Good:
A positive quality or ability a being is supposed to have according to God’s design (e.g., sight for humans, rationality for humans).
Evil:
The absence of a good that should be present. Evil is not a thing itself but a privation—a missing feature in a being that was meant to possess it.
Privation Theory (Christian View):
The idea that God created everything good, so evil is not something God made; it is the lack of a good that belongs to a creature by nature or design.
Purpose or Design:
The assumed God-given blueprint determining what each creature is meant to be able to do. A lack counts as evil only if it violates this design.
Non-Evil Lack:
A missing ability that a creature was never meant to have (e.g., a mouse lacking the strength to lift a boulder). This kind of lack is not considered evil.
Ableism (in this context):
The assumption that beings who lack certain abilities are “deficient” or “fall short” of how they are supposed to be, which implicitly ranks individuals by their capacities.
Inherent Happiness:
Happiness that comes from one’s own inner ability, not from an external cause (such as a pill, religion, or a divine intervention). Lacking this ability is argued to be a fundamental privation.
Unconditional Love:
Love grounded in the other person alone, without depending on beliefs, commands, religious doctrines, or expectations. If love depends on faith in God’s nature, it becomes conditional.
THE ARGUMENT
The Christian doctrine is that, as God made all things and is good, the problems in the created order must be down to people misusing their free will.
They say that good is the standard, and anything that falls short of it is evil. Evil is just the absence of a good that should be there but is not. So, as it is an absence, there is nothing to create or make, so the question of God creating evil does not arise.
Confusingly, some say that not every lack of good is evil.
What do they mean?
A mouse lacks the strength to lift a boulder a human could lift. This is not evil, for the mouse is not meant to have that strength. A human not being able to do so would be an evil.
An ape cannot write a novel. But this is not evil, for the ape is not due that power.
The idea is that something has gone wrong. The divine design has been marred by something. Disorder has damaged the order set by God. The Bible says that God has set up his work to be “very good,” but now it has not kept to the original design.
But take the ape. The answer is, “You assume the ape does not need and should not have that power. But how do you know? What if it should?” If the answer is that it should, then perhaps the ape refutes the love of God or the existence of a loving God.
But then they answer, “People are meant to be able to hear, and some are deaf. People are meant to be able to see, and some are blind. These things do not disprove God.”
So we are back where we started. Nothing tells us if we should or should not believe in a God.
The whole argument is based on people assuming they know what a creature should be able to do. But they do not know. It is clearly a form of ableism: the person who cannot hear or cannot see is in some way less useful and less valuable. You might treat the person the same as a person who has exceptional gifts, but that proves nothing. It could be that your perception of their inferiority is so slight that it’s not noticeable from your behaviour or even to yourself. But it is ableist and is the sea that very damaging and even hateful ableism swims in. Ableism feeds on ableism.
Nothing inherently makes us happy. A pill that can inherently make us feel happy is not making us happy. How? Because the pill is doing it, for we can’t do it, so it’s not inherent. Religions claim that faith in their version of a higher power or in them is the key to inherent happiness. That is flatly a lie as well. They are trying to do what the pill is doing.
So?
Nobody can say that having no power to be inherently happy is good. It is evil.
Since that is the case, and happiness is so important, any argument trying to say that not all absences of good are evil is defunct. It is nonsense.
When you think of happiness like that, you see that God cannot be loving or simply does not exist.
Then there is the rebuttal, “If somebody is grieving, we do not encourage them to be happy but to face the pain. We can value things that do not make us happy. That power matters more than the power to let happiness in.” That is not the point. Nobody’s life is based on grief but on happiness, and you have to face the pain of grief in order to let happiness come again.
Unconditional love is about the other person and not you or what you believe or want to believe. Thus it means keeping God out of it. Loving the person for God is love or God wants you to love is not unconditional love. Or, to translate that more accurately, loving the person because you feel or think that God is love or that God wants you to love is not unconditional love. It makes it conditional on your religious opinion.
This leads us to this.
It is faith that God is real and is pure unconditional love.
So it is faith that God is not behind evil and that evil is a lack of good that he had nothing to do with.
But faith contradicts unconditional love.
Therefore, it makes no sense to say that evil is a lack of good on the basis of faith.
Evil being a lack of good then would have to be separated from God. It could be true and God untrue.
Moreover, if evil is the absence of good, then we are saying good exists. But each situation is a combination, meaning a lack here is balanced by a good there, so it’s irrelevant to moral life.