Natural evil

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I know that I’m not asking an original question here, so if someone could just point me towards the answer, I’d appreciate it.

The argument from evil claims that the evil we see in the world is not compatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent God. This evil comes in two forms: moral and natural. Moral evil doesn’t give me pause with respect to the existence of God, but I find natural evil disconcerting. Here’s how I’d put it:
  1. God could have created the universe in a way that differs qualitatively from the universe we observe.
  2. God could have created the universe such that there would be more or less natural evil than we experience.
  3. The “pointless” evil we observe argues against an omni-benevolent God.
 
How about this: the omni-benevolent God gave us free will, with which we chose to live in this particular natural universe following original sin. That makes us subject to natural laws, some (actually, most) beneficial to our existence, and some (hurricanes, disease, etc) of no apparent benefit yet also part of the nature in which we live. However, although the natural evil that we observe or are subject might alienate us to God’s benevolence, through God’s grace we can also use it to increase our yearning for God’s kingdom, to help our fellow man, etc.
 
How about this: the omni-benevolent God gave us free will, with which we chose to live in this particular natural universe following original sin. That makes us subject to natural laws, some (actually, most) beneficial to our existence, and some (hurricanes, disease, etc) of no apparent benefit yet also part of the nature in which we live. However, although the natural evil that we observe or are subject might alienate us to God’s benevolence, through God’s grace we can also use it to increase our yearning for God’s kingdom, to help our fellow man, etc.
I agree with all of that, except I don’t understand the phrasing of man choosing to live in this particular universe. Can you explain?

So sure, some products of the laws that govern the universe are of no apparent benefit to us. Why wouldn’t God create a universe governed by laws that didn’t lend themselves so easily to confusion, doubt, and kids dying in agony without any idea why?
 
Far be it from me to look at God’s creation and deem parts of it as pointless… I many not understand some parts, but until I can create a universe the way I want to, I’ll hold my tongue about God’s version.

But that’s just me…

God bless
 
I agree with all of that, except I don’t understand the phrasing of man choosing to live in this particular universe. Can you explain?

So sure, some products of the laws that govern the universe are of no apparent benefit to us. Why wouldn’t God create a universe governed by laws that didn’t lend themselves so easily to confusion, doubt, and kids dying in agony without any idea why?
There was no death and decay until Adam and Eve committed original sin, that changed the nature of humans and the world around them to the present state (if my understanding of it all is right) Therefore they chose the nature of the world we currently live in.
 
There was no death and decay until Adam and Eve committed original sin, that changed the nature of humans and the world around them to the present state (if my understanding of it all is right) Therefore they chose the nature of the world we currently live in.
If I understand what you are saying here it would appear that in a real sense man dictated the universe he would inhabit. Am I correct in my understanding?
 
As for the “problem” of the existence of physical evils, they are an artifact of a finite, limited Universe, which has entropy as an intrinsic characteristic. This is an unavoidable fact of material existence. It’s an* assumption* that God could have created a Universe that God differs qualitatively from the Universe we observe, while being able to support complex life as we understand it. Also, the Catholic Church does not use “omni-benevolent” to describe God in the Liturgy or Catechism of the Catholic Church.
 
I know that I’m not asking an original question here, so if someone could just point me towards the answer, I’d appreciate it.

The argument from evil claims that the evil we see in the world is not compatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent God. This evil comes in two forms: moral and natural. Moral evil doesn’t give me pause with respect to the existence of God, but I find natural evil disconcerting. Here’s how I’d put it:
  1. God could have created the universe in a way that differs qualitatively from the universe we observe.
  2. God could have created the universe such that there would be more or less natural evil than we experience.
  3. The “pointless” evil we observe argues against an omni-benevolent God.
This is my own theory. When Adam and Eve first stepped foot in the Garden of Eden, there was no “natural evil” with respect to the existence of human beings. Volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and other natural disasters may have occurred, but they didn’t actually infringe upon the existence of Adam and Eve. How could it, when the Bible declares that the “wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), yet Adam and Eve did not sin initially, and therefore could not die. This also explain why Adam and Eve could live amongst every animal, including the more dangerous ones (e.g. lions), and not be eaten up.

In addition, the probability of a natural disaster affecting 2 people is incredibly small. If a hurricane happened in a “vacuum”, it would not be natural evil, because natural evil must necessarily infringe upon Man’s existence. Neptune has one of the fastest winds in our solar system, but that hardly constitutes natural evil because humans aren’t living there. So Adam and Eve may have lived on Earth during their initial years without directly confronting a natural disaster.

When Adam and Eve sinned by eating the apple and disobeying God, natural evil was brought into the world. Firstly, Adam and Eve were now capable of dying from natural disasters, as Scripture tells us: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—” (Romans 5:12) But because they also multiplied, by giving birth to children (Genesis 1:28), the probability of humans being affected necessarily increased, and therefore making natural evil all the more relevant. Today, there are just over 7 billion people living all across the world, so it’s certain that a natural disaster will affect at least 1 person of the 7 billion.
 
As for the “problem” of the existence of physical evils, they are an artifact of a finite, limited Universe, which has entropy as an intrinsic characteristic. This is an unavoidable fact of material existence. It’s an assumption that God could have created a Universe that God differs qualitatively from the universe we observe while bein able to support complex life as we understand it. Also, the Catholic Church does not use “omni-benevolent” to describe God in the Liturgy or Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Yes, it is an assumption. I meant to include that in my original post. Is it an invalid one?

The distinction between the quality of being all good vs. omni-benevolent is not one I could readily articulate. Could you help?
 
Yes, it is an assumption. I meant to include that in my original post. Is it an invalid one?
It’s not necessarilty invalid but it cannot be substantiated either, which makes your supposition arbitrary and not axiomatically true.
The distinction between the quality of being all good vs. omni-benevolent is not one I could readily articulate. Could you help?
It would be my position that omni-benevolence would use the following logic.
  • God is perfect and that God is morally good. Therefore, God must possess perfect goodness.
However, being all good could use the following logic:
  • God is perfect and has a perfect desire for goodness. Therefore, God always desires what is good.
However, being all-good doesn’t necessarily mean that God always tries to actualize the good, which may be due to perfectly good reasons (pun intended).
 
I would distinguish between truly natural evil and unnatural physical evil.

Evil, in the most reductionist definition of it, simply refers to the absence of being. Its “existence” is necessary for the positive existence of any finite creature, since without absence of being “surrounding” so to speak the existing being in its finite perfections, every perfection of it would be infinite and it would not be a creature at all but God. If God was going to make a creation at all this kind of natural “evil” was necessary, and it was not wrong for God to allow such absence to remain as he has no duty to fill it.

What you mean, though, is absences/limitations that violate some aspect of nature. Obviously prior to creatures with free wills no such evil can exist, because everything else comes directly from the sovereign Will if God. Only with the choices of free creatures coming into the picture can you get something that violates the natural order instituted by God.

A free choice that violates the natural order is a moral evil, but because we free creatures can have an effect on the physical world morally evil choices can cause events to happen in physical creation that violate the ordaining will of God.

A simple example would be one man murdering another with a knife. Everything with objective being in this picture, each of the two men, body and soul, and the physical knife, are good in the positive existence they have from God. The primary evil is the decision of the murderer to murder (to seek some lesser good in preference to the greater good of justice towards the murdered man), and the secondary evil flowing from this primary evil is the wound inflicted by the stabbing. This secondary evil is physical rather than moral, though it has resulted from a moral evil.

Since God is good and would not introduce such disorders into His creation, we believe that all such physical evils result in some way from moral evil, even though the connection can often be harder to see.

I, for one, find the idea that there would have been no physical injury to or death of biological organisms before the Fall entirely unconvincing. If there were anything wrong with such injury or death we would have to starve ourselves, since we as human beings need to consume other living things to survive. There is no question of moral evil in the case of non-human animals, yet they also need to eat other organisms to survive. There are scavengers, but where would they get their carrion without other animals dying? Then there’s all the fossil and genetic evidence for death and the passing of generations before our species emerged.

Certainly logically possible ways to get around these sorts of objections can be found, but I see no need for it. There is nothing I at least can discern to be wrong with nature as it exists apart from humans. The problem comes in when human beings are subject to the same kinds of suffering and death that other animals are. This is an evil, but one we have always believed happened after and as a result of the Fall.

Adam and Eve were given “preternatural gifts” which among other things protected them from illness, aging, and death, but which were somehow tied to their original justice, such that when they sinned they lost both those preternatural gifts and the ability to transmit them to their offspring. As a result we are subject to the same kinds of decay and harm to our bodies as other biological organisms, and what was good and ordained by God for them becomes an evil when it affects us.

Thus a hurricane, for example, would have been an unadulterated good if the fall had not occurred, but with our new human frailty it now becomes a physical evil.

One final note, as a result of the fall we often also have difficulty distinguishing good from evil, which may also result in a perceived evil that is not objectively there. Thus, some people will be horrified at, say, predation or parasitism or decay in nature despite its objective goodness. In this also may be instinctive self-preservation (don’t eat the rotten meat, don’t touch the intestinal worm, keep your distance from that spider or lion, etc.), but this would not have been necessary or rational for us before the fall.
 
I hope people will read my post, even though it is rather long. So far in this thread there has been a lot of confused language over natural vs. unnatural physical evils. We need to clearly distinguish the two or we’ll be talking past one another.
 
It’s not necessarilty invalid but it cannot be substantiated either, which makes your supposition arbitrary and not axiomatically true.

It would be my position that omni-benevolence would use the following logic.
  • God is perfect and that God is morally good. Therefore, God must possess perfect goodness.
However, being all good could use the following logic:
  • God is perfect and has a perfect desire for goodness. Therefore, God always desires what is good.
However, being all-good doesn’t necessarily mean that God always tries to actualize the good, which may be due to perfectly good reasons (pun intended).
These are excellent answers. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
 
I hope people will read my post, even though it is rather long. So far in this thread there has been a lot of confused language over natural vs. unnatural physical evils. We need to clearly distinguish the two or we’ll be talking past one another.
I read your post, but I don’t think I have enough charity (or, perception, if you prefer) to see the objective goodness in all the horrors of the world.
 
I hope people will read my post, even though it is rather long. So far in this thread there has been a lot of confused language over natural vs. unnatural physical evils. We need to clearly distinguish the two or we’ll be talking past one another.
I would agree that language and definitions can utterly change the meaning or direction of discourse, despite their apparent similarities. BTW, I did read your post. Thank you for your contribution.
 
I read your post, but I don’t think I have enough charity (or, perception, if you prefer) to see the objective goodness in all the horrors of the world.
I’m not sure what you mean, so in case you mean to express some confusion or objection let me ask for a clarification. What do you mean by “all the horrors of the world”? Do you mean simply things in nature that don’t strike your fancy, like predation, parasitoids, or whatever, or do you mean the sorts of personal tragedies that befall human beings? In the latter case perceiving the objective goodness would just mean that each physical object inasmuch as it exists is good, but the sum total of the situation is still an unnatural evil and rightly judged to be a horror.
 
I’m not sure what you mean, so in case you mean to express some confusion or objection let me ask for a clarification. What do you mean by “all the horrors of the world”? Do you mean simply things in nature that don’t strike your fancy, like predation, parasitoids, or whatever, or do you mean the sorts of personal tragedies that befall human beings? In the latter case perceiving the objective goodness would just mean that each physical object inasmuch as it exists is good, but the sum total of the situation is still an unnatural evil and rightly judged to be a horror.
I was thinking of viruses and genetic defects. I guess you could classify viruses as parasites in a sense: they rely on a host to replicate themselves, even though they aren’t technically alive. It would be fair to say that ebola (or whatever) doesn’t strike my fancy, but I see now that from a Catholic point of view we could say that it is good that it exists, in that, by virtue of existing, it (along with the rest of creation) gives testimony to *Esse, *and hence, God himself. Before the fall, we could say that the natural operation of the virus in say, a cow, an extremely fast growth rate and the subsequent destruction of cellular walls (reducing organs to sludge) would be an unadulterated good.

I think genetic defects would fall under the “personal tragedy” category. For example, the existence of some malfunctioning organelle(s) (like those which cause an error in the reproduction or execution of DNA such that a fetus forms without a skull) is objectively good. It is objectively good that such a thing exists, even though it serves no discernible purpose other than to produce horror. Or maybe such a conclusion is just the result some difficulty distinguishing good from evil.
 
For good to even mean anything, there must be evil, so that our choice to choose good is not compulsory. What would it mean to choose good if we had no choice in the matter but were always compelled to choose good? Where is the merit in that?

Evil exists because God chose to allow it to exist? Why, exactly? That is where trust comes in.

Remember that, thankfully, His ways are NOT our ways, and when we ask questions based on what WE would have done had we been the Creator, we get ourselves in all kinds of trouble, because we second-guess God left and right.

Every time we don’t understand something, we question God’s decision to do this or that, rather than just saying, hey, I don’t personally understand that, but I know that God is God and He cannot make a mistake, so all is well. He will let us know the “whys” when He deems it time to reveal that to us.

In point of fact we are not going to know why everything happens as it does. Not while we are on Earth.
 
I, for one, find the idea that there would have been no physical injury to or death of biological organisms before the Fall entirely unconvincing. If there were anything wrong with such injury or death we would have to starve ourselves, since we as human beings need to consume other living things to survive. There is no question of moral evil in the case of non-human animals, yet they also need to eat other organisms to survive. There are scavengers, but where would they get their carrion without other animals dying? Then there’s all the fossil and genetic evidence for death and the passing of generations before our species emerged.

(snip)

Adam and Eve were given “preternatural gifts” which among other things protected them from illness, aging, and death, but which were somehow tied to their original justice, such that when they sinned they lost both those preternatural gifts and the ability to transmit them to their offspring. As a result we are subject to the same kinds of decay and harm to our bodies as other biological organisms, and what was good and ordained by God for them becomes an evil when it affects us.
Thanks for your well thought-out post. I had to read it a couple of times to understand it, and I’m still not sure I fully understand the portions I quoted.

Are you saying that before the Fall, animal and plant nature survived pretty much as it does today, in a survival of the fittest mode, with no concept of evil attached, natural or unnatural, and Adam and Eve’s preternatural gifts protected them from the potentially negative effects of these natural activities (i.e., being eaten by a lion)? But after the Fall they lost those preternatural gifts and became subject to all of the rules of nature and, having free will, they were now subject to unnatural physical evil?

So, for example, before the Fall, lions were eating deer, with no concept of evil attached, but they could not eat Adam or Eve because of God’s protection of them through the preternatural gifts He bestowed on them. But after Fall, lions still ate deer with no evil attached, but they could also eat Adam or Eve, and in this case that would have been an unnatural physical evil?
 
Thanks for your well thought-out post. I had to read it a couple of times to understand it, and I’m still not sure I fully understand the portions I quoted.

Are you saying that before the Fall, animal and plant nature survived pretty much as it does today, in a survival of the fittest mode, with no concept of evil attached, natural or unnatural, and Adam and Eve’s preternatural gifts protected them from the potentially negative effects of these natural activities (i.e., being eaten by a lion)? But after the Fall they lost those preternatural gifts and became subject to all of the rules of nature and, having free will, they were now subject to unnatural physical evil?

So, for example, before the Fall, lions were eating deer, with no concept of evil attached, but they could not eat Adam or Eve because of God’s protection of them through the preternatural gifts He bestowed on them. But after Fall, lions still ate deer with no evil attached, but they could also eat Adam or Eve, and in this case that would have been an unnatural physical evil?
I think your interpretation of my proposal is about right, except I’m not sure what you mean by “conception of evil”. My post is concerned with evil itself rather than consciousness of evil, though maybe this is what you meant. Also I would correct the statement about “no… evil… natural or unnatural” You just can’t have a finite being without natural evil, which is just to say you can’t have a finite being without limitations to its perfection, otherwise it would be infinite. These limitations however would have been entirely within the bounds of nature and the ordaining will of God before the Fall.
 
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