this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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I'd call good and evil human concepts, along with the moral or ethical codes and ideas that define them. They aren't going to exist in a vacuum: what is called good and what is called evil depends on the social norms of a time and place.
Is charging interest to lend money evil? Is homosexuality evil? Is not taking on your brother's widow as a second wife and impregnating her evil? Those are all things that would have been considered wrong by different cultures.
So I'd say that any question about "good" or "evil" kind of requires asking "good in the eyes of whom" or "evil in the eyes of whom".
If you want to ask "did evil exist in the universe 4 billion years ago", I'd probably say "we don't have evidence that life existed in the universe 4 billion years ago, and I think that most conventional meanings of good or evil entail some kind of beings with a thought process being involved."
If you want to ask "were the first humans good and then become evil", I'd probably say that depends a great deal on your moral code, but I imagine that early humans probably violated present-day social norms very substantially.
If what you're really working towards is something like the problem of evil:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
So if what you're asking is "how could good give birth to evil", I think that I'd probably say that I probably wouldn't call humans or the universe at large "purely good" for any extended period of time in any conventional sense of the word. Maybe in some sort of very limited, narrow, technical sense, if you decide that only humans or something capable of that level of thought that can engage in actions that we'd call good and evil and the first point in time that there was a being that qualified as human the first second of their activity happened to be something that we'd call "good", okay, but I assume that that's not what you're thinking of.
I think that you had pre-existing behavior by humans at one point in the past and ethical systems that later developed which might be used to classify that behavior, and not in some consistent way.