Thomas Aquinas "Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good" meaning

[@chrisg0001]

That's SAINT Thomas Aquinas

[@maaaaaaaaarcel]

Only if you're part of that particular LARP-community...

[@gagishaggi6969]

Making things important gives them power for priests to abuse.

[@optimus5306]

@@gagishaggi6969 Blind the heart of this people, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes: lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted and I heal them.

[@optimus5306]

@@maaaaaaaaarcel Blind the heart of this people, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes: lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted and I heal them.

[@coffeefrog]

That title is only obligatory for believers to use.

[@Joeonline26]

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!

[@ZeroESG.goopootoob]

If you care about the Scriptures that Aquinas cared about, you'd recognize that God forbids praying to anyone but God. Pray to God, not Aquinas.

[@Jim-Mc]

I'd add that this is consistent with Rabbinical Judaism and the Old Testament as well, although not stated outright it is the assumed worldview.

[@Jim-Mc]

@UnknownSoldier Before Creation there was formless, void, darkness. All indicators of the absence of something (form, substance, light) and this was presumably not 'good.' Later, Sin is the word in Hebrew "to miss the mark," A deprivation of hitting the mark. A lie is the deprivation of the truth, so the truth is exists and the lie does not. Most behavior portrayed as evil in the OT is someone not doing something they were supposed to. Moses struck the rock instead of speaking to it as God commanded. David was at home with Bathsheeba rather than on the front line with her husband.

[@Jim-Mc]

@UnknownSoldier I don't think Aquinas goes against the OT.

[@TheThreatenedSwan]

So true

[@alexc4159]

The child wants a cookie (having a cookie is good) the parent forbids the child from having the cookie (obeying and honouring your parents and not taking what isn't yours is a higher good than enjoying the cookie.) The child has a choice to make he can have the good that is the pleasure of eating the cookie by forsaking the higher good by dishonouring his parents by commiting an act of theft and disobediance, or he can choose the higher good by honouring his parents and overcoming the desire to commit theft against them for the sake of his pleasure. Good and evil is always a choice between goods, either sacrificing the lower good on the alter of the higher or the higher for the lower. Goods of differing value+free will = the ingrediance for man to will evil in to the world.

[@JP-ps8vh]

Are you an Idiot? If you don't eat the cookie how do you know not eating the cookie is of a higher good ? The only way to say not eating the cookie is of a higher good is by eating the cookie!

[@Deewane_huye_pagal]

I can't believe in this sense

[@chadjohnsen5941]

Sounds like the Force

[@Jim-Mc]

Strangely I saw a video the other day stating that in Star Wars canon only the dark side is explicitly discussed and described. If that's true then the Force might be a full reversal of Thomistic ideas of good and evil where only evil has actual substance. 🤔

[@polemeros]

Your AI image maker, though impressive, could use some help. Its various images of Aquinas are interesting but in one respect quite off. Aquinas was a Dominican and the habit of the Order of Preachers is white, with a black cape and hood. Not brown.

[@tonykwok9763]

😇🙏

[@SilenzioDiEsistenza]

god created good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons.. nothing can exist without god, therefore all depends on god, and all is within god.

[@ilikealotofthings731]

The idea of Good and Evil mainly comes down to the idea of Survival. Good = extends one's life. Evil = shortens one's life. Nothing more.

[@ZeroESG.goopootoob]

If you maintain that, then why stop there?

[@SilenzioDiEsistenza]

you mean to say death is evil? that doesn't sound right. is not evil being unconsciouss of god? good being consiouss of god? yet either way you are not seperate from god. it is simply a change of view. one hair in the eye can skew the whole world. evil is nothing but that hair. take out the hair and you will see the world unskewed.

[@ilikealotofthings731]

@@SilenzioDiEsistenza Well I don't see christians willingly jumping off a building to be in Heaven...so..

[@nameless-yd6ko]

Thomas Aquinas "Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good" ~~~ The more I hear of Aquinas, the more that I think a modern education in philosophy (as he doesn't seem to have Enlightenment/Salvation guiding him) would do him a world of good. To assert that 'good' can exist without 'evil' (but not vice versa) shows a desperate lack of critical thought. One is required to define the other. Silly boy! Balance! The Universe is perfectly balanced; The First Law of Soul Dynamics; "For every Perspective, there is an equal and opposite Perspective!"

[@hellenicculture8169]

it is exactly so

[@doublem1971]

In hell evil will exist without good.

[@bucko3353]

hell itself isnt evil, in fact it is a realm of justice. but rather the beings in hell are evil and they are evil because they deny what is good, so even in hell this concept applies. if there was nothing good then there would be nothing good to deny and nobody would be in hell since they cant deny what is good since it doesnt exist, it is only because good things exist that people go to hell for denying them.

[@tan1591]

hell is death, the lack of life, the lack of God, total annihilation.

[@marioeid930]

Hes wrong

[@abbasalchemist]

Privatio boni is fanciful thinking. Any real contending with life's struggles requires the acknowledgement of evil as substantial. Goodness for God may not mean goodness for Man. What we call evil ultimately God calls good because His designs do not conform to our moralizing tendencies.

[@woofydawg1]

Bad is always the bastardization/degradation of a good thing. It's more like the rust on a piece of metal being a chemical decomposition of the metal rather than a substance entirely separate from the metal. A cathedral, if only for it's beauty, is a good thing. It then becomes bad when it is desecrated. In Aquinas philosophy God is love/the highest good. It can hardly be said that such a good would prefer desecration of good/beautiful things

[@abbasalchemist]

@@woofydawg1 It's equivalent to denying the substantiality of the rust on the metal. A decomposition or alteration of the metal sure, but not an absence. It is a something. Not to say this something is wholly independent, but both goodness and evil depend upon it in a Co-unity

[@regandonohue3899]

​@@abbasalchemist It is not that evil is the absolute absence of good, it is also a perversion. This does not deny evil's existence, but identifies it as subordinate to good. I would say that, with accordance to the metal analogy, that rust is an eventual absence that is dependent on metal for its existence.

[@abbasalchemist]

@@regandonohue3899 If we are speaking cosmically of Good and Evil, the establishment of the Kosmos, a Greek word which signifies a particular arrangement and ordering of things, I would agree, in fact, I would argue that a kosmos by definition MUST be Good and cannot be Evil. But if we are speaking on human subjective ethical and moral terms, the subordination and dependence of Evil on the Good could easily be reversed because goodness and virtue are just as dependent on evil as evil is on the good. According to Heraclitus' notion of enantiodrosis, anything extended to its uttermost limits becomes its opposite. As the story of Khidr and Moses demonstrates, humans have a very poor facility for identifying evil and good because we are limited by our knowledge of divine plans. Essentially what I am saying is that what we perceive as Good and Evil can be folded up into the Kosmos which is Good--but not necessarily in a moral way. The Kosmos still contains those 2 antagonistic principles which are forever in a state of Strife and allow for the death and rebirth and hence movement of the world.

[@AndrewTheMandrew531]

False. Goodness for God is what is good for man. God is not in opposition to creation. The bush was enveloped by fire, but not consumed by it.

[@ZeroESG.goopootoob]

Incorrect. Good is neither a force, nor a standard, nor thing outside of God that merely aligns with God. God is goodness, itself. He is the standard. If one denies this, then they are stuck upon one of the horns of Euthyphro's Dilemma. Neither are good seats.

[@MikePulcinellaVideo]

The universe is neither good nor evil. Both of these things are invented by man.

[@optimus5306]

No, that is not true. The universe is good, as everything is good, insofar as it exists. Good here can be thought as proper ordering, as ordained by God. So then, existence in itself is good, insofar as they have been ordained to exist in the manner which they do.

[@MikePulcinellaVideo]

@@optimus5306 How do you know that?

[@loganw1232]

@@MikePulcinellaVideo Because things exist outside us in order and value that is not of our own making, so things are good and bad outside human subjectivity.

[@kevinvelado9907]

"And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light. God saw that the light was good,..."- Genesis 1:3-4.

[@MikePulcinellaVideo]

​@@loganw1232 A caterpillar eats a leaf of a plant. Good for the caterpillar, bad for the farmer. A wasp lays its eggs inside the live caterpillar and the wasp larvae eat their way out. Good for the wasp, bad for the caterpillar. So clearly, good and bad are based on perspective. Therefore it follows that the universe makes no value judgements outside of human subjectivity. Things just are. And it is man who labels things and events "good" or "bad" based on our subjective perspective and our need to categorize and organize.

[@History-Bitesize]

There is no good nor evil.... only popular opinion.

[@Lay-Man]

Dangerous?

[@areebraza8262]

@@Lay-Man no

[@jokerguycz]

wrong, people cant change the nature of reality, this opinion of yours is evil.

[@History-Bitesize]

@@jokerguycz Good and Evil are subjective in nature. What is evil changes over time and there is no universal agreement on what either are. Therefore they are just opinions.

[@Theodosius_fan]

you are evil for saying this

[@nicklim7638]

Woke