Introduction
The division of good and evil has been an issue of many religious and philosophic studies. In contrast to the good that is taught to people in every aspect of life, evil is less addressed and studied in terms of characterization and analysis. This paper addresses the problem of evil as a response to a chosen illegitimate theodicy that justifies evil providing a personal opinion on this matter.
Illegitimate theodicy
The illegitimate theodicy that is taken into consideration is the claim that there is a necessity for evil to oppose or contrast well. For justification of this claim, arguments were presented, the metaphysical which claims that evil must exist in order for good to exist, and epistemological which claims that the people should know evil to distinguish it from good.
Discussing the first claim, it should be noted that the evil never preceded the good; therefore it should not be taken as if the evil were the first to occur and then as a result the good occurred.
If taken the biblical example of Adam and Eve, chronologically the evil occurred after the good existed. Thus, it can not be said that evil is a necessity for good to exist. It could be recalled from all religious teachings that the prophets were sent to restore the good, which implies that the good was before the evil and existed without evil. In that sense, evil should be viewed as a result of human actions that were granted to them by free will, after which the process of restoring the initial state of good takes place. As a result, it could be concluded that evil must not exist in order for the good to exist.
The epistemological claim which argues that evil must be known to people in order to know the good assumes that the people can not reach the definition of good and distinguish it unless they know evil. In order to oppose this claim, it should be noted that the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and in this sense wrong does not mean evil, is taught to people since childhood. However, to distinguish evil or to know the good, there is no necessity to teach those basics. In analyzing this statement based on religions, it is seen that all major religions are based on instincts, where people can distinguish that something evil without trying it.
If we assumed that there are people who are locked since childhood without teaching and education, they will certainly acknowledge that taking someone else’s belongings, doing harm, taking another’s life is evil, because this is intrinsic to people’s instincts. No world religion taught in her doctrines something that opposed the instinct or common sense and according to the epistemological claim, the people would not know that killing is evil unless they witness or participate in the process. Thus it could be concluded that people should not know evil in order to know the good.
Personal opinion
Evil as an absolute value is though widely discussed and analyzed to find the origins of the evil and its motives is a far more easy task to analyze than the problem that could be called relative evil. If comparing the good and the evil with colors where white represents the good and black represents evil, the people who justify relative evil would call it “grey”.
I think there should not be justification for evil no matter what scale it takes. Such factors as the circumstances, historical background, or worse the goal justifies the cause was mostly used to approve personal ambitions in a way that only the human factor was responsible for the evil. In defining the scale of the evil, we can use an example from the religions, wherein Islam for instance the wine is prohibited, and it says that the substance that the large amount of it inebriate, then the small amount of it is also prohibited. In parallel, it can be said about the evil, where the actions that on a large scale are considered evil, in the same manner, the smallest similar actions should be considered evil too.
We should not justify killing a person just because it is small related to the holocaust for example. Evil can not be considered as something forced on humanity rather than a consequence of human actions that even at the time of doing them can not be justified no matter what the benefits that are resulted. As a final conclusion, I think that all the attempts to justify evil are mostly made to relate evil to God and take away the responsibility from people, which follow that if evil is not a necessity then it’s a random occurrence, thus God does not exist if there is something in the universe that is randomly controlled. This is a weak justification that denies the free will that is given by God so the evil exists in the sense of vicious and egotistical actions driven by the free will of people.