Not a religious question

[Nik]

Do you think the notion of God requires the one of a Satan or can the good be distinguished if there were no evil? And what side is winning in the real world? -:)

[Ian]

How can any discussion involving God be not religious? Anyway, leaving that aside, If you have good, you must have bad because you have effectively created a new dimension. Thus you can say B is better than A, which involves degrees of good, but equally you can say A is worse than B. That means that there are two ways of viewing a situation, and once you have the negative direction, there is no fixed means of fixing zero, so you have to be able to go from good to bad.

However, the same does not apply to God. God (if He is) is an entity, and does not create a dimension. You cannot have degrees of "god" - you cannot have more "god", therefore there is no requirement for a negative. Therefore, apart from some TV shows, there is no need for Satan. Neither does that deny Satan. Thus the presence of oranges neither requires nor prohibits the existence of apples or quockles.

Who is winning? Right now, if there is a Satan, I would say the arrow is pointing preferentially in his direction. There is a lot of bad going on. :-(

[J.J.]

There was no evil entity until Satan rebelled against God. so how could his rebellion have been evil if there was no prior evil figure to measure his actions against? I don't think you necessarily need an evil figure in a hypothetical new religion. I think such a figure does give us something to relate to, but it's not a necessary requirement for there to be a God.

[Scout]

God is good
Devil is evil

You can't have light without dark. There's an inherent dichotomy. How to understand one without the other?

[Leonie]

I think it's probably impossible to have one without the other. Personal belief systems aside, my next book is actually a fantasy about a girl who joins a religious order.

In the process, I've built an entire religious structure, a country that is in effect, a theocracy, founded against the darkness outside its borders and as a refuge for (if you like) the true believers, and a set of scriptures.

And the antagonist/s are evil - quite literally in form, as well as nature.

[Ian]

Yes, you can have a God without the devil. As an example, you could have a God who simply watches and later evaluates. The God does not have to do good, or anything, or a lot but not just good.

As it happens, I have also written a novel about a theocracy, but it is a liberal one. Like us, they developed technology and science, and worked out they evolved, BUT not very much, and they had no fossils before about 65 million years ago. They were also dinosaurs, and at first they concluded they were created but got the date wrong, and later they considered they might have been moved there, but what is the difference between a God and a technology so advanced it can re-engineer a planet and move an entire ecosystem?

[J.]

In this dichotomy God can be omnibenevolent because the Devil and those he has led astray are the ones who do bad things. This is evidence of a man made god as it is consistent with the childish desire to get our morals as Manicheanistic pap.

If a god is truly omni-anything then said god must consequently be infinite. How can an infinite being be described as a single point on axis?

[Nik]

Yeah, a god could be just a 'judge' or a 'creator', but as of the measure of goodness, I guess we need to compare it with something different. If everything is "good" then it's not "distinctive". I guess one needs to have something "cold", 'warm' and 'hot' to understand the temperature matters..

[Ian]

As I said above, introducing "good" introduces a dimension by which we measure. God is, or is not, an entity and is not a dimension.

[Scout]

How do we define good? It must have an opposite, or it has no meaning. No light without darkness, no up without down, etc. Therefore (only speaking for those who believe in God), there must be a Devil. No good without evil.