I’m glad you brought up the notion of
time into all of this, because time is directly related to mutability which in turn is associated with evil.
Time, for Aristotle, is fundamentally linked to change and movement. Where there is alteration or movement, there is time, for everything that comes to be and ceases to be are in time. Another way of putting it is that there is change because there is time. Of things that come to be and pass away are things that belong to the world of nature (phusis). For this reason we say about the concept of God that it is a being that cannot be said to be “in” time because it is a being without temporal finitude: an unchanging absolute being, summum ens, as when Augustine writes in Book I of Confessions, “For you, God, are infinite and never change…you yourself are eternally the same.” By contrast, natural beings are finite in virtue of their being in time. This is why Aristotle’s analysis of time belongs not to his Metaphysics but to Physics, to his natural philosophy, for “every alteration and all that changes is in time” (222b31). Thus, in Book IV Chapters 10-14, Aristotle lays out his treatise on time to establish an account of time as essentially part of nature. The question, “What is time?”, will be expounded in terms of what it is for time to exist; by virtue of what can we say that time “is”; and whether time can be said to be among things that are or things that are not, that is to say, whether time is in the order of being or in the order of nonbeing.
— Paul Nadal
belate.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/aristotle-definition-of-time-in-physics/
I like Aristotle’s definition of time and it seems to lend itself well to this whole concept of creation, as it was created, having the possibility of evil as a byproduct. At this point I am pretty confident to say that both evil and time (I’m in no way conflating or relating the two) are epiphenomena of creation. They are not created things, like angels, planets, particles, or people, but byproducts of the existence of created things.
