The Problem of Evil
If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil and suffering?
The objection, at its strongest:
- If God were all-good, he would want to prevent evil.
- If God were all-powerful, he would be able to prevent evil.
- Yet evil plainly exists: not only human cruelty, but the anguish of disease, famine, and disaster.
- Therefore a God who is both all-good and all-powerful does not exist.
This is the deepest objection, because it does not deal in abstractions. It begins with a child's suffering, and no honest answer can pretend that away.
St. Thomas takes it seriously enough to make it the first objection against God's very existence:
It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word 'God' means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.
In response:
- The argument claims too much. For it to work, it has to assume that an all-good God could have no reason to allow any evil. But that is exactly what can't be shown. If God can bring a greater good out of an evil he allows — goods we may not be able to see from inside the story — then evil's existence and God's goodness don't actually contradict each other.
- Evil is not a thing. In the classical view evil is not a substance God created, but a privation: a lack of some good that ought to be present, as blindness is the absence of sight. God does not author evil; he permits the possibility of it as the shadow side of real goods like freedom and a lawful, causal world.
- Free will has a price. Genuine love and virtue are impossible without the freedom to refuse them. A world of puppets who could not do wrong would also be a world with no courage, forgiveness, or love freely given.
- This is an answer, not an anesthetic. Showing that evil and God are not contradictory is not the same as explaining away a particular grief. Reason can clear the objection without pretending the wound isn't real, and a fuller response to suffering itself belongs further along the journey.
Aquinas's own reply turns the objection on its head: evil does not disprove God, but presupposes a good so great it can draw good even out of evil:
As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): 'Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.' This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.
A closer look at freedom. It is worth dwelling on the third point, because the free-will reply is often heard as a glib trade, as if God weighed our comfort against our autonomy and simply chose autonomy. That is not the claim. The claim is that a will truly able to love and a will unable to do harm are not two options God could pick between; they are a contradiction, like a square that is also a circle. Love, by its nature, is a gift that must be freely given, and a gift that cannot be withheld is not a gift at all. To make a creature who could genuinely choose the good is to make one who could also refuse it: the very same power aimed the other way. God could, of course, have made a world of creatures that never sin, but only by making creatures that never freely choose anything, automatons running on rails, incapable of courage, mercy, or love. The wrong such freedom makes possible is real, and its cost is terrible; but the alternative is not a better world with free beings in it; it is a world with no one in it to love at all. That God permits the misuse of freedom rather than abolishing freedom is not indifference to the harm; it is the price of making persons rather than puppets, and of holding open the possibility that they will one day choose him back.