What is Evil?

In class yesterday, Dr.j asked the question of how can there be evil in the world if God is completely good. I found this idea to be very interesting. At first, I felt it would be difficult to answer the question. Dr.j then explained that people believe evil exists because God wanted to allow people to have free will, and it is impossible for free will to exist without evil. This answer makes perfect sense because complete free will must give a person the opportunity to choose evil.
Even though I understand everything Dr.J said, I have a problem with the concept of good and evil.

My problem relates to the idea that there does not seem to be a universal standard for what is good and evil. Certain things will have different meanings to different people; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It seems like evil is only a concept of a humans mind and I do not know if it really exists. If I decide that everything is good, and that evil does not exist, then the discussion about God creating evil could not exist either. It seems difficult to even have a discussion on evil if there is not a universal idea of what it is.

I feel like we really do not know what God defines as evil, so how can we know whether God actually created evil or not? I believe that the concept of evil should be changed to people’s ideas of evil because we do not know if evil even exists. We may be told what is good and evil, but how do we really know what God actually created as good and evil? We do not know. It does not seem like Dr.Johnson's question is valid because there is no exact idea of what evil is.

I believe that if I brought up the idea that we do not know what God considers evil, many people would have an instant response. They would bring up the idea that God created the human mind, so God would then have the same concept of evil that humans have; I understand that idea, but I believe it has a major flaw that relates back to free will. I feel that if God gave every human a universal idea of what is evil, he would be taking away human’s free will. Humans would not be truly free to choose if they already had concepts of what is good and bad. I believe that the concept of free will helps prove my very point of whether evil even exists. If God cannot give humans a universal idea of evil, then the person using the concept of evil will determine what it means; therefore, if we do not have a universal idea of evil that can be proven true, it seems like evil may not exist.


Can we truly know that evil exists?