The privation theory of evil is false

The privation theory of evil says evil reduces to a lack of good, much like how darkness reduces to a lack of light or cold reduces to a lack of heat. I accept the standard objection to the privation theory of evil, which says pain is certainly evil (=bad) and yet pain cannot be a lack of something. (Yes, pain is instrumentally good for survival, but intrinsically bad, and its intrinsic badness is directly accessible to us.) To lack a lack is to have something. If I lack a lack of money, then I have money. So if pain were a lack of something, then lacking pain would be to have something (pleasure? contentment?). But when someone is dead (=no longer existing), they certainly lack pain, and yet they certainly do not have anything. So the presence of pain cannot be an absence.

This means the presence of the pain of being cold cannot be an absence of feeling heat. In that sense, cold is not a lack of heat. Likewise, our experience of being frustrated by darkness is not the same as the lack of the experience of being blinded by light.

It's true that darkness (=a lack of photons) is a lack of light. And cold (=a lack of the excitation of atoms) is a lack of heat. But those are non-mental, physical descriptions of darkness and cold. Evil is not non-mental; in fact evil is realized in conscious experience (according to my preferred theory of evil). Again, pain is evil and mental.

So the analogy between evil and darkness / cold fails. Darkness and cold are only lacks when interpreted in a non-mental sense. While extrinsic and depriving evils can be non-mental, intrinsic evils must be mental, and it's with respect to intrinsic evils the privation theory fails. The ontological problem of intrinsic evils remains.

As the SEP article points out (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/#DuaPriTheEvi), even if the privation theory succeeded, it would still be mysterious as to why God allows privation evils.

There is the question of justification: How can God justify privation evils?

And there is still an ontological question: To allow privation evils is to allow a lack of perfection, but it's intuitive that a perfect being would only (and even could only) beget perfection.