Love... Dependent on evil?

This post is in response to a plea for comments on the latest post by Pat Miller, of "Stand Up. Be A Pillar." First of all, I think Pat did a good job at conveying his message. He's a great writer. Second, what I have to say will be deemed by some as "splitting hairs", but to me, the essence of it is fairly important. (Also, lets keep something VERY clear. Pat is one of the best friends I've ever had, and has by far the coolest job title: International Travel Agent [Yes, Hans, for your papa]) Another questions I'd like to throw out there is this: Did God create anything after creation? Was ANYTHING, person, place, thing, or idea, created after God created the universe for the very first time? If we can so "No" definitively, then it will help us in solving this issue. Alas, I'm not prepared to do so.

If you really care about helping us resolve this, please read his blog first. If not, just read mine and tell everyone about how Pat and I disagree...

Pat, for sake of understanding eachother, without talking past each other (I have an awful tendency), let me ask you this: Did God create Evil? If yes, how do we tell people about a loving God... who created Evil? Please read my blog on this subject to be enlightened as to my opinion

"Evil is why we are free moral agents, right?"

If you have read my entry on God creating Evil, then you may see my point of view already, and that is this: No, not exactly. Evil isn't why we're free moral agents. Evil is the product of us being free moral agents. You see, if we were not free, we would never have separated from God, and thus we would not have evil. For that is what evil is, the lack of Go[o]d. So, evil is our fault, not God's. It sounds preposterous, but I don't believe it to be.

"Our love for God would not be as strong if we had to love him."

Exactly right. Dead on. But go deeper, and think about this: God created us this way, and he created us this way so that we would commune and fellowship with him. Had he created us any other way, our communion would not have been enough to be worth the "trouble," as he already communes fully and purely with... Himself! That is why we have the trinity! We don't really have a clue as to what would exist, rather, how it would exist if it were any other way. As true as the phrase is in off-the-cuff logic, it's really an invalid point, as God created us with such a purpose, and without the purpose of us loving him, we would be ultimately invalid and absurd.

The Bible does say husbands, love your wives. So to not love them is evil. Against the Bible. So, again, we can safely say, that yes love is dependent on evil."

No. Love is dependent on the way we were made "free moral agents." Evil, as I have said before is the product of such. And, in this case, love is not made dependent on evil, rather it is superior to it in sense, really, the Love being "Good" and Evil being the vacuum of it. Make sense?


What it boils down to is that "evil" is not even really a solid concept. It is a vacuum, created by no one, no thing, and doesn't even really exist! "Evil", as such, does not exist! I'll paraphrase what I have said in an earlier post: Darkness is the absence of light, black is the absence of color, death is the absence life; similarly Evil is the absence of Good. This forces evil to only exist as a concept, particularly so because all of the other examples are non-spiritual, physical properties, making them visible to us humans. The question "Did God create Evil" is therefore really an invalid question, because evil is uncreateable.