I believe that I addressed the reason why goodness is the actual thing (like light) and evil is the merely essential thing (like darkness). It is because goodness is the aesthetic most valued by God. Goodness, as I defined it, edifies. Were evil the actual thing, then its opposite — the absence of evil — would be merely something that does not destroy. Since destruction without edification would result in the consumption of all that exists, it cannot be the case that evil is the actual thing.
I apologize for insulting materialists (or physicalists). That wasn’t my intention. In fact, I intended to show that we have common ground by acknowledging the existence of goodness.
As Mswas suggested (and I had as well) the aesthetic of goodness is subjective without some objective reference frame that declares what is objectively good. What I did was posit that God has decided what is objectively good, and it is that which morally edifies — in other words, that which free moral agents share with other free moral agents such that all benefit and grow. It makes sense to me that God, Who exists necessarily (remember that Ludovic gave us that), is the objective frame since He exists in every possible world.
You must do no such thing, Lib. You proposed some gentle fencing practise, and I waded in with an enormous broadsword. In online interaction, one cannot see the mischievious glint of rough-and-tumble debate in a friend’s eye, just as that friend might not pick up facial cues to turn down the tone of his discourse. I also know that a drop of insensitive grandstanding from a friend is more painful than a torrent of the most deliberately vicious bile from a random yahoo. And so, soul mate, it is I who ask you for forgiveness.
Quite so, indeed as we agreed just yesterday “Love is all that matters”. That we have different explanations of what love is pales into insignificance compared to the fact of its existence.
But this thread is perhaps all about that different explanation. All of the entities you appeal to (goodness, edification, morals, aesthetics, “freedom”) are extremely difficult to translate into physical entities, and so I fear that for me to engage with you here in earnest, from my deeply held physicalist position, would pull the thread so far away it might unravel; we would be starting “from first priciples” if you like.
So I’ll do my best to debate on your terms. Your thesis is indeed compelling, but I’d like to explore the antithesis; that evil exists and that good is its absence. I rather like your summary
Perhaps a useful metaphor here is entropy? That everything tends towards disorder and destruction, and that the “good” is merely that which retards or arrests such? Almost Nietzschean in its depressing tone!
Actually, I think entropy is an excellent metaphor for evil. And it raises the question of whether the universe might not be the other way around were it not amoral. Approaching the issue aesthetically rather than metaphysically is certainly a much different discussion than the bland topic of ontological necessity.
I’m not too up on this actual/essential thing, but if it isn’t stretching the Good:Light::Evil:Darkness metaphor and if my understanding of light is correct, then Evil is the ground state and if God did not create it then it pre-existed and transcends God and we have gone into something like reductio ad absurdum in the proof of God’s existence.
God’s existence has been given. (See the OP.) Goodness exists because, in order to be God’s most valued aesthetic (which is the premise), it must exist. (See the OP again.) Because goodness exists axiomatically, it is the actual thing. And evil is merely its absence; therefore, evil is merely essential.
Maybe you could point me to some definition of this actual/essential dichotomy. Are you saying that it is not the case that Evil is the ground state, i.e., that which would be there even if there were no Good?
And the whole point of reductio ad absurdum is to show that if the premises lead to an absurdity then the premises are false.
There’s quite a body of literature on both existentialism and essentialism, but to condense it a bit, essentialists basically say that essence preceeds existence while existentialists hold that existence preceeds essence. Aquinas best described the dichotomy (in my opinion, though Hegel is more popular) and Sartre made the best case for existentialism (in my opinion). For purposes of this discussion, since it has already been given that God exists, there is nothing on the table about His ontological significance. Rather, it is a discussion about His essence. The premise is that He values goodness above all else, and goodness is defined as an aesthetic. Since an ontological commitment is made by stating that goodness has value, it must be presumed that goodness exists. And since goodness exists, it is not necessary that evil exists as an actual thing. Just as it is not necessary that darkness exist as an actual thing since light exists.
This leaves me more confused than I was to start with. I gather that the meaning of essential differs considerably from the street value, but I can say no more. In addition, I am now uncertain as to the definition of preceed.
I do not think that a god of any kind exists, period. Every definition of a god that we have had from the dawn of time has been something made up by one person or group of people for the sole purpose of accumulating wealth and gaining power over others.
Evil is simply the voluntary doing of harm to another. In that aspect, it can be said to exist, but it’s a definition only. Piers Anthony notwithstanding, there really is no such thing as an Incarnation of Evil or an Incarnation of Good.
Well, the question is whether a thing has a nature before it exists or existence before it has a nature. Here are exerpts from Hegel’s famous Doctrine of Essence:
Thanks, Libertarian. I’ll read them tonight and see if they make any sense to me. I’ll admit from your short description it looks to me like two blind men and an elephant.
Oops, sorry! My bad, as the young folks say. You may debate the premise in what you quoted, but the rest follows logically from it. So if it is true, then the rest has to be true.
Fair enough. I can see how it might seem that way.
But your example is a good one to talk about. Let’s say that only one of your two blind men is touching the elephant. He is an existentialist. The other blind man is describing to the first one how to tell whether it is an elephant or something else. He is an essentialist.
