I just watched a very interesting video today. In an elementary school class, the teacher (or rather, a professor) gives a very inappropriate logic puzzle to the obviously puzzled young students, the problem of Evil. 'God creates everything. Evil exists. Thus, God creates evil. Therefore, God is evil.' However, the professor does not have his way so easily as a precocious boy stands up and debunks his argument. 'Professor, does cold exist?' The professor automatically nods. Then, the student gives out his entire reasoning. Basically, he 'proves' that cold is merely an absence of heat, and the same applies to the problem of Evil. The boy also provides another example about darkness as merely being the absence of light. Associating darkness and cold as Evil, he concludes Evil is just the absence of Good. Therefore, God is not evil. Let's leave the stumped professor behind and focus more on this boy, who's later 'revealed' to be the young Albert Einstein. First of all, I will use the 'turn the chessboard over' method I have learned from a certain anime. We can also say that heat is a degree of coldness. Thus, the main problem is that we have to assumed first which one 'truly' exists, cold or heat. Can you see the circular argument here? Physics says that the very fundamental concept of heat is based on the (assumed) existence of photon. 'Cold' and 'hot' are just reference terms in our everyday language about the amount of thermal energy, thus related to the amount of photon. The same applies with light and darkness. Then, how can we draw the line between coldness and hotness? It is because of our previous experiences. We have the memory of what 'normal' temperature is like, thus defining the borderline of 'hot' and 'cold'. Ask people who live in other regions. They may not agree with your defined borderline of 'hot' and 'cold'. Applying this to the problem of Evil, how can we draw the borderline between 'good' and 'evil'? Needless to say that it is rather a false analogy, even if we force the analogy to work out, we will be baffled with the problem of drawing the borderlines. Therefore, I can turn your argument around by saying that moral principles are relative and so on. Now, can you see the misuse of language here? You can say that death is absence of life, evil is absence of good, folly is absence of intelligence, etc. I beg to differ. You have to be careful when you put all those concepts into the context of degree, especially using physics phenomena as analogies. Saying that evil is a form of non-existence of good implies that you say 'nothing' is 'something'. Secondly, what do you define as 'evil'? Is it the action? Is it the intent? Is it the outcome? I'm not going to wander through ethics this time since it would digress from this discussion. In addition, from all the books about the Person of the 20th Century (according to the Time magazine) I have ever read, I don't know of such tale. It would be so ridiculous to know that Einstein is that careless in his reasoning, even though his grey matter might not have developed fully. We have to be more critical of his theories then. My last message: beware of anonymous, unqualified Internet memes. Any comments, guys?