Does evil exist? This is the question I had been asking for so long until I read The Confession and The City of God of St. Agustine of Hippo (Aljazair nowadays). The question weather evil exists or not is crucial regarding to our faith in God. These simple questions might trigger you and me why such a question is important: If there is a benevolent and omnipotent God, why there is evil? Why there are afllictions throughout the earth if God is capable of doing anything? Is our God is a careless divine being? If He loves human being and all the creatures, why then all the corrupting things should happen? What God has done if He truly exists, and benevolent, and omnipotent?
Agustine, and also Thomas Aquinas, proposed a profound idea regarding to the problem of evil and the benevolence and the omnipotence of God. The idea of evil and God does not mean one existence should contradict the others. We should not be trapped into one extreme while excluding or ignoring the others. The existence of benevolent and omnipotent God should not necessary neglect the evidence of evil on earth. Vice versaly, the evidence of evil does not have to raise our eyebrows regarding to the essence of God.
Agustine and Thomas believe that evil does not exist at all. There is no evil on earth or anywhere else. What there is is only goodness. Only goodness do exist. What we perceived as evil or bad thing, or anything contradict to goodness does not exist. What is happening in our affliction world is the corruption of goodness. That's it.
This simple demonstration might give us a broader insight. Take a piece of paper, and make a hole in the center. The whole paper is the analogy of goodness, while the hole in the paper we just made is evil. Evil is the non existence of goodness, the corruption of goodness, or the non presence of goodness (privatio boni). The bigger evil is the bigger hole in goodness.
The definition of evil also has it's analogy in Physics. What we usually call as darkness is nothing but the condition of no or less light. Darknes itself does not exist, only light exists. Cold also does not exist in itself. It is merely the condition of no or less heat.
Why should be such a hole corrupt goodness? And why God seems to not doing anything in spite of the corruption of goodness? Agustine believes it is due our original sin. Again and again we failed to free ourselves from sin. And God seems to not doing anything because He has given us free will. We are totally free to choose weather to live as sons of God, or as sons of satan. We ourselves are responsible for our own deeds, for the affliction of our lives through the choice we made. Jesus himself ever said: those who hath eyes, see; and who hath ears, listen. We should be able to read the signs in order to make the right choices.
The idea of evil, or darkness, or cold, indicates that the world we live is not a dualistic world. There are not such two powers contradicting and oppossing one another. We are not living in the tense of two extremes pulling ourselves to different poles in constant battles. Instead, what there is is singularity. And our sins has made this singularity corrupted. We thought singularity is not, and duality is. God himself is one, single, isn't it? And there is no way that bad things and evil could emerge from goodness, from God. He is not the source of our afflictions and pains. He wills us to be good, but the decision is still and always in our hands.
There is no enemy outside to fight. It is ourselves, more spesificly our tendency that corrupt our own lives, that we have to fight.
