Brilliant new apologetic fact

[Cheerful Charlie]

Having a discussion on another forum, I am astounded at the following argument:

God created everything, but he didn't create diseases/cancer etc because these aren't "things".

So we end up with both the claim that everything must have been designed due to blah blah blah, followed by "except all the bad bits which weren't designed".

I thought at first this guy was just a moron, but this argument seems to not even come from him. It is in the form "evil is not a thing" which is slightly better until you try to insert real life examples in, after which it again fails.

When you get arguments like this, you realise they are just trying to say anything to avoid having to think about it and hope it goes away.

This sort of argument goes all the way back to Augustine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good

The privation of good (Latin: privatio boni) is a theological doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence or lack ("privation") of good.[1][2][3] It is typically attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo