Can Evil Create?

There's a quote that says "Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made." That quote, attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien, is intriguing, and I wonder it it's true.

As a general rule, I tend to avoid absolutes, because they can very easily fall apart with even a single counterexample. If I make the claim that all swans are white or that all ravens are black, then all it would take to disprove those claims is a single black swan or a single white raven. The claim that elephants cannot jump may hold true as a general rule, but if we treat it as an absolute rule, it can be disproven by a single jumping elephant. Similarly, the claim that evil cannot create anything new can be disproven by even a single instance of an evil force creating something new. Granted, the claim could still hold true as a general rule, but as an absolute rule, it would be disproven by a single counterexample.

That said, I currently can't think of one. Pornography isn't new; it's a corruption of a healthy and holy practice. Harmful drugs aren't new; they're a misuse of many of the plants that God has made. In fact, since God made the entire planet and the people living on it, it could be said that everything was initially created by good forces, so that anything we make is ultimately made out of something that was created by God. We can't "create" houses, for example. We can only modify, relocate, and assemble the natural resources that God has created. If houses were evil, we could deem them a "corruption" of the wood, stone, and other materials of which they are made. So, perhaps evil cannot create, but, by the same token, neither can we.

Personally, I think that evil can create, because ideas can be new, and people of any moral persuasion can create new ideas. Those ideas may be modifications (or, less charitably, corruptions) of ideas and concepts that already existed, but the new forms of those ideas are, nonetheless, new. God didn't create pornography, and if He didn't, that means someone else did. Prostitution is sometimes jokingly called the world's oldest profession, but there was once a time when it was new. Unless God created that idea, someone else did.

So I'm going to have to disagree with Tolkien or with whomever actually created that quote. Evil can create new things. And alternatively, if they cannot "create anything new," then, by the same logic, neither can we.