Farkel, although I fully agree with you that the entire good-evil thing as described in the bible doesn't make sense at all, I think there's a bit of a fallacy in your reasoning (well, not really a fallacy, more of an unwarranted assumption). Or maybe I didn't get your point...let's see.Let's say that god created the world yesterday. Today, we look at that world of yesterday and describe it as 100 percent "good", meaning that it has all the properties we associate with our current notion of "good" and none corresponding to its opposite "not good" (alias evil). So, yesterday, as you point out, the adjective "good" had no meaning at all - there was only what we today call "good", so the concept of good did not, or at least _did not have to_, exist at that time.
Why do we have a concept of "good" today? Because we assume that last night, something happened to change the world. Something new was introduced while we were snoring peacefully, it differentiated things in a new way (meaning that some things have more of it, and some less), and we feel it therefore makes sense to find a description for those differences. We might say it's a new dimension (as in geometry) and label its extreme ends "good" and "evil".The point I'm trying to get across is that, unlike Plato, I see no reason to postulate that concepts or ideas are "beings", existing in their own world. I also don't think the bible postulates that god created such a "concept of good" together with his first creation. God created a universe (release 1.0) some time ago, but the bible describes that universe later: from the viewpoint and within the extended explanatory framework of its successor, universe 2.0. The notion of good needn't have existed in universe 1.0, according to this model _and_ the bible (IIRC - I haven't wasted my time on bible reading for a long time).f.
Why do we have a concept of "good" today? Because we assume that last night, something happened to change the world. Something new was introduced while we were snoring peacefully, it differentiated things in a new way (meaning that some things have more of it, and some less), and we feel it therefore makes sense to find a description for those differences. We might say it's a new dimension (as in geometry) and label its extreme ends "good" and "evil".The point I'm trying to get across is that, unlike Plato, I see no reason to postulate that concepts or ideas are "beings", existing in their own world. I also don't think the bible postulates that god created such a "concept of good" together with his first creation. God created a universe (release 1.0) some time ago, but the bible describes that universe later: from the viewpoint and within the extended explanatory framework of its successor, universe 2.0. The notion of good needn't have existed in universe 1.0, according to this model _and_ the bible (IIRC - I haven't wasted my time on bible reading for a long time).f.