The Fall (Plantinga Ch. 3)

Towards the beginning of the chapter, Plantinga writes that, "To see human decay, all you have to do is look around town, look around the world." (48) I liked that passage because it was brutally honest,but not in the sense that I liked the idea. I think that for most people, when they look at the world around them, they see it as constantly improving and getting better in many ways. But that is not the case. Like I discussed in my previous blog, there really is no true progress. When you really observe your surroundings, it is not hard to see that no matter where you go, there are always going to be people going through hard times and relationships being broken. There is no escaping it.
The next thing I was struck by was when he said that, "In fact, evil needs good in order to be evil...Here we can see that evil is a kind of parasite on goodness." (52) Never before had I grouped good and evil together, I had always put them in separate "boxes" if you will. However, after our discussion in class, I was convinced that they go hand in hand, but that does not mean God wanted it to be that way. I think that this is consistent with the Screwtape Letters, because the advice given to Wormwood by his uncle Screwtape is basically to play off the patients idea of goodness and to distort it. Never does he tell Wormwood to create evil by itself, he simply makes evil look like goodness. It is important that we all remember that there is infact goodness in everything, especially in people, even the ones that we like to think of as "pure evil," even if we are only joking. Evil is no laughing matter, and it is not something to be casually tossed around.