Evil and good

In the last year I have joined this group called the cultural commission, it's a speech and debate league I guess you could say that's all over NC, and this group (tcc) has a speech and debate forum which I am now on quite a lot. This forum has a miscellaneous forum were everyone, if there in speech or debate can discuss any topics, one quite large topic Was called "If God is all good and all powerful, why does evil exist?" and me and my Daniel newton (a member of that forum) both were discussing this together for quite a while, the main thing was that no one could come to the conclusion about what the definition of evil even was, there were mainly two thoughts about this,one was that evil is the absence of good, and the other was evil is the distortion of good.

A few days ago I got an e-mail from Daniel who has discussed this topic quite a lot, the e-mail said this-

"If evil is the absence of good, it doesn't exist. If evil doesn't exist, then all there is is good. If everything is good, everything is equal. If everything is equal, Christianity is no better than any other religion. And leads to pluralism and other such evil paths... What do you think? I'm confused."

I don't really agree with all that has been said here, if everything is good then everything is morally equal, but not truthfully equal, so it wouldn't lead to pluralism, but it would lead to moral relativism which contradicts the christian worldview.

So I first asked him what he thinks the definition of good is, and we both agreed that the definition of good is that which is pleasing to God.

In the end this is my reply to the hole question (and if this post sounds like I'm just replying to Daniel sorry about that, I'm just using what we said as a background for this topic]) was this-

"The reason you concluded evil was the absence of good is because you thought that that is the opposite of good, that isn't the opposite of good, the absence of boy is part of the opposite of boy, but the real opposite of boy is girl, which a girl is the absence of being a boy, but if you say that the absence of boy is girl alone then you find that girl doesn't exist.

This can be applied to good and evil, you guys said that evil is the opposite of good, which is true, but you then said that the opposite of good is the absence of good, which you then came to the conclusion that ether that's not true or evil does not really exist.

But the absence of good isn't the full opposite of good, it's only a part of it, the opposite of good is that which is displeasing to God, and that's what evil is.

Now we come to the real question, if God is a powerful and all good then why does evil exist?

The answer is, if the concept of pleasure to God exists, the concept of displeasure to him must exist, think about this, if the concept of pleasure existed without the concept displeasure wouldn't that make it not real pleasure at all?

For instance, God said the world was good, what would that mean if there was no concept of it not being good? It would mean nothing because for some concepts to exist there must be it's opposite. If God said something was 'good' (which is pleasing to him) what would that mean if there was no opposite thing to be the alternative of what God called the earth, so good couldn't have existed unless there was an opposite standard which is evil.

So my conclusion is that because evil is the opposite of good, and good is that which is pleasing to God, evil is that which is displeasing to God, and the reason that evil exists, is because if there is no concept of that which is displeasing to God, there cannot be the concept of that which is pleasing to God, therefore, by creating good the concept of good, the concept of evil was created."

which is my main belief on the subject, a question that arouse after this was " was God able to derive pleasure before Satan fell?" and I'd say yes, even though displeasure to God wasn't in heaven before Satan fell the concept of displeasure to Him was still there, so pleasure to God existed and displeasure to Him (or the concept of it) existed, but before Satan actually committed displeasure to God, only the concept of displeasure to God existed and it was not practiced or used until Satan committed it.

It was quite interesting to think through this topic myself, after I came to the conclusion that evil is displeasure to God it seemed quite obvious, but then again, I observed this discussion before I even started thinking about it.

That's all for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this!

John