Good & Evil, Black & White, Hot & Cold

It's interesting to me how i hear people talk about good and evil. Our society & the media seem to see good and evil as diametrically opposed forces. As if it is a battle between God and the devil. Black vs. white. Hot vs Cold. Two equally ranked brute titans battling for the ages and whoever is stronger wins. What is interesting to me is that in many ways they have it right without ever realizing how wrong they are.

When attempting to describe good and evil as in comparison to black & white and hot & cold the analogy is very strong and correlates very well. What is interesting about these analogies is that black and white are not two diametrically opposed forces. For example, when you are in a dark room and you can't see, what do you do? You turn on the light. When it is bright out and you need it a little darker in the room what do you do? You turn on the dark, right? Even my two and three year old know that that's not the case. You don't turn on the dark, you turn off the light or close the shades so that the light doesn't get in. Black is not something you can turn on or off. It exists where light does not. There is no dark battling light there is only light or lack of light. Where light exists darkness flees. There even comes a point where there is no more light when it is pitch black. It cannot get any darker because it is the point at which there is no light at all.

The same thing works for hot and cold. What is the formula to make water into ice? It is H2O - h (water minus heat). It's not water plus cold because just like with light cold is simply the lack of heat. When you attempt to cool yourself down with ice what you are actually doing is dissipating the heat. There is such a vacuum of heat in the ice that when it comes into contact with your skin the heat in your skin dissolves into the ice. You feel cooler due to that heat leaving you, and that ice-cube melts due to your body heat entering and warming that ice cube. This can be a bit of a confusing concept at times, so maybe i should go at this a different way. Heat and cold are relative to each other right. Something feels cold because it has less heat than something else. Fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit to someone from Alaska is warm, maybe even hot. Fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit to someone from the Caribbean islands may feel extremely cold. However, there comes a point at which something cannot get any colder. Absolute Zero is the term for the temperature at which no heat exists. It is impossible to get any colder than that. However, heat can keep increasing indefinitely. There is no known hottest temperature.

So in essence there is no such thing as black & white or hot & cold. There is only light & lack of light (or less light). Heat & lack of heat (or less heat). The same thing applies to God. There is no good & evil. Evil is merely a corruption of good. It is the lack of God. Thus there is only God & lack of God (less God). Of course this is still not a perfect analogy because unlike with black & white and hot & cold there is no such thing as an absolute zero with God. He exists everywhere. He cannot, not be. So there cannot ever be No God, there can only be attempts to block him out like shades blocking the light on a very bright day. Thus the argument is not God vs. Satan or good vs. evil, but rather God vs. less of God.

Image from KaCey97007 used under cc license.