The only problem with your conclusion is that it uses a non-existent component.
It is evil that does not exist. (Linked Talk)
Thus God's creation is perfect for its given intent.
That intent is for us to know and Love God, as God loves us.
Regards Tony
This is the classic
privation theory of evil (Augustinian / Neoplatonic). It fails on several grounds.
First, absence alone cannot account for experienced harm. Blindness may be described as the “absence of sight,” but blindness is not merely nothing, it has concrete effects, structures experience, limits agency, and produces suffering. If evil were truly nonexistent, it could not generate real consequences. Yet suffering is not illusory.
Second, the argument smuggles value into ontology. It defines “existence” as “good” by fiat, then declares anything undesirable to be “nonexistent.” This is not a discovery but a semantic maneuver. Calling death “the absence of life” does not dissolve its reality as an event that destroys organisms, relationships, and futures. Describing something negatively does not negate its ontological status.
Third, the theory fails with active, intentional evil. Ignorance may plausibly be framed as a lack of knowledge, but cruelty, deception, and malice are not mere absences of virtue. They involve deliberate choices, planning, and execution. Torture is not simply “the absence of kindness”; it is a positive act requiring intention, effort, and will. A doctrine that reduces atrocities to “nonbeing” trivializes moral responsibility.
The claim that all intellectual realities are purely good is demonstrably false. Ideologies, delusions, rationalizations, and destructive belief systems are intellectual constructs, yet they produce immense harm. These are not absences of thought, but
misdirected, distorted, or weaponized thought. They exist, propagate, and exert causal force in history. If evil does not exist, then justice becomes incoherent. One cannot meaningfully condemn genocide, slavery, or abuse if these are merely “lacks” rather than real moral wrongs.
The Baha'i conclusion “there is no evil in existence” is reached not by observing reality, but by protecting the premise that a perfectly good creator cannot create evil. Evil may depend on good, distort good, or parasitize good, but it is 'not' nothing. It is real, causal, and morally significant. Any philosophy that denies this does so at the cost of moral clarity and lived human truth.
