I was saying that you have no other way of looking at good and evil in relation to eachother than the antithesis of one another. It's far more appropriate to start with God as the absolute moral good and define anything else or anything that contradicts Him as evil, but I tried to work towards the conclusion that God is the absolute standard of good, rather than start with the presupposition that He is. More appropriately, God is the definition of good and anything else is evil. God, not as a substance, but His character and nature. How closely our character aligns with the nature of God will determine the level of "goodness."

Your way of looking at good and evil in terms of things and a lack of things is not coherent because you can certainly have evil things and good can take the form of nothing.

God is not all things, nor can He do all things. He is not something that contradicts His nature and He cannot act in a way that contradicts Himself. God is all that is good and is the standard, the measure by which all things are weighed to determine if they are good or evil.

Evil, as someone already stated, is a relative perception. Your topic of being "Absolute Evil" can only be absolute in it's truest sense if there is a standard of good by which it absolutely fails or is in absolute opposition towards. In which case, you can only have an "Absolute Evil" if there is an "Absolute Good." The only absolutely good being is God because He is the only one that is perfect. Anything that lacks a bit of good is no longer absolutely good because absolute quite literally means to be perfect.

It's better to look at good and evil as mutually exclusive concepts--that good is the opposite of evil and evil is the opposite of good. You might think of them most accurately as being defined by the absence of eachother. In other words, good is the absence of evil and evil is the absence of good. So again, an "Absolute Evil" would be a perfect evil, or an evil that is evil in total and entirely lacks good. That being said, by defining what an absolute evil is you automatically define what an absolute good is because an absolute evil would have to be in mutually exclusive contrast to absolute good. Any evil that had some measure of good in it would no longer be perfect evil, but it would be diluted with good and would no longer by absolutely evil. The same holds true for an absolute, or perfect, good: a good that consisted of no evil whatsoever would be a perfect good, an absolute good.

Good and evil are the antithesis of one another, there really is no other way of defining them in relation to eachother. That being said, how do you know what is good and what is evil? If they are defined as the opposites of one another then you could easily say that if "a" is evil then the opposite of "a" is good, but at what point do you start to say something is good or evil in the first place?

Most people would say that it's up to each person to decide what is good or evil for themselves, or they'll say that good and evil are not moral codes but are calculated weights of what yields the most benefit and what yeilds the most harm. However, the more you begin to try and define what is good or evil as a starting place you get more and more relative as people can never really agree with what is right or wrong and what is the most beneficial or the most harmful. Basically, in order to define good and evil at all you need to start with an objective measurement outside of the realm of humans--you need something imparted to humanity that is immovable and finite so that it is not subject to change. That's just a basic necessity for a measurement or a rule. In order to measure what is good or evil you need an objective, absolute standard.

To this I say that God, both as defined in the Christian Bible, by the early Church fathers, and by Theologians and Philosophers through the ages is the absolute standard of good that is objective and unchanging in His perfect goodness. He is the "Absolute Good" by which we may define good and evil. "Goodness" then, or that which makes something good, is how closely it aligns with the perfect, objective rightness of God. Evil, then is anything that does not align with the rightness of God, or to put it more accurately, evil is anything that is opposite of God, that is opposed to God's rightness, or that is lacking God's rightness. To speak directly to your original forum post, "Absolute Evil" would be that which lacks God entirely, or that which God is entirely absent from. The reason why I believe you connected a robot that lacked morality and feeling and followed it's programming to destroy as being absolutely evil is because God imparted a measure of His perfect goodness into each human to create, to build up, and to flourish with life and joy. Destruction is the antithesis of our created purpose and is therefore instantly insidious and instantly evil. As well, God imparted a moral code onto each human being at the point of Creation that reflected His perfect goodness so that we would live in right standing with God and be morally good creatures. Then we chose to sin in contrast to God's goodness and we fell, but still we were created with the "image of God," part of which includes a moral code.

It is therefore evil to destroy, which is contrast to the goodness of God's character that builds up, creates, protects, and preserves and it is still more evil to destroy without any purpose or moral code, for then we are not only witnessing an act against the goodness of God but an act in abject dereliction of the moral code that God created us with and is defined by the goodness of God's character. That is why I think you believe an unfeeling, entirely destructive piece of machinery could be considered "Absolute Evil." It's not just that destruction rubs the wrong way against the morality we were all created with as human beings, but that the villian in "Terminator" completely disregards any sense of a moral order with it's lack of personal feelings or emotions. It simply destroys as a cold, calculated function as a response to a measure of programming.

Consider it this way, when a child tells his or her mother that he or she refuses to clean their room then there is a measure of disobediance and a measure of "evil" in opposition to the "good" that the mother is asking the child to do. But it is altogether more disruptive, disobedient, and "evil" when the child completely ignores their mother's bidding and goes about their day oblivious to any sense of clean.

To translate this to the broader idea of good and evil, it is an evil of one manner to live in opposition to the goodness of God, but it is entirely a deeper evil to live as if no sense of right and wrong existed, and therefore, no God by which to give a standard of right and wrong.