A friend pointed out I hadn’t posted in a while. This was something I spun up the other day for fun.

This solution is a substantial departure from existing attempts that I’m aware of.

For a good summary of the theodicy problem, you can go to The Philosophy Dungeon. The basic dilemma is if you are all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, how can there be evil?

Inspiration and ideas for this solution come from Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (Incompleteness Theorems on Wikipedia) and from Claude Shannon’s Information Theory (Information Theory on Wikipedia). I’m sure they would not be impressed by having any similarities drawn.

Four Parts

Circumstantial Encoding

We use symbols to represent concepts all the time. You are reading some now. While rare, these can occur naturally. That does not imply those symbols have the meaning we ascribe to them (furthermore those symbols may only be relevant for a subset of the population if it is based on language). That arrangement of matter that appears like symbols we know could contain a cogent idea, one that isn’t evil itself (it is a set of symbols that can be interpreted as an idea) but could express the idea of something evil (whatever that may be defined to be).

To summarize then, there can be arrangements of matter that appear as the symbols used to encode an evil concept, without being evil itself as it is a happenstance arrangement and requires comprehension of those symbols.

That is a long chain of what-ifs. However there are scenarios where that chain of what-ifs is guaranteed to occur.

Intentional Encoding

When I imagine, say an apple and myself eating it, I am using the neurons in my brain to encode that along with the transformations for eating. They don’t exist in matter the way I do (or the apples on the counter at present) but entirely in my brain. I am intentionally performing this operation, generating the imagery, automatically encoding that in neurons, and then updating that encoding to as the imagined apple is consumed.

Were I instead to intentionally imagine performing an evil act, while that doesn’t materialize in reality, innocence can be considered dubious.

Unintentional Encoding

However, if that imagination was without my control (a consequnce of factors external to me) then I am a victim of those thoughts even if they do not materialize in reality.

Determining whether a person experiences intentional versus unintentional encoding of evil thoughts is hard to ascertain.

The Ultimate Victim

However, there is one being that by being all-knowing then by definition imagines all possibilities, all realities (coherent and otherwise), and all events that transpire. There is no choice in the matter as that definition is asserted about this being.

We need not exist in any material way, it is sufficient that such a being exist for us to as well in its imagination and its the existence of an all-knowing being makes our existence a necessary consequence.

Conclusion

There isn’t evil. Our universe is just a figment of forced mental machinations.