where did evil come from?

[cardenio]

“agnostic” (read: “apathetic”) friend brought this up

God is good. God saw all he created and it was good. Where did evil come from?

The first response is satan turned away from God but where did the idea of turning away from God come from? All was good, how could the idea of “evil” occur to anyone if all there is is good?

it would be like if you were fed spaghetti for every meal and never saw anybody eating tacos. If you saw a taco it wouldn’t occur to you that you could eat it.

And if all God created was good then there could be no innate evil. Right?

 

[StCsDavid]

God created eveything good…including free will. We have the choice to choose God or choose ourselves or choose to be apathetic. That’s the easy answer.

The other answer is it is one of those things that is a mystery beyond the scope of our ever fully understanding.

 

[puzzleannie]

“agnostic” (read: “apathetic”) friend brought this up All was good, how could the idea of “evil” occur to anyone if all there is is good?

it would be like if you were fed spaghetti for every meal and never saw anybody eating tacos. If you saw a taco it wouldn’t occur to you that you could eat it.

And if all God created was good then there could be no innate evil. Right?

no, there was no innate evil, all was good, but the intelligent beings God created were given free will, the ability to know His goodness, and to freely choose to accept it and be part of it, or to reject it. There has always been a choice between good and not-good. If all there was to eat was spaghetti, you don’t have to know about tacos, you can always choose not to eat at all.

 

[trumpet152]

Good argument. “The Problem of Evil” It has been said that there are many good arguments for the existence of God, and only one good argument against it. You just named it.

Where did evil come from? Free will. God created love. Real love. True love. FREE love. But in order for love to be free, there must be the choice to love. But if there is the choice to love, there must be the choice not to love (or else it is not a real choice). This choice nto to love is known as evil. God created good. Evil is the absence of this good (just like darkness is the absence of light). The choice to sin must exist if there is a choice to love.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

“agnostic” (read: “apathetic”) friend brought this up

God is good. God saw all he created and it was good. Where did evil come from?

The first response is satan turned away from God but where did the idea of turning away from God come from? All was good, how could the idea of “evil” occur to anyone if all there is is good?

it would be like if you were fed spaghetti for every meal and never saw anybody eating tacos. If you saw a taco it wouldn’t occur to you that you could eat it.

And if all God created was good then there could be no innate evil. Right?

Evil didn’t “come from” anywhere - it’s not a something, but an absence of what ought to be present. A speck of dirt has more reality. That’s why evil is a parasite - it is dependent on real things in order to “be” at all. “Good” and “being” are convertible - they are the same.​

Because it is so difficulty to talk coherently and intelligibly about what has no reality of its own - about something that is fundamentally unrealistic, because without a real relation to God, Who is “Really Real” Being in all its fullness - one has to talk of evil as though it were a real being. It’s like a gap in a jigsaw where there shouldn’t be a gap - it is evil for a jigsaw to lack a piece of what is intended by the designer to be a part of it.

So with us - but in much more complicated ways, because we are living beings, who are not God, but are created by God in order to be like God. We are complete only once we have been perfectly united with Christ - to be anything less, is to be less than what we are designed for; so it is a radical evil for us to turn away from God, since this is to choose a fantasy existence; it is to try living by poisoning ourselves; it is self-destructive. IMHO, the only way to “make sense” of anything so sense-less as evil, is to measure it by the Reality of God. And Our Lord reveals that Reality to us, by being Who He is, and doing as He does. We cannot “take” God’s Reality as it really is, any more than a moth can live in the heart of the sun - so Our Lord shows us Who God is, minus the Glory of God. And the inward grace of the Holy Spirit does the work of Christ in us to transform us into “miniature Christs”.

Why did satan fall ? Ultimately, evil is a mystery of free will - to be free, is to be God-like; because God is supremely free. He is therefore free to Love. To be like God, is to be free to love: unreservedly, with total self-giving, without second thoughts. And the more wonderfully like God a creature is, the more free it is. It is freer to love - & also, freer to love its own beauty and glory, which is what it should do; to love the self God has created, is a recognition of His Goodness. If it loves itself in isolation from God, that is disordered - it is an evil. And the more like God a being radiant with God’s Holiness is, the further it can fall from God, if it falls.

Which is basically what seems to have happened to the devil: satan preferred the beauty of satan before his fall, to admitting that he owed everything, beauty and all, to God - so he has that beauty to contemplate on his own terms, just as he wanted. Except that he has lost everything that drew him to love himself; for all those good things have their origin in God’s Love. He keeps the disorder he has reduced his being to; for that was his work, not God’s.

IOW - satan’s love of self was disordered & idolatrous. The disorderliness is the evil. His self-love was in a wrong relation to love for God, by trying to put love of satan above love of God. That is the evil and the unreality - for how can love for God, which is the right response to God Who is Love, be rightly ordered if any lesser love seeks to rule it ? God’s Love is the only thing that allows other lesser loves to exist; it is their cause, & their atmosphere & life. ##

 

[cardenio]

Sophie’s World (evil book I read freshman year) said that Augustine’s idea of evil was that there is no evil; simply the absence of good. But I can’t see it. Example: since I’m a teenager and it’s summer I’m usually the last one up. Usually by the time I go to bed, the dishwasher is done running. I can choose either good, absence of good, or evil. I can put the dishes away without being asked (good), ignore them and go to bed (absence of good), or smash them against the wall (evil). If I ignore them and go to bed I haven’t done any good except that of avoiding evil. If evil is nothing but avoiding good, then my “ignore and go to bed” choice is really “avoiding the avoidance of good.” Double negatives become positives; “don’t stay away from good” becomes “be good.”

I can’t see how you can deny the existence of evil.

So… did God present two options, one good and one evil, and say “take your pick”?

For anyone who’s read C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (which I’m about halfway through)…why isn’t all of creation in the state of mind that the Lady is in? She doesn’t realize she has free will until Ransom tells her. She does what Maleldil tells her to do and she doesn’t even think about anything else. When Ransom tells her that it’s her, the Lady, that makes the decision to do what Maleldil asks, she groans that he’s making her grow older too quickly. She can’t be made to understand evil and hardly gets the concept of “free will.”

 

[Ghosty]

So… did God present two options, one good and one evil, and say “take your pick”?

Actually, God presented a 100,000+ options, and only one went against God’s will (eating the fruit). Evil is something conciously chosen.

In the options you presented, unless you were SUPPOSED to put the dishes away, leaving them for later could be a “good” in the Augustinian model, in that resting is a good and there is nothing is necessarily being deprived by waiting until later to put them away. Smashing them, however, is definately an evil (though only because they aren’t yours to smash).

God bless!

 

[jimmy]

“agnostic” (read: “apathetic”) friend brought this up

God is good. God saw all he created and it was good. Where did evil come from?

The first response is satan turned away from God but where did the idea of turning away from God come from? All was good, how could the idea of “evil” occur to anyone if all there is is good?

it would be like if you were fed spaghetti for every meal and never saw anybody eating tacos. If you saw a taco it wouldn’t occur to you that you could eat it.

And if all God created was good then there could be no innate evil. Right?

I think your problem is that you look at evil incorrectly. You are assuming that evil is something. In reality, evil is nothing. It is the lack of subjection to God. It is the lack of showing of God. God gave us all free will, so we can choose to follow God. We either choose to accept or reject. It is not a choice between two things. It is a choice of one thing, this is not a restauraunt, there is no menu.

A more accurate example would be if I refused to eat the spaghetti and eat nothing.

 

[jimmy]

A good example of this is in the lord of the rings. In the story Tolkien made the idea that evil can not create, it can only corrupt. The orks were a corruption of men.

We become evil as we lose grace and become less of a temple for God. If you have a lot of money you are rich, but if you lose that money you become poor. It is the same with your soul, if you lose virtue, you become evil.

Another way of putting it is that evil is not evil because it is evil. It is evil because it is not good. In other words, it is evil because it is not a full showing of God.

God is the only being that has a characteristic wholely because of Himself. Without God nothing is good or evil. Everything is relative. But since God is, then we can know what is good. Therefore to not accept the good is evil.

 

[YinYangMom]

cardenio:

I can choose either good, absence of good, or evil. I can put the dishes away without being asked (good), ignore them and go to bed (absence of good), or smash them against the wall (evil). If I ignore them and go to bed I haven’t done any good except that of avoiding evil. If evil is nothing but avoiding good, then my “ignore and go to bed” choice is really “avoiding the avoidance of good.” Double negatives become positives; “don’t stay away from good” becomes “be good.”

First off, smashing dishes isn’t ‘evil’. Smashing dishes over your sibling’s head just to see him/her bleed to death would be an evil action.

So… did God present two options, one good and one evil, and say “take your pick”?

No, God did not ask us to take our pick. God asked us to love Him and to serve Him. He asked the angels in heaven to love Him, to serve Him, and to be subjective to humans. Lucifer’s pride could not accept that, thinking it was beneath his status of angel to serve mortal man. Because he was angel he had full and complete knowledge of the consequences of his choice to refuse. Having that knowledge, he still decided he would rather remove himself forever from God’s presence than to subject himself to man…and he took many angels with him…forever. From that moment on he has been battling the Archangels over the souls of every human God creates.

When humans do evil things it’s because Satan and his servants have succeeded in instilling doubt into their hearts and minds…doubt in God’s love for them, in God’s design for them, in His desire to have them with Him in eternity.

Evil, in and of itself does not exist as a thing. Satan’s obsession with stealing souls is the embodiment of evil as it stems from his jealousy, envy and regret.

You might be thinking evil is something truly horrific like the 9/11 attacks, the holocaust or the human experiments performed on the concentration camp victims, but contraception, abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and cloning are evil too. In every instance the evil is man’s choice to deny the dignity and respect for life that only God can create.

Evil is an exercise of free will against God’s will…by making the wrong choice one separates oneself from God’s grace. Once removed from God’s grace it is easier to make more and more poor choices. But Jesus gave man the sacrament of reconciliation and His unfathomable mercy so that we may always have the opportunity to return to God.

 

[BibleReader]

The “problem of evil” probably can not be perfectly understood.

At a minimum, this is true: God made us in His likeness, to the extent of Free Will. We can, be a mere “flick of the will,” opt out of the flow of grace that makes the will exercise at that moment subjectively “good.”