How would you resolved the problem of evil in Plato's theory of participation? Did God created evil?

Answer 1

Well, let's define our terms a little bit so we know we're talking about the same things:

Plato's theory of participation suggests that all things which are identifiable participate in a sort of shadow existance with an original, perfect form. Thus we know what a chair is because it shares some properties of 'chairness' with an essential and perfect chair. Now obviously there are no -perfect- chairs in the real world... they can be found only in the (supernatural) world of ideas.

The problem of evil suggests that there are some problems with believing in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good diety. In the first place, since the diety created everything that is, the diety would have to have created evil as well. In the second place, even if the diety is not directly responsible for the genesis of evil, it would seem that it would be less-than-perfectly-good to not stomp it out if it could.

Putting the two concepts together leads to some interesting ideas. Arguably, because we can identify things as 'evil', there must be some perfect form of evil in the world of ideas. And since perfect things in the world of ideas ARE perfect, it wouldn't matter if there were no examples of it in the physical world - it would still exist as an idea. Likewise, the only place that a theist can really put the world of ideas itself is inside God's head. Which leads to the odd conclusion that an all-good God somehow has evil floating around in its head.

There are a couple easy ways out of this conundrum, if you want them. One is to de-idea 'evil'. An exeption to the theory of particpation is that things don't count as ideas if they're made up of other ideas. For example, a gryphon has the head, wings, and claws of an eagle, but the body and hind legs of a lion. There is no 'gryphon' idea - it's just made of other stuff. A person dedicated to the idea of an all-everything diety might therefore say that what we THINK of as evil is really just the absence of 'good'. This still leaves you the problem of God creating areas of good-absence in the first place, but that is typically rationalized away by saying that good-absence is better than all-good because it permits the existance of free will (which I consider to be a rather specious argument, but perhaps that's beside the point).

Another solution to the problem is to slightly re-define evil. Obviously, if evil is nothing more or less than the opposite of good, you don't need it at all (the above solution). But what if it's not? If evil is something DIFFERENT from anti-Good but nonetheless opposed by it generally, then God could be both all-good AND all-evil if desired. This theory has the benefit of giving the divine not only as much free will as man, but actually absolute free will - God COULD be ultimate evil if desired, but instead CHOOSES to be ultimate good. Aristotle, I think, would also tend to argue that evil is not necessarily the opposite of good: for example, pain might be considered a kind of evil, but complete absence from pain is not really a good thing either - pain can be a handy warning sometimes, even if we don't like it.

You can tell which solution I like better. You can make up your own mind!

Answer 2

every coin has two sides. god created humans . All are not good .some turned to the wrong path . It is not gods fault.