First, how can something which is all good spawn something evil? How can pure evil come from pure good? Clearly it can't -- if the good gives birth to the evil then the good must have incorporated the evil to start with and the good must not have been pure good, after all.
Oh come now. You are describing metaphysics, not physics. Anything can happen. This is not chemistry. There are no formulas, standards for purity or logic.
The whole business is nonexistent as far as I am concerned. Nature knows no such concepts; they are a human invention. They describe our subjective impressions of life, more or less the way romantic love describes sexual attraction. Evil is in the eye of the beholder. The cows and sheep we eat surely consider us evil, heartless, brutal villains. We have equally low opinions of the bacteria and mosquitoes that infect us. But Mr. Mosquito thinks that Mrs. Mosquito is a divine creature -- the essence of pulchritude -- and of course he is right.
Evil people exploit other people with no more thought than a butcher kills a sheep, but a man from Mars would not be able to judge whether that is dysfunctional evil or just another way to make a living. Many species, including all primates and carnivores as far as I know, murder members of their own species and periodically cannibalize their offspring (when they kill or drive off a rival male). Of course we consider that evil -- and it is from our perspective -- but from a larger perspective or the point of view of some other species there is nothing wrong with it, any more than there is something wrong with wasps paralyzing their prey and laying eggs in them. It must be horrible to be slowly eaten alive, but it ridiculous to call it cruel or evil. There is no higher purpose or meaning or morality or lesson in any of this behavior -- not even the worst human exploitation or war. It is just animals doing what they do. We may eventually succeed in domesticating humans to eliminate such behavior -- and most people will agree that would be a good outcome -- but it has no larger meaning that another species would appreciate, and there is no intelligence or judgement in the universe except in living species. Other species don't care what we do to one another any more than we care what wasps do to caterpillars. They may care about us and love us the way I love cats and red-wing blackbirds, but I would never condemn a cat for killing a blackbird. That is what cats do.
- Jed
