RE: If God created all the good things around us then it means he created all EVIL too
January 25, 2017 at 5:59 pm
(This post was last modified: January 25, 2017 at 6:02 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(January 25, 2017 at 2:21 pm)Asmodee Wrote: The mental gymnastics on this page are just fabulous! They should put Christian apologists in the Olympics because these guys have some moves! Unfortunately, different apologists are saying diametrically opposing things. One side is saying that evil is the absence of good. Well how does that work?
I must be missing the discrepancies you see btwn Godschild and me. Anyway...how does that work, you ask?
The concept of evil as "the lack of the good that ought to be there" is actually pre-Christian. Plato hints at is, but Aristotle developed it in his Nichomachean Ethics, Augustine popularized it. Today we call it virtue ethics. In order for it to work though you need to accept the notions of formal and final cause.* Formal cause is the notion that it means something to be human, more specifically, things that are essentially normative. Final cause is the notion that some things have desired ends, i.e. a purpose. An analogy might help. A dull, bent and rusty nail is a bad nail. It lacks all the essential features a nail ought to have: sharp, straight and fresh. A nail needs to have those features so it can do the job it is supposed to do. Nails have a right and proper use, fastening wood pieces together, not cleaning your ears. It should be obvious how these notions cannot be reconciled with modern atheistic naturalism. The atheist can list all kinds of facts about human beings, but that says nothing about the right and proper way to live, i.e. values. If there is no ultimate purpose to human life then there isn't anything we are supposed to do. If humans don't have essential natures then there are no general virtues for which they should strive.
*I'm not going to defend those right now since that would be a distraction and beyond the scope.
