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One of my best friends for much of my student days was a Jew named Marc from Chicago that lived at our frat house. We drank, smoked and partied together, and competed for the girls at a nursing dorm (one was to be my future wife). We loved to discuss religion as we sat drinking at the bar in the basement late into the night. Although it would not be until ten years later that I would get serious in my search, we both had enough religious baggage that we couldn’t leave the subject alone. Two discussions left lasting impressions on me that I still remember. One was on this question of whether we can be sure that God is good.

You may be too young to remember “Twilight Zone” when it first aired, but one memorable episode involved two guys that lived two very different lifestyles. One was a paragon of all that was good: honest, loyal, hard working and trustworthy, even when it cost him dearly. His life was a struggle, but he kept his character to the end, knowing his steadfastness would bring him eternal joy. The other was a louse in every aspect, the very antithesis of his friend. His crookedness brought him great success, wealth, fame and even happiness, but he knew he was in bad standing with God. Well, they died, and the typical “Hollywood Ending” would have each get his just deserts. But they were both wrong in their understanding of God, who turned out to be as crooked as the second guy, and the two friends’ eternal destinies were to be extensions of their earthly lives.

This was the subject Marc and I tackled as we sipped on beer in the early morning. He said, “How do you know that God is good? We don’t have any way of knowing for sure… in fact, it’s a 50/50 chance that He’s evil. So why not live it up now, and just hope for the best?” I’d like to blame my lack of ability to properly address the issue at that time on my tired and inebriated state, but I had no answer for the next ten years.

I have since found the answer, and once I grasped it, it seemed so clear that I wondered why I couldn’t see it then.

God (if God exists) MUST be good. God can’t be evil and remain God. Here’s why: good and evil are not simply two sides of the same coin.

Taoism is represented by the “Yin/Yang” symbol shown above. Yin and Yang represent the two poles in the concept of Dualism, which holds that there are two co-equal forces in nature, Yin (say, black) and Yang (white). Neither is greater than the other. One can assign goodness to, say, Yin, and evil to Yang. To the one who follows the ways of good, evil is objectionable. But likewise, to the follower of evil, good is objectionable. It all depends on your point of view. Cops kill robbers and robbers kill cops.

But there is a flaw in this thinking. Good and evil are not co-equal; rather, evil is a corruption of good. Good can exist without evil, but evil cannot exist without the host upon which it is a parasite — good. People often imagine and long for a utopian society, where everyone is good. Christian doctrine says that this was the original state of mankind (the Garden of Eden), and although it assigns two destinies, heaven and hell, one is not the flip side of the other, due to the non-dualistic nature of good and evil themselves.

Consider the definitions of good and evil. Good involves that which is desired in some way: in purpose, suitability or morality. Evil is simply that which operates against the good. Also, good attributes are defined independently: honesty, loyalty, diligence; evil attributes are defined as corruptions of the good: dishonesty, disloyalty, sloth. By the way, almost all of our opposites are like this. Light is a form of electromagnetic energy, with a unit of measure — lumens; darkness is the absence of light. Heat is likewise a form of energy, measured in Joules; cold is the absence of heat. High/low, fast/slow, up/down, smart/stupid, happy/sad, beautiful/ugly, heavy/light, strong/weak, and on and on. Nevertheless, there are some qualities that are truly dualistic in nature — the most obvious is left/right. Left[right] is extremely difficult to define: “Of, belonging to, located on, or being the side of the body to the north[south] when the subject is facing east.” Electromagnetic north and south are defined by the right-hand rule, leading to circularity.

Anyway, because evil is always characterized in relation to good (but good stands on its own), evil could not exist independently. And since God is the original and independent essence, if God were evil, He would only exist in relation to that other entity which embodied good, and that entity would better qualify as God. So God, if He exists, must be good — but this does not of itself imply that the Christian concept of God is correct.

This essay is way too long, so I’ll have to leave the other idea Marc shared with me for another time. That one involved a dream he had after ignorantly consuming a whole stick of hashish at once.