There are many common arguments used in an attempt to disprove the Christian God, perhaps none so common as the problem of evil. It goes something like this; If God is all good, knowing, and omnipresent, how can he permit evil in his creation? To fully understand this question, we must first ask another. What is evil?
St. Thomas Aquinas suggested “evil is not something, but rather the privation of a particular good.”1 What he means by this is simply that evil is not an entity in itself, but rather the lack of something that should be present. Everything in the universe has a proper function or end. It is when something is lacking, or deviates from this end that it becomes evil. We can then further categorize evil in two ways; natural and moral. A natural evil would be something such as natural disasters, famines, or even things inherent to a person outside of their control like blindness. A moral evil would describe a willful act of the human person such as murder, or rape. Let’s look at both cases individually to try and determine if they are logically compatible with a good and just God.
Let it be said first that natural evil is typically seen as the lesser of these two problems. Many people will concede that it may be just, or even necessary to our natural order that these disasters exist. For instance, forest fires are necessary for clearing out dead trees and plant matter, as well as controlling disease and infestations. Their ashes are even beneficial to the soil and the production of new life. Floods are renewing to ecosystems and the reproductive cycle of many species relies on flooding to start. This problem becomes slightly more complicated when we consider the natural evil inflicted upon human beings. If God is good, why would he allow the man to be born blind? This argument fails in two ways. First, the man could have been born blind due to some moral evil committed by the mother, such as drug use during pregnancy and therefor is not a natural evil in the first place. Let’s say however the man due to no fault of another was simply born blind. We see this as a great injustice, but perhaps we are incorrect in this assessment. As Christians we see the point of life to become saints and live in service of others, so how is blindness an impediment to this? St. Margaret of Castello was born blind, and with a disfigured spine. Her legs were different lengths, and her left arm was malformed. Abandoned by her parents at only the age of six, she found her way to religious life and by fifteen joined the Third Order of St. Dominic. She regarded her disabilities as a means to unite her pain with the pain of Christ on the cross.
On the other hand, we have moral evil. How is it that a good and loving God would permit his creation to commit great acts of evil and inflict suffering onto the innocent? “Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.”2 This perfectly simple answer may seem like an evasion of the question at first glance, but it is not. Ultimately a world wherein lesser evils can bring about greater goods, where good can be chosen over evil, is better than a world without evil.
1 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de Malo (QDM), q.1, a.1.
2The Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Double Day, 2003), 309.