Blog Is Evil Actually a Good Thing?

Lots of atheists and agnostics get angry at believers for believing in a "god" they feel is a hypocrite for putting evil in the world or at least for not getting rid of it. But I think maybe we need evil, like we need struggle to actually be happy.

I don't just mean in terms of opposites needing each other to define each other, either, though that's part of it, 'cuz they do. But if bad things didn't happen, life would kinda suck. If everyone was healthy all the time, if supply and demand didn't exist, or if supply was always unlimited so everything was virtually cost-less or if everyone always had all the money they could ever spend and never had to work for more or worry about whether they would have enough, people would have no drive to do anything.

It seems like people come up with cool ideas most of the time so they can make money off them. You could say creative people would be creative anyway, but I doubt they'd be as creative if they weren't trying to get rich. Nobody ever invents anything and just gives it away or donates it to mankind. They always want vast riches, and then once they have that money, almost no one gives it all away.

So if everyone had a good life without struggle (evil) in it, no one would have anything to strive for. People wouldn't fight to make things better. We would just be satisfied and bored and vegetate on a couch. The fear of not surviving is what wakes us up and makes up fight. True happiness isn't really something you can reach, it's something you get from reaching and thinking you might get it, 'cuz if you actually solve all your problems, the happiness you were after would become boredom and stop being happiness. So we kinda need pain and suffering to make life worthwhile and maybe this is why God created it and leaves it here for us to bitch about.

Doesn't this make the argument immediately specious?

No

What if God had just made us perfectly content and happy with everything, and there was no bad? He could have made everything perfect, and all our lives full of happiness and fulfillment. I think when people think "Life wouldn't be as good without the bad" they're thinking in the narrow confines of their own experience on this Earth.

People find it hard to imagine life without all the travails and difficulty, so they can't imagine a "perfect" world, or a world "without evil," but if God can do anything, he could have made beings who lived in a perpetual state of happiness and lives that were filled to the brim with excitement, awe, and love, AND a mind to not get bored with it or a life that wouldn't be boring.

That's true but identifying a different way it could've been done doesn't change the argument made, since we were made the way we were. Second guessing is always an option. Even if we went with your scenario, we could still then ask the question of why God made us at all? Then we could go further and ask why God even exists to create anything? Or why there is anything such as existence period. To keep our sense of nature from totally unraveling into endless "what if's" you have to lock down where things are and examine nature based on parameters we can define, like we're here, we pursue happiness, and we go through pain to try to get it.

Sure, the way things exist now, your explanation makes perfect sense. I think most agnostics and atheists don't have a problem with that argument, but rather that God made us perceive and experience our world the way we do in general. I would guess that if God did make things the way I had described, that there would still be a good reason, and I think that reason would be similar to what many people believe now. That would be, create other beings to share love and happiness with.

I don't think you can make the case suicide rates would go way up. If that were true, lottery winners and wealthy people would have a higher suicide rate now and I don't think they do. It's possible but that possibility can be tested.

The numbers would be somewhat off, though, since one of the popular things for rich people to do is help others through charities and foundations. If everyone has everything they want, there wouldn't be any philanthropy for rich people to pass the time with to give their lives meaning, so they'd be far more bored under that scenario than they are now, which might make the suicide rates higher.

If there was no evil my main motivation would still be the same: Boredom and there are ways of curing boredom without resulting to evil.

If money wasn't a factor, plenty of people would still make things and share them with others.

But the need to create others is a state of being unfulfilled, otherwise you wouldn't need to do it. If people were perfectly happy already, we wouldn't have the drive to share the happiness and/or the interest in sharing anything. And what would be the point of sharing happiness with people who also already have it?

You could go even further and ask the question why God would create happy beings to begin with, since the need to create something suggests God was imperfect enough to need something, and a perfect being needs nothing.

Again, this is why asking "what if's" leads to an infinite loop of subdividing questions.

The boredom itself is a form of evil, and if you're bored, you aren't happy. Sharing wouldn't help. You share to help. If everyone is already without nothing, there would be no point in sharing. What would share with someone who already has everything?

I don't think God can have the human emotion of "unfulfilled" attached to him. Who is to say the he was unfulfilled and created us? He could have been completely fulfilled, but wanted to create humans so others could feel that same fulfillment, that same love and happiness. It's creating a false dilemma to say that God created us, that he either needed to or wanted to because he was unfulfilled.

Also, he wouldn't be sharing happiness with people who already have it, he would be making happiness where there was none by creating people where there were none. The point would be to give joy to other living beings, just like we ourselves like to give and share joy with other human beings, whether they are happy or not. I certainly don't act dour around friends who are happy, because it's not pointless to share happiness with others who are generally happy.

Pertaining to how the world is right now, we could explain that God created evil and bad to make the good better, but that's not the real question to be asked. The real question is: Why did God make us need evil and bad to appreciate the good?

If God needed to create anything, life included, it would mean he was lacking something that creating us provided him with. We eat 'cuz we're hungry. Artists paint 'cuz they feel like they have to get the creation out. Needing to do something means you aren't content with what you have. Happiness requires contentment. So any time we do anything, it is an attempt to go from a state of less happy to more happy, otherwise we wouldn't bother doing it. A perfect God wouldn't need to go from a state of less happy to more happy, so a perfect God would create nothing.

I think you are talking about more than the absense of evil. I don't think boredom is evil. I don't even think sadness is evil. Evil is doing something that will hurt other people.

Obviously a world with no motivation is bad because then we all just die (all be it blissfully in the world you've described). Basically you are describing a vision of heaven which a) is a bit like being on really good drugs and b) only really works as a concept if you're already dead. I've never liked that idea of an afterlife. I prefer to think of an afterlife as Level 2 (with this life being Level 1) complete with it's own challenges.

I'm using the term evil broadly and collapsing anything unpleasant into it.

I think that's specious reasoning. And I didn't say God was less happy to happier because he made us, he just made us to share his happiness. Try and look at it outside the realm of human emotion.

EDIT: Let me explain that last sentence. God can exist as anything he wants to and can do anything, so there's no reason to believe that he shares the same needs we do, like creating beings because he feels a void.

It's only specious if you identify how. Just saying it is meaningless. A perfectly happy God wouldn't have the need to share his happiness. He would be perfectly content being happy. If he had a desire to share, that desire is something that once met would make him happier, which would mean he was less happy before he got it met, which means he wasn't perfectly content or truly happy before he did it.

Could he not be perfectly content yet want to share that contentment with others?

It's specious because it sounds like it should make sense, since it's based on our own human reasoning and emotion, but God could, logically, be outside that reasoning.

If you're perfectly content, you don't want anything. That's a contradiction.

I accept that God's emotions, if God would even have then, could be different, but again, if you open that box, an infinite number of Pandoras pop out and you wind up with a trivial conversation of "what ifs."

Speculating God's involvement with evil at all is purely a "what if."