chill

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5880957&forum_id=2.#49987598)

The foundation is *creatio ex nihilo* together with the convertibility of being and goodness. God is not the greatest being among beings but subsistent being itself, *actus purus*. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists. Evil is *privatio boni*: not illusion, but a real absence of a due good — as blindness is a genuine catastrophe in the eye without being a positive entity added to it. The common objection, that pain and malice are experienced as positively real, mistakes the doctrine's register: it is a formal-ontological account, not a phenomenological one. Nociception is the nervous system functioning; the evil of pain lies in the disorder it registers. Malice is a positive act of will whose evil consists in the privation of right order within it — which is why even malice must intend some good under some description: power, autonomy, transgression experienced as liberation. Augustine's analysis of the pear theft in the *Confessions* remains the founding phenomenology of this point. Evil is in every case parasitic — the lie depends on the currency of truth, the tumor on the body's own generative processes — and *per se* unintelligible: it has no reason of its own to give. The privation theory predicts precisely this (*Summa Theologiae* I, qq. 48–49). Two consequences follow directly. First, there is no rival principle and no dark ground in God: Manichaean dualism and its philosophically refined descendants — Boehme's *Ungrund*, Schelling's dark ground, Hegel's constitutive negation, process dipolarity, the Jungian quaternity — each re-substantialize what the classical account identifies as privation. Second, the divine nature cannot contain evil for the same reason pure actuality cannot contain potency: privation cannot inhere in subsistent being. This belongs to the grammar of the concept, not to an audit of divine behavior.

The intermediate defenses. God is not an agent within the world who declines to intervene; creation is the continuous donation of being to the whole, and the image of the negligent bystander misstates the relation between God and world from the outset (McCabe, Davies). The logical problem of evil is widely regarded as resolved: Plantinga demonstrated that it is possible that no feasible world contains significantly free creatures and no moral evil, omnipotence not extending to contradictions, and Mackie conceded that the strict inconsistency charge fails. Natural evil is addressed by the requirement of nomic regularity: embodied responsible agency requires stable natural law that is no respecter of persons, since a world of continuous particular intervention would abolish the conditions of action itself (Swinburne, van Inwagen). Van Inwagen's no-minimum argument addresses the demand that God permit only exactly as much evil as necessary: for any quantity, marginally less would also have served, so there is no non-arbitrary threshold against which divine governance can be measured. Against Rowe's evidential argument, Wykstra's condition holds: the inference from "I can discern no justifying reason" to "there is none" is licensed only if such reasons would likely be discernible by us, and given the cognitive distance between a temporal creature and one who comprehends the entire modal landscape, that condition fails. Skeptical theism in isolation, however, is comfortless and threatens to expand into general moral skepticism. It functions responsibly only when embedded in an epistemology of persons (Stump): where character has been decisively disclosed, opaque permissions are received as one receives the opaque decisions of someone whose goodness is independently known. Christianity locates that disclosure at the point of maximal evil, which is where the argument passes to its completion.

Here the tradition divides, and the choice of branch carries most of the weight. The maximalist line — Leibniz, and Plantinga's *felix culpa* argument that the best possible worlds contain incarnation and atonement and therefore sin — explains evil by making it necessary to optimal value. Its cost is the one Ivan Karamazov names: no final harmony justifies the suffering of the child, and a God who requires that suffering as a means to the harmony has made it an instrument. The deeper structural problem is that necessary evil migrates. What the best world requires, the divine will requires; what the divine will requires is eventually read into the divine reason, and finally into the divine nature. The path from Leibniz through Hegel to the doctrine of a dark Godhead is continuous, and it is traveled by making evil progressively more rational.

The stronger line — Hart and Marilyn McCord Adams in the present day, Gregory of Nyssa and Julian of Norwich behind them — concedes Ivan's premise entirely. Evil serves nothing, means nothing, and is not a thread in any providential design; the Christian is permitted, indeed obliged, to hate it without qualification. The New Testament's own posture toward evil is a provisional dualism: evil as an enemy under a defeated occupation, never as an instrument of the kingdom. What this tradition offers in place of justification is defeat in Chisholm's sense — not the outweighing of an evil by goods elsewhere in the ledger, but its incorporation into a whole, specifically the victim's own life, whose goodness is of a different order. Adams's analysis of horrendous evils — those that destroy the very possibility of positive meaning within a life — shows why nothing less suffices: horrors cannot be outweighed globally; they can only be defeated personally, and only by a good incommensurate with every created good, which is intimacy with God himself. The Christian claim is that God's answer to evil is not an explanation but an act. The Word assumes the human condition to the furthest extremity of godforsaken death, so that no depth of horror remains that is not also a place of contact with God. The resurrection is the demonstration, in advance of the general case, that the privation does not hold. The eschaton is the restoration of each person, not the optimization of an aggregate. Gregory of Nyssa supplies the underlying logic: because evil is privative it is necessarily finite — only the Good is infinite — and therefore no soul's distance from God is bottomless. Julian's "all shall be well" is a claim about defeat, not an explanation of permission. Dostoevsky's own response to Ivan within the novel is consistent with this: not a counter-argument but Alyosha's kiss — an act offered where argument has been refused.

The exclusion of evil from the Godhead now follows without supplementary argument. If the darkness were intra-divine, this entire economy would fail at three points simultaneously. Metaphysically: integration is an operation performed on contents, and a privation is not a content. It cannot be integrated; it can only be remedied. Jung needed evil to be substantial in order to serve as the fourth term, which is why *Aion* and the correspondence with Victor White prosecute the *privatio boni* so insistently: he understood that the quaternity and the privation doctrine cannot both stand. Soteriologically: if evil is a moment within God, the passion ceases to be a redemptive act and becomes a divine self-enactment — God working out his own internal opposition through the suffering of creatures. This instrumentalizes the creature more completely than any *felix culpa* theodicy, and *Answer to Job* states the position almost explicitly: the incarnation as Yahweh's moral development, precipitated by Job's superior consciousness. And hope acquires a metaphysical ceiling: nothing can be saved from what God eternally is. Redemption gives way to integration, and evil inherits the divine permanence. The coherence of the gospel therefore requires evil's contingency. The *privatio boni*, so often dismissed as evasive optimism, is in fact the condition of the possibility of total hope: only what has no root in being can be abolished without remainder. Revelationally: the community that had witnessed the crucifixion rendered its considered verdict afterward — God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Isaiah 45:7, the standard counter-text, does not establish what is drawn from it: *ra'* in that oracle denotes calamity and judgment within covenant history, and Aquinas's distinction accounts for the remainder — God causes the being of every act and authors no act's defect. A God with a shadow could neither hate evil purely nor destroy it finally; he could only solicit its integration. Such a being might be individuated. He could not be worshipped.

What should be conceded to Jung is real. As psychology, *Answer to Job* is a serious document — a phenomenology of the Western God-image under historical pressure — and work on one's *imago Dei* is clinically genuine. But Jung's own Kantian restriction, that he speaks of the image and not the metaphysical object, cuts in one of two directions. Honored, it yields no theology: the morphology of psychic compensation is information about the psyche. Breached, it commits the transposition the classical grammar exists to prevent: deriving the constitution of subsistent being from the manner in which composite, temporal creatures achieve wholeness. Creatures individuate by integrating opposites because they are composites. Divine wholeness is not an achievement. The related modern position — Moltmann's suffering God, Bonhoeffer's claim that only the suffering God can help — receives its truth at Chalcedonian precision without the cost: *unus ex Trinitate passus est carne* (Constantinople II). The Word truly suffers in the flesh he made his own; the divine nature is not thereby darkened. Impassibility, rightly understood, is not indifference but the plenitude that makes love unconditioned by need (Gavrilyuk, Weinandy). A God who suffers by nature is a fellow casualty; only a God who suffers freely, in assumed flesh, can be present in the depths and mighty to raise what is in them. The wounds belong to the risen body, not to the divine nature.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5880957&forum_id=2.#49987608)

wtf i love christianity now

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5880957&forum_id=2.#49987626)

The commitment is the convertibility of being and goodness — *ens et bonum convertuntur* — and it must first be stated precisely, because most objections strike a claim it does not make. The thesis is not that "exists" and "is good" are synonyms, nor that goodness is a property some beings possess as a rose possesses redness. It is that "being" and "good" are identical in reference and distinct only in sense: "good" names being itself under a particular formality — being as perfective, as desirable, as the terminus of appetite. It belongs to the family of the transcendentals, the terms coextensive with being as such because they add to it only a conceptual note rather than a real determination: "one" adds undividedness, "true" adds intelligibility (being in relation to intellect), "good" adds desirability (being in relation to appetite). Because the distinction is conceptual, Moore's open-question argument gains no purchase. That "X exists" and "X is good" differ in meaning is not an objection to the doctrine; it is the doctrine's own second clause. Informative identities are not synonymies — the morning star is the evening star, and one can know the first term without the second. The claim concerns the referent.

The argument itself runs through three premises. First, the good is what all things desire — Aristotle's opening of the *Ethics*, which is not an empirical survey but an analysis of the concept's formal structure: to call something good just is to present it as desirable, as apt to complete or perfect. The definition must be read in the right direction, or it collapses into the Euthyphro problem: things are not good because desired, as though appetite conferred value by voting; they are desirable because good — "what all things desire" specifies the formal object of appetite, what appetite as such is *for*, not a constituency whose preferences constitute the property. Second, a thing is desirable insofar as it is perfect, because appetite is precisely the tendency toward completion: nothing is wanted except as actualizing something in, or for, the one who wants it. Third, a thing is perfect insofar as it is actual. Perfection is not an ornament laid over existence; it is completeness of being — potency brought to act. Here the modern reader balks, because "being" has been heard for two centuries as the thin existential quantifier, mere inclusion in the world's inventory, and inclusion in an inventory sounds axiologically inert. But for the classical tradition *esse* is not placement; it is act — the most intensive act, "the actuality of all acts, the perfection of all perfections." To be is to be *doing* something, minimally the act of existing, and beyond that the characteristic operations of one's nature. Hence the two registers of goodness: a thing is good in the primary sense by existing with its nature intact (first act) and good more fully by operating well (second act) — the knife is good by being a knife and better by cutting. The conclusion follows: a thing is good insofar as it is actual, actual insofar as it has being; goodness is being itself considered as perfective. Same reality, two formalities.

The second premise carries a load that must be defended, because appetite sounds psychological and most of the universe wants nothing. But *appetitus* in this tradition names not conscious desire but the directedness of any nature toward its characteristic actualizations — the plant toward light, the heart toward pumping, the intellect toward truth. Conscious wanting is one species of a wider genus: teleological ordering. And this teleological realism, contrary to the standard dismissal, survives Darwin intact. Biological description cannot be conducted without norm-laden function concepts — a heart that cannot pump is not a different kind of organ but a *defective* one, and no purely statistical or structural paraphrase captures that "defective" without smuggling the norm back in. Etiological theories of function, insofar as they succeed, vindicate rather than eliminate this normativity: natural selection is an account of how natures with intrinsic standards of success come to exist, not a demonstration that there are none. The doctrine requires nothing more exotic than this — real natures with real characteristic completions, such that "good for X" is fixed by what X is. Goodness is not projected onto neutral fact by preference; it is read off the structure of natures. This also blocks Hume's guillotine at the root rather than leaping over it: if natures are intrinsically directed, the "is" was never norm-free to begin with, and the alleged gap between fact and value is an artifact of a desiccated concept of fact.

From convertibility, the privative account of evil follows by short deduction. If whatever is, insofar as it is, is good, then evil cannot be a positive nature — for if it were, then insofar as it existed it would be good, which is absurd. So evil is a non-being. But not every non-being is an evil: the stone's sightlessness is no defect, a man's inability to fly no misfortune. Mere negation — the absence of what is not owed — is axiologically silent. Evil is the absence of a good that is *due*: privation, absence measured against a nature's own norm. Blindness is an evil in the animal because sight belongs to what an animal of that kind is; the same absence in the stone is nothing at all. And because the "due" is supplied by the nature itself — by the directedness just defended — privation is not a value judgment draped over neutral facts. It is a fact: the fact of a nature failing of its own completion. This is why privation must not be confused with unreality. The doctrine does not say evil is illusory; it says evil is real the way a hole is real, the way deafness is real — a genuine, sometimes catastrophic absence, with a subject, a location, and effects, but no substance of its own.

If this analysis is correct, three things should be observable, and all three are. First, definitional asymmetry: every evil is defined through the good it lacks, never conversely. Blindness is understood through sight, disease through health, the lie through the practice of truth-telling, cowardice through the courage it fails; no one can define sight as the absence of blindness except as a joke. A theory on which evil were a positive principle coordinate with good would predict definitional symmetry — health as absence of disease should be as fundamental as its converse — and the prediction fails everywhere. The entire vocabulary of evil is a vocabulary of spoilage. Second, existential parasitism: every evil inhabits and lives off a good. The tumor rides the cell's own replicative machinery; the lie spends the currency of a truthful practice and would be worthless in a world of universal deceit; treachery presupposes trust; tyranny requires the ordered loyalties and functioning institutions it corrupts. Push the parasitism to the limit and evil abolishes itself: a totally corrupted being has ceased to exist; a totally disordered will can no longer will anything. Evil therefore fails all three marks of independent reality — it has no *per se* existence (only inherence in a good subject), no *per se* intelligibility (interrogate an atrocity and the "why" bottoms out in a surd; the privation theory *predicts* this terminal opacity, whereas a positive theory owes us evil's own intrinsic logos and cannot produce it), and no *per se* causality (evil effects nothing except through the real powers of good things — even the destroyer's efficacy is borrowed strength; every agent acts for an end under the aspect of some good, so evil is caused only *per accidens*, beside the intention). Third, the scaling law: the worst evils are corruptions of the best things — *corruptio optimi pessima*. Only intelligence can lie; only freedom can betray; only a person can be malicious, which is why a demon requires an angel as its substrate. A positive-evil theory predicts none of these regularities. Privation predicts all of them.

Two hard cases test the account. Pain first, because Kant's objection to Leibniz — that pain is a positive magnitude, not a mere absence of pleasure — is correct and beside the point: privation is not negation-of-the-pleasant but absence-of-the-due. The sensation of pain is an act of a functioning sensory system, and the capacity for it is a perfection — congenital analgesia is a lethal defect. The evil of pain lies in what it registers: tissue damage, disorder, privation. Where the alarm itself malfunctions — chronic and neuropathic pain — the privation has migrated into the signaling system: an alarm ringing without fire is a disordered alarm. What is bad about pain is never the actuality of feeling but the deficiency felt or the deficiency in the feeling; and suffering at the level of the person is the will's repugnance toward an apprehended evil — an act whose object is a privation. Malice second, because moral evil seems most positive of all: the murderer deliberates, plans, executes, with terrible efficacy. The tradition grants everything real in this: the act, as act, is a being, and its constituent perfections — the steadiness, the foresight — are, precisely as perfections, goods. The sin is the deformity in the act: the will operating while lacking the order to the rule it owes. And the will cannot fasten on evil as such, because evil as such offers appetite nothing to grip; it moves only toward good under some description — power, security, vindication, the ecstasy of transgression felt as liberty. Augustine's analysis of the pear theft found even wanton, profitless wrongdoing savoring a counterfeit omnipotence; Milton's Satan must say "Evil, be thou my good," the resolve itself borrowing the form it defies. None of this diminishes evil or excuses anyone. The "merely" in "merely a privation" belongs to the objector, not the doctrine: privation is an account of evil's ontological structure, not its magnitude. Magnitude is indexed to the good destroyed — which is why the account, far from minimizing the death camps, states with precision why they are maximal: the greater the good despoiled, the greater the evil, and persons are the greatest goods in nature. Absences are not thereby gentle; the missing bolt brings down the aircraft. And culpability is not softened but located: guilt just is the will's own refusal of due order — a privation of which the agent is the cause.

The ascent to God now takes one step. Creatures are good by participation: their being is received, therefore limited, therefore defectible — the very possibility of privation is the shadow of finitude, not a dark seed in the source. God is good not by receiving being but by being it: *ipsum esse subsistens*, unrestricted act. Two corollaries follow without further premises. There can be no rival principle — Manichaean dualism and its refined descendants (Boehme's *Ungrund*, Schelling's dark ground, Hegel's constitutive negation, process dipolarity, the Jungian quaternity) all re-substantialize a privation, positing as a positive pole what has just been shown incapable of being a substance at all. And there can be no evil in the divine nature — privation is a hole, a hole requires a subject with unfilled potency, and pure act has none. This is not a verdict reached by auditing God's conduct and finding it acceptable; it is what the words mean. The causal question is answered with the same precision: God causes the being of every act — nothing would otherwise exist — while the defect arises from the deficient secondary cause, as the motive power causes the walking and the crooked leg causes the limp.

The intermediate defenses can now be stated briskly, since the foundation carries them. God is not an agent within the world declining to intervene; creation is the continuous donation of being to the whole, and the negligent-bystander framing misstates the God–world relation from the outset (McCabe, Davies). The logical problem is generally regarded as resolved: Plantinga showed it possible that no feasible world contains significantly free creatures and no moral evil, omnipotence not ranging over contradictions, and Mackie conceded the strict inconsistency charge. Natural evil is addressed by the requirement of nomic regularity — embodied responsible agency requires stable law that is no respecter of persons, since a world of continuous particular intervention abolishes the conditions of action (Swinburne, van Inwagen) — and van Inwagen's no-minimum argument dissolves the demand for exactly enough evil: for any quantity, marginally less would also have served, so there is no non-arbitrary threshold. Against Rowe, Wykstra's condition holds: "I discern no justifying reason" warrants "there is none" only if such reasons would likely be discernible by us, and across the cognitive distance between a temporal creature and one who comprehends the whole modal landscape, that condition fails. But skeptical theism in isolation is comfortless and threatens to expand into general moral skepticism; it functions responsibly only within an epistemology of persons (Stump), where character decisively disclosed licenses trust in opaque permissions. Christianity locates that disclosure at the point of maximal evil — the transition to the argument's completion.

Here the tradition divides. The maximalist line — Leibniz, and Plantinga's *felix culpa* argument that the best worlds contain incarnation and atonement and therefore sin — explains evil by making it necessary to optimal value. Its cost is the one Ivan Karamazov names: no final harmony justifies the child's suffering, and a God who requires the suffering as means has made it an instrument. The structural problem is deeper: necessary evil migrates. What the best world requires, the divine will requires; what the divine will requires is read into the divine reason, and finally into the divine nature. The road from Leibniz through Hegel to a dark Godhead is continuous, traveled by making evil progressively more rational — that is, by abandoning the privative account step by step.

The stronger line — Hart and Marilyn McCord Adams now, Gregory of Nyssa and Julian of Norwich behind them — concedes Ivan's premise entirely, and can afford to, because the metaphysics has already denied evil any positive role to play. Evil serves nothing, means nothing, is a thread in no design; the Christian is obliged to hate it without qualification. The New Testament's own posture is a provisional dualism: evil as enemy under a defeated occupation, never as instrument of the kingdom. What this tradition offers in place of justification is defeat in Chisholm's sense — not the outweighing of an evil by goods elsewhere in a ledger, but its incorporation into a whole, specifically the victim's own life, whose goodness is of a different order. Adams's analysis of horrendous evils — those that destroy the very possibility of positive meaning within a life — shows why nothing less suffices: horrors cannot be outweighed globally, only defeated personally, and only by a good incommensurate with every created good, which is intimacy with God himself. The Christian claim is that God's answer to evil is an act, not an explanation: the Word assumes the human condition to the furthest extremity of godforsaken death, so that no depth of horror remains that is not also a place of contact with God; the resurrection demonstrates in advance that the privation does not hold; the eschaton is the restoration of each person, not the optimization of an aggregate. Nyssa supplies the underwriting logic, and it is the privation doctrine again: because evil has no being of its own it is necessarily finite — only the Good is infinite — and therefore no soul's distance from God is bottomless. Julian's "all shall be well" is a defeat-claim, not an explanation of permission. Dostoevsky's own answer to Ivan is consistent with this: Alyosha's kiss, an act offered where argument has been refused.

The exclusion of evil from the Godhead has already fallen out at the metaphysical level; what remains is to see the entire economy fail if it is denied. If the darkness were intra-divine, the collapse comes at three joints at once. Metaphysically: integration is an operation on contents, and a privation is not a content — it cannot be integrated, only remedied; Jung needed evil substantial to serve as the fourth term, which is why *Aion* and the correspondence with Victor White prosecute the *privatio boni* so insistently — he saw that the quaternity and the privation doctrine cannot both stand, and the argument above is the case that the privation doctrine stands. Soteriologically: if evil is a moment within God, the passion ceases to be a redemptive act and becomes divine self-enactment — God working out his own internal opposition through the suffering of creatures, which instrumentalizes them more completely than any *felix culpa*; *Answer to Job* states nearly this openly, the incarnation as Yahweh's moral development precipitated by Job's superior consciousness. And hope acquires a metaphysical ceiling: nothing can be saved from what God eternally is; redemption gives way to integration, and evil inherits the divine permanence. The gospel's coherence therefore requires evil's contingency, and the *privatio boni*, so often dismissed as evasive optimism, is the condition of the possibility of total hope: only what has no root in being can be abolished without remainder. Revelationally: the community that had witnessed the crucifixion rendered its considered verdict afterward — God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Isaiah 45:7 does not establish the counter-position: *ra'* in that oracle denotes calamity and judgment within covenant history, and the being/defect distinction covers the remainder. A God with a shadow could neither hate evil purely nor destroy it finally; he could only solicit its integration. Such a being might be individuated. He could not be worshipped.

What should be conceded to Jung is real. As psychology, *Answer to Job* is a serious document — a phenomenology of the Western God-image under historical pressure — and work on one's *imago Dei* is clinically genuine. But Jung's Kantian restriction, that he speaks of the image and not the metaphysical object, cuts one of two ways. Honored, it yields no theology: the morphology of psychic compensation is information about the psyche. Breached, it commits the precise transposition the classical grammar exists to prevent — deriving the constitution of subsistent being from the manner in which composite, temporal creatures achieve wholeness. Creatures individuate by integrating opposites because they are composites; divine wholeness is not an achievement. The related modern position — Moltmann's suffering God, Bonhoeffer's claim that only the suffering God can help — receives its truth at Chalcedonian precision without the cost: *unus ex Trinitate passus est carne* (Constantinople II). The Word truly suffers in the flesh he made his own; the divine nature is not thereby darkened. Impassibility, rightly understood, is not indifference but the plenitude that makes love unconditioned by need (Gavrilyuk, Weinandy). A God who suffers by nature is a fellow casualty; only a God who suffers freely, in assumed flesh, can be present in the depths and mighty to raise what is in them. The wounds belong to the risen body, not to the divine nature.

The remaining pressure, stated honestly, now includes the foundation itself. The convertibility thesis is a package deal with teleological realism about natures, which is defensible but contested; Schopenhauer's inversion — suffering as the positive, satisfaction as mere cessation — is its exact mirror-image and the most serious modern denial, and the dispute between them is settled by metaphysics, not by introspection, since each can redescribe the other's phenomenology. Beyond that: the entire structure is an eschatological promise whose vindication is deferred, and Adams acknowledges as much; its strongest form leans on universal restoration, a minority position; skeptical theism still walks a narrow line above moral paralysis; and Ivan's final gesture — returning the ticket even if the promise is kept — is not refuted but met with a counter-claim. The position's most careful formulation does not pretend to make evil intelligible. Its metaphysics entails that evil has no intelligibility to find. It stakes everything on the claim that evil will be unmade — and its deepest coherence is that only the privative account makes that claim so much as possible.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5880957&forum_id=2.#49988132)