Christians have generally agreed that evil is not a substance or a thing but instead is a privation of a good thing that God made. A privation of a good is the corruption or twisting of a created thing’s essence or substance.1 Evil, since it is not a thing in itself, is parasitic on the good. There can be good without evil, but there cannot be evil without there being a good upon which it preys. The concept of evil as a
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