From: alarm@yabbs
To: Cat@yabbs
Subject: re: good and evil
Date: Mon Jul 25 15:26:38 1994
You said,
>i was thinking :) and it seems to me that you cannot have god at all 
>without having satan...

You are correct when we think of it in psychological terms; the contrast 
of evil helps us to see that good is good. But this is not a necessary 
contrast as your argument supposes. Since the world is full of "evil" or 
bad or whatever you want to call it, we cannot psychologically understand 
good without it. But what it the world was something like it says it was 
in the Bible. The sin that Adam and Eve committed had to do with this very 
contrast. They thought that they would be like God, knowing good and evil. 
The Bible sets a picture for us of the possibility of a world without evil 
and without satan (before satan became evil he was an angel, i.e. good; 
according to the Bible). The argument is that sin caused them to have this 
psychological necessity thrust upon them and us. It is not a logical 
necessity. 

Anselm, a twelfth century monk (I think), or maybe 11th, said that God was 
the only logically necessary being. It is called the ontological argument 
for the existence of God. A very interesting argument, even in it's 
primitive form. 

-alarm.