  In his work “On the Necessity of Contradiction in the World and Determinism and Subsistence,” Khayyam offers three arguments to exonerate God from being the origin of evil by identifying evil with non-existence or absence. God, Khayyam argues, has created the essences of all the contingent beings, which are good in and of themselves since any being, ontologically speaking, is better than   non-being.8 Evil therefore represents an absence, a non-being for which God cannot be blamed.