People throughout history have always leant on religion, gods, or
higher powers of some kind. Prehistoric people believed
that spirits
caused illness, Egyptians had a great many gods, Greeks had huge
temples called Asclepions built, in honour of the god Asclepeios, and
many civilisations after this have also placed a great importance upon
deities. Although in Christianity there has always been seen to be one
god, religious behaviour still held high significance up until fairly
recently. The witch hunts in the 1600s, for example, were caused
because of the belief that the innocent women were evil.
But what is "evil" exactly? Everybody seems to recognise that it is the opposite of "good." But then again, what is that?
This is not an abstract in which we will be considering that, but we
will be considering an aspect of the term "good and evil" in a broad
sense.
Iraneous, a Greek
philosopher, was very interested in these ideas of
what was wrong and right, and struggled to come to terms with the idea
that both a God and a Devil could be present at once.
Firstly, he reasoned, if God was omnipotent, as was
claimed, he would have the power to rid humanity of the Devil forever.
If, also, he was as caring and loving of his
people as was taught, he
would feel he had to do this, as he couldn't watch his people suffer.
This would not make sense.
However, God did not get rid of the Devil. Iraneous came to the
conclusion that God and the Devil could not coexist without the
breaching of some of the fundamental points of Christianity that had
been taught and believed throughout the years - omnipotence,
omnipresence, and omniscience.
To this day, nobody has really solved the mystery of
good and evil, what they are, and how they came to be, and why they
both exist, when, by all accounts, it should be logistically
impossible. We will wait with bated breath until a philosopher many
years from now will perhaps find the answer, or at least, one that
satisifies our thirst for knowledge of matters that are unknown, and
quite probably always will be.