The argument i get from LDS is that we have free will and that is why evil exist.
If evil = free will, a world with less freedom would have less crime.
But corrupt dictatorships reduce freedom, which increases evil.
I’d say, we aren’t free enough, and free will reduces evil, it doesn’t create it.
Free will doesn’t explain why innocent babies suffer or natural evil like earthquakes and tsunamis. According to Vedanta, evil is a product of Maya—the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real. According to some forms of gnosticism, the world was created by an imperfect demiurge. According to some, the demiurge is evil to others merely of being of less than omniscient intelligence. This myth is found in Plato’s Timaeus. It also resembles Aristotle’s metaphysics, where God is too perfect to be involved in the creation of the natural world.
…then it’s also outdated ancient thinking, no?
[…I was going to say more on the matter, but I don’t want to give my ‘smarts/smart retorts’ away. 
It’s symbolic language. Science in the form we have come to know it entered the 17th century west as a new way of knowing one that promised to augment our power and proceeded to deliver on that promised dramatically. The power delivered has proved to be over nature only it has not increased our power over ourselves to become better people. The former can be wielded only over one’s inferiors.
The scientific method has limitations spilt into it. It is restricted in principal to the phenomenon of the natural world. In yogic terms it is prakriti to our purusha. Scientific knowledge, pure or applied emerges only in regions were scientists can control or have power over the materials they work with.
As you may know from meditation, nothing literal can be said about Brahman.
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Of course evil doesn’t “need to” exist if we are positing the existence of a benevolent all powerful deity that could easily make the world free of evils.
Positing the absence of such a deity, then yes, it is probably a necessary fact that some evil will exist. Life is too stupid to figure out how to be non-evil. Don’t see that changing any time soon.
Belief is warranted when a proposition is true. Logically “wanting” has nothing to do with it.
If we know something IS true, where is the need for belief?
There was a time when everyone KNEW that everything revolved around the Earth. So, for whatever reason people tend to believe that evil is necessary, perhaps it is just because we are not capable of absolutely knowing and we always feel the need to absolutely know what we want to believe but cannot figure out…
I would say that the jury is still out when it comes to the belief that evil is necessary.
Without the freedom to choose right from wrong, we would be no more than puppets and He would be our puppeteer.
That doesn’t mean that God created evil. It just possibly means that it naturally unfolded as a result of our human evolution and we are the ones who have allowed it. w
Hopefully, God is somewhere working behind the scenes and when we have given Him a chance, He is able to pick up the pieces and and remold them and continue on and on and on to give us another chance as humanity.
Perhaps He is not capable of destroying the evil which we have created, only we can do that, but perhaps he is capable of circumventing it with our help.
Then again, who has really known the Mind of God!
So we don’t blind ourselves to it (the alternative of belief). So we can live according to it. So we can enjoy it.
Or… if it isn’t the way things have/ought to be… So we can change it.
I used to think evil was not necessary, that God could have made us the same as we are except without evil in the world. But as I thought about it more, it seems like evil is indeed a necessary possibility given the fact of self-aware consciousness. It would be impossible to hide the existence of evil as a mere possibility from a sufficiently self-aware consciousness because quite simply the existence of good and bad and the knowledge of these implies logically possible extremes on both ends. Given a normal or moderate good and bad it’s easy to abstractly extend that to arrive at an extreme good and an extreme bad. However you want to define evil, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be the case that a self-aware consciousness armed with a basic conceptual framework including of goods and bads wouldn’t be able to imagine the possibility of evil. So if it’s logically implied that evil would be possible to be imagined then the only defense left would be that God could have made us in such a way that while we could imagine evil it would not be possible for us to enact evil ourselves. But is that really possible? Is there any X we can imagine for which it is also somehow and necessarily the case that despite imagining it there is no way we could ever actually engage in X? Maybe something that violates the laws of nature or is just physically impossible. OK, so in what possible world would it be the case that any and all possible evil deeds would be physically impossible to actually enact? That would imply we have no ability to even harm each other, which is absurd. We would each of us need to be Gods in order for that to be the case. So the last possible defense is something like God made us with an in-built psychological limit or impossibility whereby despite the fact that we can imagine evil and despite the fact that we could physically do evil deeds there is something about us that prevents us from actually doing evil deeds. Like an extreme internal morality or something where it physically cuts off our ability to do something if that thing would be evil. Or, this limit could be purely psychological as something like the most extreme aversion-to whereby the moment we try to do something evil we experience such intense inner pain or subjective pressure that we simply cannot do it.
Sure, God could have made us that way. We could have an inner psychological resistance to doing evil things that is similar to our inner psychological resistance to, say, deliberately cut off our own hand. The emotional pain/resistance of knowing we were about to do something evil could be on par with the physical pain/resistance of cutting off our own hand or any otherwise extremely painful harmful act upon ourselves. This would imply a super high level of empathy or mutual understanding whereby we equate the other person with ourselves in an almost complete sense at least in terms of our emotions and raw feelings/impulses. Yet even so, some people still self-harm in extreme ways despite the pain and inner instinct of resistance to doing it. Some people do literally cut off their own hand, although that sort of thing is probably more rare than people doing evil deeds to others. So while this wouldn’t completely solve the problem it would help. We still need to ask if it’s possible for humans to have that high level of empathy for each other, and yes that does seem possible. I see no reason why God couldn’t have made humans with this extra psychological function of extreme empathy for other humans whereby we would experience such an intense feeling of pain, aversion or resistance to causing evil deeds to happen to someone else. The only possible problem might be how this would logically seem to extend to any form of life that it would be possible to cause evil to, so basically any kind of animal that could be tortured or caused extreme pain or badness to happen to it. Maybe that’s not so much of a problem as it first appears; we might have that aversion to causing evil to animals, while still being able to find more humane ways to kill animals and eat them. Or humans simply might have been vegetarians, God could have obviously designed us in such a way that we can get all our needed nutrients from plants and the thought of eating animals would be as strange as the thought of eating each other, or eating rocks. I see no reason why that would have been impossible to create humans like that… granted it would mean we are fundamentally different from all other carnivorous animals, but there are enough vegetarian animals out there who never eat other animals that it makes perfect sense we could also have been like that.
So in the end, I changed my mind. I do agree with the claim that evil is not necessary. God could have made humans in such a way that:
- We naturally eat plants and the thought of eating animals would be as strange and unnecessary to us as eating rocks or eating other people
- We have the same ability to understand the possibility of evil and what it means as we currently do
- We have a very intense empathy/mutual understanding toward other humans such that we feel an equally strong aversion/pain/resistance to causing evil deeds to happen to someone else as we would feel with the thought of cutting off our own hand
Given the above, which are not logically impossible for God to have done, evil could have been severely reduced in the world. But would it have been eliminated entirely? I’m not sure. Just like there are rare extremely masochistic people who do cause extreme pain and self-harm to themselves, it seems likely there would also be rare people that somehow are able to do evil deeds despite the extreme inner instinct of aversion to doing them. It could also be argued that we humans as we currently are already have such an extreme inner instinct, as most of us would probably not be capable of doing real evil to another person. At least not in big ways, and that seems to be a main part of what distinguishes evil from merely bad. Yet in this case even if evil did rarely occur it would indicate some kind of real breakdown and disorder in a person, something was really fucked up and wrong with them to be able to do that. Such a kind of disease or serious dysfunction wouldn’t be strictly speaking necessary, but I suppose you could argue that given enough humans and enough time it would be inevitable that a small number of people would have that kind of dysfunction simply as a consequence of our biological and psychological imperfection. So to counter that, God could have designed humans and the world in such a way that those rare possibilities simply never occurred, through what might appear as random chance or by his subtle divine intervention or simply by giving us biologies and psychologies less prone to having those sort of errors.
The final conclusion is that if we assume God exists and God had the ability to create humans and the world in any possible way he liked, then it is the case, as far as we can understand it, that evil is not necessary to have existed. God could have made humans and a world for us in such a way that there was no evil, and this implies no contradictions I can see. We could still have our understandings of good and bad, our free will, etc. and it would still have been the case that evil didn’t exist. Or, of you want to be very strict about it, it certainly could have been the case that evil would have been VERY VERY rare. Like a once in a billion kind of genetic disorder.
…given this, what are we do think about God? I think this implies that God deliberately intended for us to live in a world that has evil in it, for many of us to be subjected to evil deeds, and for all of us or at least some of us to be psychologically capable of doing evil things at least to some degree. This must have been a deliberate choice. But why? What reasons would God have for making humans and making the world like that when he could have done otherwise? That’s a very interesting question and I’ll leave off trying to answer it for now, but please feel free to offer your thoughts.
evil is not a evolutionary or naturaly truist form, in life or death
What is your definition or understanding of evil?
Anyone else ever get the sense that, when it comes to humans talking about God and supernatural stuff, we are really out of our depth and have no idea wtf is really going on? Even our words and ways of talking about it are strange and don’t add up, even when it comes to something like ethics and morality I need to define it in purely “metamaterialistic” (metaphysical but naturalistic) terms, I can’t get into the supernatural yet.
I want to say the supernatural dimension is really the reified and sublimited, higher-abstracted taken to the nth degree metamaterial dimension. We can invert that and say the higher dimension existed first or always compared to the lower dimensions that declined from it or exist in lower parallels or obits. But even that is just speculation.
No philosopher worth his salt in mindgenius levels ever wondered why philosophy can’t properly talk about so-called supernatural things? Cmon, the silence there is deafening and no one wants to cut across his own ego to admit it.
evil is not an evolutionary or naturally truist forum in life and death
edited
nathan
Ok then, what is evil?
really just ignorance, in every shape, it’s the destroyer of worlds
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“In the context of reason there is no place for hate and evil.”
The philosophical evidence is simple. Kant agreed:
Kant wrote in “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,”: “pure reason is the faculty of concepts, and concepts are not concerned with the inclinations, but only with the understanding and its object”
Therefore, according to Kant, pure reason cannot be the source of evil, which arises from the inclinations and desires of the human will. Kant believed that every human being has the capacity to resist evil and choose the moral path, which is the path of reason.
My opinion is aligned with St. Augustine’s notion that evil is corruption of good and that there is only good.
My assertion: “Barbarians reflect on cruelty in nature to fuel cruelty. Moral beings reflect on reason to become reasonable. The potential for philosophy shows what path is right to choose.”
I’ve always wondered if visiting aliens would even notice and prevent harm to an ant, when they would visit Earth.
The idea of physical aliens visiting Earth might be invalid, but from a morality perspective, morality reveals an infinite consideration potential that in supposed ‘higher beings’ might potentially result in care for a creature as tiny as an ant, preventing the aliens from harming them in a landing, for example.
The admin of another philosophy forum appears to have recognized something in creatures as tiny as ants, as revealed by her hundreds of posts referring (a friendship with) ants, sharing crumbs of bread with them for example. This is also part of morality.
The negligence that you mention, becomes unjust only through a culture that reveals that the potential for consideration was available.
A lack of care or moral consideration can become unjust only when the potential for it (in an individual) can be made evident. This also reveals that moral evolution is inherent to cultural development or ‘humanity’.
It is a sign of higher intelligence when the human shows potential for moral consideration. As such it is an argument that humans should choose wisely when they have the capacity to do so. A greater capacity moral consideration comes with new responsibilities, and as such, the human being naturally evolves culturally into a moral being (reasonable being).
Henry David Thoreau mentioned the following about the moral evolution of humanity:
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual moral improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
Visiting aliens apparently have beef with beef, I dunno.
People act like children, never questioning the garbage they are taught. The concepts of good and evil are particular agregious.
It’s as if good and evil exist in the world as forces or energies, like heat and light. How completely absurd and medieval.
I think people need to stop for a moment to review the bollocks that underlies their basic preconceptions.
One man’s good is another woman’s evil. There are no forces at play or balances. Good is what pleases you and evil are the things that do not.
“Why evil is not necessary” should be “why c childish subjective conceptual abstractions ought not lead us astray.” Good and Evil are not objective forces of nature. They are just opinions.
Most people unthinkingly accept concepts like “good” and “evil” as though they are objective truths, but this is a profoundly flawed and outdated way of viewing morality. These ideas are often treated as universal forces—akin to light or gravity—when in reality, they are nothing more than subjective human constructs. To cling to such notions without questioning them is intellectually lazy and philosophically naive.
“Good” is simply what aligns with an individual’s desires or cultural norms, while “evil” represents what opposes them. One person’s hero is another’s villain, and there are no cosmic forces dictating who is right. Pretending otherwise is to impose childish simplicity on the complexity of human experience.
Instead of perpetuating this medieval dichotomy, we should recognize that good and evil are tools of convenience—useful for shaping social cohesion but far from absolute. The real danger lies in allowing these unexamined abstractions to dominate our thinking, leading us to moralize rather than understand. It’s time to reject the illusion of objective morality and confront the messy, subjective reality of human values.
Where have you been, mister??
So you want us to confront the messiness of subjective values? Or… do you just want us to leave them the way they are?
What would make them less messy for you? If they were objective?
Or are you happy with messy?
Is messy the way things are supposed to be?
How about we treat every person as a person and never violate their personhood? I know that seems subjective, because persons are subjects…but what if we do it for every person? Too … clean?