World building: foundations

(Heavy stuff alert)
In my opinion, it is hard to make a fantasy world without tackling questions of origins, power, and free will. Where does everything come from? Where does power come from? Where does good and evil come from? And what degree of free will does anyone have?

First where does everything come from? Where did the first thing come from? Where did the laws of nature come from, and the power that brought everything into existence? I suppose, as a writer, I could just say everything just always was, but it would be a much less interesting world.

It is logically impossible to get something from nothing, so there has to be an eternal something behind everything that exists. I need at least some eternal laws and a mechanism of some sort for those laws to work on. I prefer the eternal mind (mechanism?) that provides the laws that make it possible for things to come into existence (from the mind) avoiding the logical problem alluded to above.

For my world building the creator is the eternal being that was before everything else, and from whom everything came into existence. This also starts to answer the power question. Where does the power come from? But there is good power and bad power. You could call them positive power and negative power, so presuming the first positive power comes from the creator where does the other come from, or does it come from the creator as well?

Presuming the creator is perfectly good would leave no room for the bad, but we know from our own existence beings that are both good and bad can exist. I believe free will answers this paradox.

In order to create beings with the ability (freedom) to choose between the positive and the negative, or the good and the bad, they have to be created with the ability to choose the bad. They don’t have to be created bad, only with the ability to choose either way. I believe the act of exercising this ability is where the extra negative power or evil comes from. So when one comes across evil forces in my book, and evil characters, the evil power doesn’t come from the creator.

Now you might ask me, “Why couldn’t the creator be perfectly evil instead of perfectly good?” A good being can set up the necessary conditions for free will by doing a good act (By creating a free being for instance – a good thing), but an evil being would have to do a good act in order to set up the same conditions, and this would be impossible for a truly, totally evil being - it would be breaking his nature. In the same way a perfectly good creator can’t be evil, or do evil (or he’s not perfectly good), a perfectly evil being can’t do good. So this establishes the goodness of the creator.

To sum it up, and put it in words people can actually understand, we can’t get something from nothing. Only an eternal good being would create the world and other beings with the ability to do good or evil (free will).

Now this isn’t the only way you could set up the base foundations of your fantasy world, so next time I will talk a little bit about that, and then try to explain who the beasts, the humans, and the Endsætas are, and why they exist in the world of my book.