Nothing or Something, To be or not to be, ...

Let us imagine there is a simple ">" relationship between varieties of goods and evils without regard to how it is calculated.

For instance, many of us would suffer a blow to the toe in exchange for $1,000,000.  Some might not.  The calculation is not important, the important thing is that some evils might be tolerable in the face of some goods.

And let us imagine similarly, the simple absence of Any Good At all.

The absence of Any Good At All is as bad or worse than the presence of some Good with an admixture of Evil.  I will attempt to show you that in what follows.

The calculation of the good of a good is not as simple as how many.

Puppy love is good, a Great Love is better and qualitatively different.  The establishment of a home is good, the population of that home with love and kindness is immeasurably better.

Hegel describes this difference of size becoming a difference of quality (and Marx photocopies badly from him). Some evils are of such magnitude that they are unthinkable.  Some goods are of such magnitude that they are indispensable.

If the creator were as evil as possible I suppose we'd all be drinking our own excrement for all eternity.  Let's call this evil OMEGA-EVIL.  -the set of all equally evil things that an evil creator could have done that would have been qualitatively and quantitatively more evil than this world.-  Such a being we would refuse to call God.

Now let us imagine another set of worlds, where God makes them impossibly good - say where no pain and only pleasure, honor, love and charity takes place.  Call those worlds Aleph-Null Good.  This is the traditional picture of heaven and the Angels there - each doing what God has ordained for them and living in His Full Presence at all times, where none use their freedom to harm others, etc.

Call the conglomeration of those ideas Heaven and Hell.

Is any world in which there is an admixture of evil better than every world in which there is no admixture of evil or any world in which there is no good or evil?

Here it's more complicated.  Imagine if God, being Good, decided to make a world in which there were no good or evil, per impossible God would have to unmake God which is absurd.

So God, being good, had to make a world in which there was good.

God cold not have made anything more valuable to me personally than freedom - even the appearance of it. I would prefer my freedom to nearly every other physical comfort and the story of that fact about humans is decorated with the bloody messes we call history.  That's not to say there aren't better things, but that the absence of it is intolerably evil.

According to the Bible, the Angels felt the same way and rebelled.  You can see why they would - who would want to have control over the oceans and a keen intellect but no ability to use it except under strict orders?  They were made 'as free as possible' given their duties.

So also us, we humans, being given three responsibilities in toto all have the freedom required to make a life, even a good life, even in the face of adversity.  A thing which people choose over and over throughout history over any other kind of existence.  Of course much of the world exists to prevent the establishment of that good free life, call that the Evil In The World.  That is caused by Humans, not God.

But could God have made a world without free beings -at all-.  Perhaps a world in which there were only glass beads, for instance.  Given the existence of the Glory of God, no.  Such a world would be of no value, and the World which God has planned is a world of Ultimate Value.  His not building a world in which there was true value would be one of the OMEGA-EVIL worlds, a torture of immense pain.  Even a minute restriction in freedom is enough to drive most people to violence, the idea of removing it altogether is not only cruel but nobody once having tasted of it, could likely let it go.

We in fact try to do this - restrict our freedoms - we build our governments and systems to protect ourselves from the consequences of our open freedom, but in the end, even they are just expressions of our freedom folding back upon us as the natural consequences of our actions, the act of war of the powerful upon the weak.

With Much Love