What is Evil?

What is evil? 

I don't mean, "what kinds of things are evil?" That is a topic for another day. I mean, what does evil consist of? What is its nature? 

I hear this question a lot, even from people who grew up Christian. Once I tried to explain it to a relative of mine. He was concerned that since God created everything, God must have created evil, so mustn't God therefore be evil or evil be good? 

This is a common confusion because of the way people think about "evil". 

When people hear "good and evil", they think of two equal opposites. Like north and south, left and right, or the two poles of a magnet. They think that if you crashed good and evil together, they would cancel each other out. But this is not what we can observe. 

Let's start with an easier example.

Try to picture a perfectly healthy body. A body with no flaws or breaks in it. It operates successfully, and there are no missing or extra pieces. Most of us can imagine this hypothetical. We may not know the particulars-- we're not all doctors-- but we can imagine that a body like that could exist. 

Now try to imagine a perfectly unhealthy body. I don't just mean a body with a few flaws in it or one that is exceptionally sick. I mean a body with everything wrong with it. It's too hot and too cold at the same time. It's both swollen and emaciated. They have a double arm amputation as well as extra arms and limbs. Every piece is simultaneously fractured, absent, and malfunctioning all at once. You may picture a bunch of dust. My point is, unhealth is self-contradictory. There can't be a body that's completely unhealthy. There must be some healthy parts of it or else there's no body at all. 

Unhealth has to tweak some part of health too far to one side or the other. We can all imagine a perfectly healthy body, but we can't imagine unhealth without a body at all. 

Or try to imagine a crooked line that's not made up of straight lines. Well? Can you? I don't mean a curved line. I mean a crooked one. You can picture a straight line that's not made up of crooked lines, but a crooked line is just two or more straight lines joined improperly.

In the same way, good can exist without evil, but evil can't exist without good. They aren't equal and opposites. Good doesn't depend on the other. "Evil" is good things put together wrong. "Evil" is only what you get when you have too much or too little of a good thing. Evil is not good's opposite. It's good's absence.

In the same way that cold is not really an energy but the absence of heat energy, evil isn't really a thing. It's the absence of a thing. 

When you move away from a source of heat, you get cold. When you move away from a source of light, you get darkness. When you move away from a source of life, you get death. And when you move away from the source of good, you get evil.

God didn't "create" evil, because in a sense evil is not something that is created. It's what happens when you uncreate. 

There's another question here. "Well, if God can do anything, could he do evil if he wanted to?" Yes, but why would he? Evil, by definition, is worse than Good. It's not a question of ability. It's a question of why. 

We do evil because we can't help it or because we think it will get us good things in an easier way. God can help it and he knows that you can't get good by doing evil. So why would he bother to do evil? That's like taking out all your healthy teeth and replacing them with ones filled with cavities. It doesn't make sense. 

Evil is not some quirky alternate route or path that gives you the same result in the end. There's no such thing as a "healthy" amount of evil except "none". 

Anybody who says otherwise is either deluded or selling something. My money is on the later. 

God's will be done. God save us all. I love you.