Is Evil Necessary?

The Creation of Adam and Eve by Jean Fouquet

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Father God is Good...we determined that because of the evil existing in the world,...

magulo po ehh...pero ang tanong ko ehh yung the necessity of evil,

kasi po ang nasa isip ko if there is no evil there will be no standard for goodness...

such as you cannot determine if the thing is hot if you do not know what is cold...

so how can we know that a thing is good, if we do not know evil....so ibig sabihin po ba nito there is a necessity for evil so that we may know what is goodness? [Anthony]

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RESPONSE:

[Father God is Good...we determined that because of the evil existing in the world,...]

Dear Anthony,

We know that God is Good not because of the Evil existing in the world. We know that God is good because of His Creating and Saving Love. He created us, gave us life, made us according to His image and likeness, provides us with the necessary things for our survival such as air, water, sunlight, etc.

The Goodness of God does not depend on evil but evil is a corruption of what is good. Good can exist without evil but evil cannot exist without good.

[magulo po ehh...pero ang tanong ko ehh yung the necessity of evil,]

I got your point brother.

[kasi po ang nasa isip ko if there is no evil there will be no standard for goodness...]

Even without evil there will be standard of Goodness such as Love and Justice. But without good there will be no standard for evil.

For instance, the Baby feels that he is loved and cared for and accepted by his Mama even though he does not yet experience his Mama reprimanding him, punishing him or getting angry at him. Goodness can stand on its own without evil.

On the part of evil, it cannot stand without a good to bank on. We know that a person is an evil mother if instead of caring for her child she beats him and maltreat him. We know that these acts are evil because it is contrary to the good that must be present in the nature of the mother.

[such as you cannot determine if the thing is hot if you do not know what is cold...]

These are practical knowledge. There are some things that we do not now unless we experience them like touching a snow which I have not experienced yet or being burned by alive which, thank God, I have not experienced also.

But being good and being evil is higher than a mere physical experience or knowledge. Goodness refers to the usefulness of the thing, whether it is beneficial to us or not. We know that a knife is good by knowing that it cuts vegetables and not based on the evil that it cuts our finger. There are a lot of knifes in our family kitchen that we are using since my childhood they are good by being useful yet it never gave me evil in a sense that it never cut my finger or hurt me at all. Despite the failure to bring evil in my life I know that it is good.

There are parents that remained good all their lives they do not succumb to evil or haven't done evil to us. Yet we know their goodness independently from evil.

[so how can we know that a thing is good, if we do not know evil....so ibig sabihin po ba nito there is a necessity for evil so that we may know what is goodness?]

We know that a thing is good by knowing, experiencing and seeing its positive effects in our life and that of others. We know that a thing is good by its usefulness. A thing is good if it is life-giving and life-enhancing and life-nurturing without necessarily giving us the contrary effects. While evil on the other hand, we know it as such if it is a corruption or absence of the good that is supposed to be there.

For instance, Physical Evil such as Blindness. The human body is good, human eyes by nature are good. Human eyes are good inasmuch as they gave us the power or the ability to see. Blindess exist not by itself but as a privation of sight in human eyes. We say there is blindness when our eyes failed to give the good things that they are supposed to provide, that is, capacity to see. Blindness then is an effect of mere failure of the eyes. It is just an absence of a good that must be there.