn't create it?

While we're at it, what else didn't God create?

Also, why in the world would a nice all-powerful guy like God allow such an evil thing as evil to "happen?"

[gary_s]

Aaron, society generally agrees that harming another person is unacceptable. That is a simple guideline to follow when thinking about the rightness or wrongness of an action. It is quite appropriate to mine the fringes of human interaction. Religious debates tend to focus only on the primary issues like murder or rape, but most people agree on those anyway. There is a whole world of interaction at the fringe. Is it OK for a society to relegate children of poor families to a substandard education and thus condemn them to repeat their parent's poverty? Is it OK for one country to devour world resources at the expense of people from countries that have no power to stop you? Are these not the kind of ethical/moral questions that affect more people than murders?

[mitchellmckain]

Wait just a damn minute. God didn't create evil but he allowed it to happen? Where, pray tell, did evil come from if God didn't create it?

God created the universe for the purpose of giving birth to the self-organizing phenomena of life, which has free will. Thus you can say that God created the possibility of evil by creating something that was not under His absolute control.

While we're at it, what else didn't God create?

God did not create the majority of things that were created by other people. God did not create the pyramids or the great wall of China. God did not create the Illiad or Hamlet. God did not create the Mona Lisa, the Sisteen Chapel or Michelangelo's Pieta. God did not create Microsoft Windows or Dell computers. God may have inspired these things, either directly or indirectly by the things which He did create, but He did not create them.

Also, why in the world would a nice all-powerful guy like God allow such an evil thing as evil to "happen?"

Because He is NOT a control freak, but desires more than anything else to have the company of other creators who are in some small way like Himself. But that is not possible if He remains in control of what they do, for in that case all He would create is tools.

[Aaron]

Aaron,

I'm not buying your ethics professor's argument against incest, either. I would have been tempted to raise my hand and say that I was a product of incest (I'm not) and ask whether he thought I was dysfunctional.

Mmm yes. I think its similar to the debate about whether or not people are born gay, born with a gay gene that is. It always makes me want to say, "well I wasn't fortunate enough to be born with the gay gene, but by god I know I'm gay at heart so are you telling me I'm less gay than a person born with a gay gene?! This is discrimiation!!!"

[Aaron]

Hi Aaron, good to hear from you again. I'll address your question with a question:

Why should God care about human welfare?

Hey Emery,

I haven't been around here much, I'm busy with finishing school I guess. But anyways your question is quite interesting. I'm having trouble coming up with an answer though; I think maybe I need to add some qualifications first. I'll give it a try.

World 1: God is outside of everything. He is the creator of all things, including morality (what is right and what is wrong), matter and energy, everything.

In this world statements like “God should water the flowers more often” or “God shouldn’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” or perhaps “God ought to pay more attention to that tribe over there” don’t make sense. God isn’t anyone’s subject, God doesn’t answer to a higher power for the actions that he takes. God in this world is outside of everything, even morality. A person inside of this world cannot make a case against God for being immoral because there is no moral law outside of God for that person to appeal to. So in this world as far as I can tell your question is invalid.

On a side note if world 1 is representative of the world that we live in and if what Christians say is true then we could perhaps make these statements, “God cares for the people he has made, God has never not cared, and God will continue to care for the people he has made.”

World 2: God is a natural God, like the Greek gods perhaps. I mean to say God is part of nature, but still has what we would consider god-like powers. However, in this world God is subject to right and wrong just as we are. Moral law is outside of God, maybe we could think of it as some loose universal thing woven into the fabric of our universe similar to the physical laws of nature. Some people might say such a universal moral law is foolishness and that it does not exist, but I suspect these people would quickly be appealing to some sort of justice as soon as this nature God comes around passing his judgment upon them.

Hmm, perhaps there is an interesting point to be made here. A person inside of this world might not think there is a universal moral law, but as soon that natural God comes around wanting to send them to Hell that person is going to say “No God! You run around like a tyrant thinking you can tell people what to do, well I’m having none of it! Whose is holding you accountable?!” By accusing God of being a tyrant this person is admitting to everyone that they believe in a moral law that applies cross-individual (meaning there is a moral law that is has power outside of the individual, it is universal). They are appealing to what is fair, they are appealing to what is right, they are appealing to some sort of standard which they feel everyone must be held accountable to. Perhaps that is what it means, “Judge not, lest you be judged”?

So in this world I think your question has application. Why should God care about human welfare? Well because it’s the right thing to do. He has the power to help us out and therefore he should, because it’s the right thing to do. We could probably make a legitimate case against him if he didn’t help us, and we most certainly could make a case against him if he ever did anything that caused us harm.

World 3: This world is similar to world 2 except any sort of moral law is excluded. We cannot describe an act as evil or good. There is no universal standard by which we can judge the actions of the people who live in this world. I’m afraid this world is quite uninteresting though. God could do whatever he wanted with us and no one could make a case against him because there is no such thing as right or wrong. Or perhaps we could make a case against him since we can do whatever we want. I take it back, this world is quite interesting.

But know I have to wonder is it possible for there to be beings with free will like us in such a world as this? Suppose there is person A and person B. Person A makes person B there slave. In this world it would seem person B would be persons A slave without any quarrel at all. Why should there be any quarrel? It is not a bad thing that person B is now a slave, nor is it a good thing. Person B would see his change of profession as neither for the better or for the worse, it just is. Concepts like better and worse do not exist in this world. If they did then person B would immediately feel like he had been wronged by person A and would feel a huge amount of resentment and anger towards person A. But these kind of feelings and concepts are characteristic of what we would find in worlds 1 or 2, not in world 3. So it seems impossible for a being with free will to exist in a world with no cross-individual moral law.

So I’m not sure your question is valid in this world either, for things like obligation do not exist. God would not care for humanity because it’s the right thing, because there is no such thing as the right thing.


I don’t know Emery. I’ve got myself going. I’m not sure that the worlds I have created hold water within themselves, if you know what I mean. So have I answered your question?

[Aaron]

Aaron, society generally agrees that harming another person is unacceptable. That is a simple guideline to follow when thinking about the rightness or wrongness of an action.

But society does change over time. Like the examples I raised with american society 50 years ago in regaurds to the homosexual life style or during the Inquistion. I'm betting that those societies weren't trying to cause people undue harm, but they still did a lot of things that were wrong according to our socitey today. So I see what you're saying and I agree with you I think society generally looks down upon causing people undue harm, but I suppose what changes is the definition of "undue" (if you or I succesfuly subdued a terroist that was trying to take over a plane we would probably think we did the right thing, even if we had to cause the terroist a little harm. Similarly a person during the Inquisistion might think they were doing the right thing by handing over someone else to be tortured, although we today see that as sickening). So how do we know our societies definition of what "undue" harm is, is heading in the right direction?

It is quite appropriate to mine the fringes of human interaction. Religious debates tend to focus only on the primary issues like murder or rape, but most people agree on those anyway. There is a whole world of interaction at the fringe. Is it OK for a society to relegate children of poor families to a substandard education and thus condemn them to repeat their parent's poverty? Is it OK for one country to devour world resources at the expense of people from countries that have no power to stop you? Are these not the kind of ethical/moral questions that affect more people than murders?

Well when you put it that way they seem to affect more people than murders, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore murder either. I'm also inclined to think that if we can find out why we agree on the primary issues it will help bring the fringe issues into a clearer light.

[gary_s]

But society does change over time. Like the examples I raised with american society 50 years ago in regaurds to the homosexual life style or during the Inquistion. I'm betting that those societies weren't trying to cause people undue harm, but they still did a lot of things that were wrong according to our socitey today.

Yes, absolutely societal norms change. But that doesn't seem like a good reason to question this reasoning. "Society" doesn't represent everyone, just a critical mass of power that is able to keep certain standards in place. 50 years ago, not everyone was a homophobe, but enough were able to exert their will to keep "society" in a place where homosexuality was publicly condemned.

So I see what you're saying and I agree with you I think society generally looks down upon causing people undue harm, but I suppose what changes is the definition of "undue" (if you or I succesfuly subdued a terroist that was trying to take over a plane we would probably think we did the right thing, even if we had to cause the terroist a little harm. Similarly a person during the Inquisistion might think they were doing the right thing by handing over someone else to be tortured, although we today see that as sickening). So how do we know our societies definition of what "undue" harm is, is heading in the right direction?

Yes, I think you're asking much more pertinent questions now. The answer, I'm afraid, is neither absolute, nor always clear. It's often circumstantial. You've heard the morality question regarding the train, right? If a train-load of people is about to crash, but you can save them by switching the rail, but that will cause the train to kill one innocent person who just happens to be standing on the rail, would you do it? So, part two is would you push one innocent person onto the track if it would save the train-load of people? Regardless of your answer, consider how you would face the loved ones of A) the one person you killed, or B) the train-load of people you killed.

It is quite appropriate to mine the fringes of human interaction. Religious debates tend to focus only on the primary issues like murder or rape, but most people agree on those anyway. There is a whole world of interaction at the fringe. Is it OK for a society to relegate children of poor families to a substandard education and thus condemn them to repeat their parent's poverty? Is it OK for one country to devour world resources at the expense of people from countries that have no power to stop you? Are these not the kind of ethical/moral questions that affect more people than murders?

Well when you put it that way they seem to affect more people than murders, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore murder either. I'm also inclined to think that if we can find out why we agree on the primary issues it will help bring the fringe issues into a clearer light.

No, I'm not suggesting we ignore murder as a moral question, either. What I'm saying is that the simple questions relatively easy to agree on. But when you get to the more nuanced questions, then the answers are not so clear and the concept of "morality" is no where near as obvious as it appears to be when condemning murders. I think this is an area that most religions score an "F" on because they spend so much time preaching about sex, drinking, abortion, homosexuality...that they practically ignore the things people spend 98% of their time actually doing. Things as simple as stretching the truth to make yourself look a little better in an interview.

[mitchellmckain]

Hi Aaron, good to hear from you again. I'll address your question with a question:

Why should God care about human welfare?

Hey Emery,

I haven't been around here much, I'm busy with finishing school I guess. But anyways your question is quite interesting. I'm having trouble coming up with an answer though; I think maybe I need to add some qualifications first. I'll give it a try.

World 1: God is outside of everything. He is the creator of all things, including morality (what is right and what is wrong), matter and energy, everything.

In this world statements like “God should water the flowers more often” or “God shouldn’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” or perhaps “God ought to pay more attention to that tribe over there” don’t make sense. God isn’t anyone’s subject, God doesn’t answer to a higher power for the actions that he takes. God in this world is outside of everything, even morality. A person inside of this world cannot make a case against God for being immoral because there is no moral law outside of God for that person to appeal to. So in this world as far as I can tell your question is invalid.

For me this world is equivalent to no (personal) God at all. A God that I cannot call good is not a god that I can worship, no different from an impersonal force or ideal. I cannot see myself owing such a being anything and would not see it as any more sentient than a computer or the law of gravity. If I seek to follow the highest ideal that I can think of then I would do so simply because that is what I choose for myself. I am not saying there is anything wrong with the religion in world #1 but I could not identify that religion with Christianity. Of course I don't believe that the world described here is the world that I live in. I think that I would find such a being describe as god in world #1 to be largely irrelevant and its so called morality to be an artificial morality that I could not recognize as a meaningful morality at all.

On a side note if world 1 is representative of the world that we live in and if what Christians say is true then we could perhaps make these statements, “God cares for the people he has made, God has never not cared, and God will continue to care for the people he has made.”

I don't see how this thing can be said to make any choices at all let alone any that can be called good. Thus I see no basis for the word "care" to be even be applicable to such a thing. This is because Aaron has basically denied that there is any basis for God to have reasons for doing anything. If anything is better it is just because God has decided that it is better. His god of world #1 acts in world where there is no reason for anything.

World 2: God is a natural God, like the Greek gods perhaps. I mean to say God is part of nature, but still has what we would consider god-like powers. However, in this world God is subject to right and wrong just as we are. Moral law is outside of God, maybe we could think of it as some loose universal thing woven into the fabric of our universe similar to the physical laws of nature.

This is a being that I could respect and learn all I can from depending on its character and behavior. I may even come to love such a being as a father, but I don't think that I could worship such a being as God.

World 3: This world is similar to world 2 except any sort of moral law is excluded. We cannot describe an act as evil or good. There is no universal standard by which we can judge the actions of the people who live in this world. I’m afraid this world is quite uninteresting though. God could do whatever he wanted with us and no one could make a case against him because there is no such thing as right or wrong. Or perhaps we could make a case against him since we can do whatever we want. I take it back, this world is quite interesting.

So this is a reality which Aaron imagines morality is no more applicable to anything in it than it is applicable to his god in world #1. But the truth is that this world is vastly superior to world #1. For lacking some being who dictates what is good or evil for no reason at all, we are free to learn for ourselves reasons why some things are better than others. For the simple fact is that if we are to imagine that these worlds that Aaron defines describe the world we live in, then although we have no objective reason for believing in Aaron's god of world #1, we do have very substantial objective reasons for seeing that doing some things is in fact better than doing other things. It is rather obvious to me that the morality we create for ourselves in world 3 based on reasons is a far better morality than the one created by his god in world #1 for no reason at all.


Anyway, I prefer the word "reality" to "world", and thus I shall use that word for a fourth alternative:
Reality 4: God is outside of the time and space structure of time, space and matter. He is the creator of all things that are contingent upon some cause or creator -- that is, He is the creator of all things that are not simply true by necessity.

In this alternative, what is good and rational is not a product of God's decisions though some of what WE call morality may be necessary logical consequences of His decisions, like His decision to create life and the universe. But the point is that there is a basis for judging whether or not the decisions and actions of this God is either good or bad and he is a being who chooses for Himself between many alternatives because He does indeed care about things. He chooses to do good things because He cares about what is good.

But unfortunately in this reality, unlike the first one describe by Aaron, the moral argument for His existence is bullshit, and the divine relativism of those people that push that pseudo-proof can be seen for the morally vacuous nonsense that it really is.

Hmm, perhaps there is an interesting point to be made here. A person inside of this world might not think there is a universal moral law, but as soon that natural God comes around wanting to send them to Hell that person is going to say “No God! You run around like a tyrant thinking you can tell people what to do, well I’m having none of it! Whose is holding you accountable?!” By accusing God of being a tyrant this person is admitting to everyone that they believe in a moral law that applies cross-individual (meaning there is a moral law that is has power outside of the individual, it is universal). They are appealing to what is fair, they are appealing to what is right, they are appealing to some sort of standard which they feel everyone must be held accountable to. Perhaps that is what it means, “Judge not, lest you be judged”?

Whereas in Aaron's reality #1 you are not allowed to think about whether the God he preaches is good or bad, in reality #4 you really must judge for yourself, and even if you come to the wrong conclusions at first because you don't have enough information or understanding, you may eventually see that what God has done really is a good thing. Whereas in Aaron's reality #1, you really cannot know whether you are worshipping something that is any different the devil (or greatest evil) because He is good by definition no matter what horrific thing He has done, in reality #4 you are responsible for making sure that the god you are worshipping and serving really is a good being and not an evil being. Whereas in Aaron's reality #1 you just have to do whatever murder and human sacrifice that God tells you to do, in reality #4 you are responsible for what you do and cannot use the excuse that God told you to do it.

So in this world (#2) I think your question has application. Why should God care about human welfare? Well because it’s the right thing to do. He has the power to help us out and therefore he should, because it’s the right thing to do. We could probably make a legitimate case against him if he didn’t help us, and we most certainly could make a case against him if he ever did anything that caused us harm.

I agree that this question has no meaning in Aaron's world #1 and in fact I don't see that any questions about his so called god in world #1 has any meaning and thus frankly don't see that this god in world #1 is worth wasting any thought about at all. But this question that Emery asks does have meaning in reality #4, because in reality #4 God is a sentient being that makes decisions about what He does and what He cares about. The answer is simply that although God does not care a whole lot about our passing physical comfort, He does care a great deal about our eternal spiritual welfare. And He cares because He choose to, for the same reason He chose to create the universe, which He created for the purpose of a parental relationship with us, to give of His abundance to another. But for us to receive all that He has to give we must learn and grow, even though that takes pain and suffering at times, and in fact that learning and growing may be the most important part of what He has to give us, as it usually is in the relationship between parents and children.