(August 21, 2023 at 8:22 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: I don't think there's any conceptual issue, in that they seem equivalent. And there's certainly no problem explaining fun with an anti-theodicy in the same way that theists would explain evil. And also, the issue about substitution seems moot since in both cases we'd argue it was only an analogous good/evil based on human perception.
I think your strongest (only?) argument would be whether a maximally evil being is as coherent as a maximally good being (if we pull the Augustinian trick of defining evil in terms of an absence of good then doubly so). Should we examine this point in more detail? I think it the most profitable avenue to explore.
We might think that evil god and good god are equally possible if we are talking about the anthropomorphic version which is so popular in these discussions. This view pictures God as a big guy in the sky whose will functions more or less like a person's does.
If we go all the way back to Plato, though, and the Neoplatonic Christians, it makes less sense. As I understand it, they largely start with the view that we desire the good. Every action we take, we take because we think it will be good in some way. So all of our desires are aimed toward the good, and if we do aim toward what's evil it's because we are mistaken in our judgment; we have miscalculated. (Even a so-called Satanist or someone like that, who claims he wants evil, does so because paradoxically he thinks it will be good for him in some way -- it will show up his enemies or stick it to his parents, or whatever.)
So in this view there is a chain of good acts, which end in a highest good. The Form of the Good, in Plato's language. The Form of the Good is God.
As you rightly say, in this view evil is deprivation. There is no Form of Evil, only lack of Good. And when we talk about God's will, it isn't as if he wants something, in the way that people want things. What we call God's will is really just people aiming directly and uncomplicatedly toward the good.
(And I realize my description is oversimplified -- after all, Plato and Dante, in their different ways, wrote a hell of a lot of pages to explicate the idea more fully.)
So this seems to me less easy to flip. In this view it's harder to make the end of the Great Chain of Being into evil instead of good.
