Theists: What do you mean when you say that God is 'perfect'?

[Angrboda]

@Neo

Reading Augustine. I come to a different conclusion than he did. He assumes that God, being good, cannot create evil. This is entirely too simplistic. God, being good, would not create evil, unless he had a compelling moral or non-moral reason for doing so. When the caveat is added, it's clear that Augustine's argument is too facile, and that his conclusion doesn't follow because his premises are not sound. The rest of Augustine's argument is a bunch of semantic confusion, metaphorical nonsense, and outright word salad. It's not obviously clear that our possessing free will is a compelling reason for allowing the existence of evil. Just as we can fail to recognize free will as an overriding concern in the question of evil, we can easily overlook possible reasons why God may have created evil, whether they be moral or non-moral (I think it's a truism that God has interests beyond those that are strictly speaking "moral concerns"). And the idea that God may have had a "more compelling reason" for evil that we simply are ignorant of is an argument which still mints plenty of coin. The argument that evil is the privation of good is faulty, and rests more upon clever word play and people's general inattention to the concept of implicit values than anything else. I'm sorry, I don't find your concept that evil is the privation of good to be well supported other than by tradition and empty metaphor. If you have a more compelling argument for the position, or a better explication of it than Augustine, please provide it.