Problem of evil

[brycelaliberte]

I would be one of those Christians. It wasn’t till I met true evil and fought it with good that I surmised that God exists and that He is more powerful. It is only when we meet evil that we understand how good God is.

Peace…

MW

This is my point exactly about the goodness of God against the evil that exists; for as much evil as can exist, His goodness will always win out. There is no such thing as an evil that wins, that is why there is no problem.

Me and some friends are reading through Job, and it’s very important to note that God lets all the evil happen to him, and still Job remains faithful. Obviously, his good vanquished all the evil Satan could muster against him.

 

[Pete_1]

**Then you’ve just sacrificed Divine Providence to human free will Overruling is entirely consistent with human freedom - in **** **​

If a mans will is overulled to force him to stand up, he cannot sit down, therefore it cannot be said that he is wilfully standing.

 

[Swan]

By finding more difficulties - I like finding difficulties ​

**As for this problem, human free will is no answer at all - because that could easily be overruled, by God, Who is all sorts of things that make evil impossible. For me, the problem is in the Christian conception of God, not in evil. **

If God is

• All-Beneficent
• All-Benevolent
• All-Knowing
• All-Mighty
• All-Powerful
• All-Wise
• Alone Creator
• Eternal
• Faithful
• Free
• Good
• Gracious
• Infinite
• Just
• Love
• Moral
• One
• Sovereign
• Transcendent
• True
• Unconditioned
• Unconstrained
• Unique
• Unthwartable
  **- & so forth, then evil cannot exist. God is all these things. **

**IMO, the doctrines should, if need be, undergo revision so as to fit the Biblical data on which they are said to be based. Doctrine depends very largely on interpretation, & inexact interpretation makes for inexact doctrine. **

**Free will in man itself needs to be accounted for, & can be - which is why it is not the answer. God, in the current reading of the “Christian story”, created man & serpent knowing full well that the one would lead the other to sin, which is extremely displeasing to God. This reading makes God sound both passive-aggressive & wicked: because it means that God put man in a situationin which sin was unavoidable, & massively damaging to all future generations; it means that God is responsible for the damnation of millions, who were born in original sin through no fault of their own. **

**It’s a mess, because it’s a patchwork: of OT myth, misinterpretation, eisegesis, exegesis, Church dogma, extra-Biblical philosophising, & wonky linguistic & chronological data. **

**I don’t think evil can be explained: that requires rationality, & evil is irrational. I don’t think it needs explaining, but only to be accounted for; which is not the same thing. Since Christian faith does not function like one of those books in which one can can “enquire within upon everything”, since on the contrary “we see in a glass darkly”, I don’t regard this failure to explain it, or to give a complete account of it, as a problem. Sometimes it is best to admit that one does not know **

I just wanted to say that I really enjoy your posts. They are intelligent and well thought out. And I agree with quite a bit of your reasoin even if I don’t come to the same conclusion. For example, your posts in this thread and the one on the tree in the garden are excellent, IMO, in the way the address the “designed to sin” aspect of Genesis that I have never been able to get around. Really thought provoking. Thanks.

 

[Feanaro]

I do not believe in the Judeo-Christian God precisely because of this objection.

How do people on this forum address this issue?

Here are a couple of good audio files on this subject:

bringyou.to/CraigSinnottArmstrongEvilSuffering.mp3

peterkreeft.com/audio/07_suffering/peter-kreeft_suffering.mp3

peterkreeft.com/audio/15_cslewis-problem-of-pain/peter-kreeft_problem-of-pain.mp3

I hope you actually take the time to listen to them. They are fairly long but have helped me tremendously with the subject and are worth giving your time to.

The first is a formal debate on the subject between an Atheist philosopher and a Christian philosopher. The second and third are lectures by Catholic professor of philosophy and author, Peter Kreeft. Enjoy:thumbsup:

 

[buffalo]

I just wanted to say that I really enjoy your posts. They are intelligent and well thought out. And I agree with quite a bit of your reasoin even if I don’t come to the same conclusion. For example, your posts in this thread and the one on the tree in the garden are excellent, IMO, in the way the address the “designed to sin” aspect of Genesis that I have never been able to get around. Really thought provoking. Thanks.

I think St Ambrose answers these pretty well.

 

[Contarini]

That he happened to know how it would all turn out is beside the point.

Hardly. God created the Adam-and-Eve who sinned, and not some otherwise identical Adam-and-Eve who did not sin. If there was no possible world in which Adam and Eve did not sin (if, in Plantinga’s terms, they suffered from “transworld depravity”), then that *really *denies free will. If they had free will, then some other beings otherwise identical to them might not have sinned. And the question arises: Why didn’t God (who knows all possibilities) create those beings instead? I see no way out of this except for something like “open theism”–the view that God does not in fact foreknow future free choices. I cannot accept that alternative.

Were God forcing us to do good works, it would be God doing the works, not us, and the works would become meaningless.

Straw man on several grounds. The word “force” has not been mentioned; the Catholic Church teaches that when we do good works it is only because God is doing them in us (in other words, you’re creating a false dichotomy which the Catholic Church has rejected ever since the time of Augustine); and as I said above, if God knows all possibilities He could surely choose to actualize some rather than others.

What happened could have happened differently, it just didn’t. It’s like in a story: just because you know that Faramir let Frodo go doesn’t mean he had to.

Yes, and God wrote the story. When humans write stories with evil in it we can explain this because of the evil that the humans experience in the “real world.” But why is there evil in God’s story? You can’t say “because humans have free will” without violating the analogy. Faramir had free will too.

Edwin

 

[BlaineTog]

Hardly. God created the Adam-and-Eve who sinned, and not some otherwise identical Adam-and-Eve who did not sin. If there was no possible world in which Adam and Eve did not sin (if, in Plantinga’s terms, they suffered from “transworld depravity”), then that *really *denies free will. If they had free will, then some other beings otherwise identical to them might not have sinned. And the question arises: Why didn’t God (who knows all possibilities) create those beings instead?

Because the creatures he created were created to be as good as they possibly could be, an unfortunate side-effect of which is that they would decide to eat the apple. But that was their free choice, and God chose to let their choice stand rather than subvert it.

Straw man on several grounds. The word “force” has not been mentioned; the Catholic Church teaches that when we do good works it is only because God is doing them in us (in other words, you’re creating a false dichotomy which the Catholic Church has rejected ever since the time of Augustine); and as I said above, if God knows all possibilities He could surely choose to actualize some rather than others.

Whether the word “force” itself has been used or not is irrelevant if the meaning is there, which it is. And I’m not saying it isn’t ultimately God working through us when we do good deeds, only that He still needs our consent.

Yes, and God wrote the story. When humans write stories with evil in it we can explain this because of the evil that the humans experience in the “real world.” But why is there evil in God’s story? You can’t say “because humans have free will” without violating the analogy. Faramir had free will too.

Not at all. The analogy was intended to show that characters both have free will and the story is predetermined. There is evil in God’s story because humans choose to do evil, and God allows that evil to be incorporated into the plot.

 

[SeekingCatholic]

The Problem of Evil, if successful as an argument, does not show God does not exist, but it does show that God, if He exists, can not be at once omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent (OOO). For the existence of gratuitous evil (to be explained later) is logically inconsistent with a God with these attributes; He could prevent it (omnipotence), He would know where it would occur and what to do about it (omniscience), and He would not want it to exist (omnibenevolence).

Gratuitous evil is unnecessary and/or disproportionate evil. It is logically possible that there is a certain good (A) which can not be realized but for the existence of a certain evil (B). In this case an OOO God might well permit the existence of B in order to bring about the existence of A. There are certain conditions for B not to be gratuitous evil: 1) B must be the least evil necessary to bring about A; if it were also possible to bring about A with a lesser evil C then using B to bring about A would in fact be gratuitous evil. A fortiori, of course, any evil used to bring about A would be gratuitous if it were possible to bring about A without any evil at all. 2) A must be a greater good than the evil of B. If B is a great evil, and A only a slight good, then the good does not outweigh the evil.

I have not here said anything about the specific nature of the evils or goods, or about how the consent of the subject undergoing the evil changes matters. That is a complicated topic. We sometimes in fact do force others to undergo evil for the “greater good” (e.g. conscript soldiers in times of war). I would argue that consent of the subject makes the evil less of an evil than it would be otherwise, but it can even then outweigh the possible good to be realized (e.g. courts in the United States will not recognize a contract to sell oneself into slavery, even if made completely voluntarily). Whereas non-consent of the subject makes the evil a greater evil, but in certain situations he can be made to suffer it anyway for the sake of a greater good. I would argue that if we are in danger of occupation by a foreign power we can in fact conscript able-bodied people to serve in the armed forces, if there are insufficient volunteers.

Anyway, if it could be shown that a gratuitous evil actually in fact exists, then evidently “classical” theism collapses, for it holds to the existence of an OOO God (it would still be possible to believe in the existence of non-OOO Gods). I hold that: 1) the traditional beliefs of Christianity regarding sin, hell, and damnation are, in fact, beliefs in the existence of gratuitous evils; and 2) in fact for this reason early Christian theology did not believe in an omnibenevolent God. Later attempts to resolve this conflict (since Christianity claims to believe in an OOO God) have either involved denial of traditional beliefs regarding hell (universalism) or else denial of one of the two other O’s, either omniscience (“Open View theology”) or omnipotence (the “free will defense”).

According to Christian theology, sin and its consequences (damnation and hell) are the worst evils. Only the greatest of goods could therefore constitute a sufficient reason for allowing them without their being gratuitous evils. More on the next post…

 

[SeekingCatholic]

If God allows the evil of sin for a greater good, it could only be for the greater good of 1) the person sinning; 2) others; or 3) Himself. This “greater good” can only be spiritual/moral, since according to Christian theology even the slightest sin is a greater evil balanced against even the greatest of material goods; it’s not permissible to tell even the slightest lie even to save one’s life, or even the lives of 100,000. Let’s analyze each of these possibilities in turn. We’ll see that only a sliver of a case can be made out for “ordinary” sin, which I can refute, and there is no case whatsoever when it comes to the sin of final impenitence.

1). It could be that sin could eventually lead to the greater spiritual/moral good of the sinner. Some spiritual writers indeed say that God allows one to fall into sin so that he will realize his own weakness and not become puffed up with pride and self-righteousness. Since pride, according to Christian spirituality, is the worst of sins, it might seem that some sort of case could be made here - God allowing a fall into one sin in order to prevent a fall into worse ones. But an omnipotent God need not use this to prevent the sin of pride. In fact the most humble people - Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary did not, in fact, need to be “humbled” in this way. God could enlighten their minds such that they would certainly know what they would do without His help - which is sufficient knowledge to result in humility, without their actually having to do the sin in question, which makes the evil gratuitous. Moreover, no case whatsoever can be made here for the sin of final impenitence - that results in eternal hell, and can in no way be said to result in the greater good of the one sinning.

1. Sin of one person could certainly result, however, in the spiritual/moral good of others. Often, it clearly does. The actions of thugs and tyrants, etc., often result in heroism of others, even to the point of being willing to give up their lives. The heroism of the soldiers on the beaches of Normandy wouldn’t have been possible but for the sins of Hitler and the Nazis. But, God could provide plenty of opportunities for practicing fortitude (and the other virtues) without needing the sins of others: wild beasts, natural disasters, and so on. But the sin of final impenitence can hardly benefit others. There is a distinction between open final impenitence (the person dies with blasphemy on his lips), and occult final impenitence (he’s been in a coma for years so no one really has a clue about his spiritual state). Open final impenitence could possibly benefit others, insofar as they realize they don’t want to die like that - but the good to be gained (as there are many other ways for God to instill the desire of a good death) can hardly outweigh the evil (eternal hell for the person in questin). Occult final impenitence benefits no one alive. What about the souls in heaven who “get” to look upon the damned? According to St. Thomas the souls of the just will derive pleasure from seeing the torment of the damned. But here the good is not proportionate to the evil. The just derive only an accidental increase in glory - they would still be perfectly happy in heaven, enjoying the Beatific Vision, even with no one in hell, while the damned lose all glory, and all happiness. It’s like murdering someone to get a tummy tuck.
2. This is logically impossible. God can gain no commensurate benefit out of some one sinning. In Christian theology mortal sin is an “infinite” offense against God. It’s true He gets glory out of punishing the reprobate - but He gets more glory out of rewarding the good. In Christian theology He is both merciful and just - but His mercy is a greater attribute than His justice - and He gets more glory out of showing mercy compared to showing justice.

Of course this is nothing new. Christian theologians have grappled with it for a long time. The early ones - and up through the Middle Ages - they got around it essentially by denying God’s omnibenevolence. More to come…

 

[SeekingCatholic]

As I said, the earliest Christian theology got around this problem by denying God’s omnibenevolence. It is not difficult to understand why. They believed in the wrathful, angry God of the Old Testament wreaking vengeance, who exterminated entire populations and, at one time, even the entire world.

That this is so is clear from the writings of those such as St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas. According to St. Paul, God chose some to be vessels of honor, others to be vessels of dishonor and wrath; according to St. Augustine, God selects only a few out of the massa damnata; this doctrine continues in the Thomistic concept of grace and predestination. (Of course, the early Protestant reformers and double-predestinationists such as Calvinists went even further.)

As St. Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans:

9:13. As it is written: Jacob I have loved: but Esau I have hated.

9:14. What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? God forbid!

9:15. For he saith to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And I will shew mercy to whom I will shew mercy.

9:16. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy.

9:17. For the scripture saith to Pharao: To this purpose have I raised thee, that I may shew my power in thee and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.

9:18. Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will. And whom he will, he hardeneth.

9:19. Thou wilt say therefore to me: Why doth he then find fault? For who resisteth his will?

**9:20. O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it: Why hast thou made me thus?

9:21. Or hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump, to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?

9:22. What if God, willing to shew his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction,

9:23. That he might shew the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy which he hath prepared unto glory?**

But it is not logically necessary that there be “vessels of wrath” in order for God to be able to show His riches of glory on the “vessels of mercy”, nor to make His power known. It is of course logically necessary for “vessels of wrath” to exist in order for God to able to show His wrath - but show it to whom? Here the good is not proportionate to the evil - the blessed gain only an accidental increase in glory - while the damned lose essential glory. Therefore the evil is gratuitous.

St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and the others did not speak in these precise terms of course, so one can only speculate as to whether they in fact realized the gratuity of the evil in question. However this only is relevant to what they subjectively realized, not the objective facts of the case - denying God’s omnibenevolence.

Unwilling to admit this, modern theology has taken a different tack. There are three different possible approaches, not without their own difficulties. The first two deal with denial of one of other “O”'s.

1. Deny God’s omniscience. (This is called “Open View theology”.) This denies that God can have infallible foreknowledge of future events - He only knows about events as they happen. Obviously then, He can not be held responsible for preventing evil if He does not know beforehand it will happen. This is a vast departure from Christian orthodoxy. And theoretically, however, while this does solve the problem of evil when applied to moral matters; it is still not without its own difficulties. This is because apparently God would need to be in the dark not only with regard to absolutely infallible foreknowledge, but also with regard to the likelihood of future events. He could instantiate a universe in which, even though He does not have infallible foreknowledge of future events, the likelihood of moral evil arising is close to zero. Unless, of course, He does not have knowledge about even the likelihood.
2. Deny God’s omnipotence. This is what partisans of the “free will” defense use. So the argument goes, in order to allow us to be free to choose good, God also had to allow us to be free to choose evil. Therefore, the evil is not gratuitous but exists for the sake of the greater good. This clearly confuses the potential for good or evil with its actuality; claiming that because evil exists potentially, it must exist in actuality. More importantly, it denies that God has the power to infallibly move a creature to freely choose good, and that therefore in some sense creatures must be freely choosing good on their own. This is also a vast departure from Christian orthodoxy and smacks of Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism. It also denies that God could instantiate a universe where, although every creature would be to free to choose evil, they in fact always chose good.

The final, most desperate attempt is this:

1. Change Christian teaching and deny the reality of hell - simply avoiding a good part of the problem altogether. But there is still the problem of sin and moral evil. Typically, they are seen as inevitable missteps in man’s learning process and journey to God. (Universalism and “process theology” often go hand in hand.) I may say I do not find this convincing at all. Why does man need a learning process and journey? Why can’t God create man with the necessary knowledge in the first place to avoid these “missteps”? There is still gratuitous evil even in this scenario.

 

[Benadam]

Are you saying that there is such a thing as evil?
Some Christians believe in god precisly becuase there is such a thing as evil.

I’ll repeat what Mother Therese said about why we have the poor. What she said speaks directly to human freedom.

"We have the poor because people refuse to share."

 

[Benadam]

I consider poverty to be an evil because it has the potential to cause immense suffering… I do not see how is that caused by “free will.”

Mother Therese said " We have the poor because people refuse to share."…that statement directly addresses human freedom.

 

[madeup_nickname]

I don’t buy the free will argument either. Who says that free will is a gift and that humankind is better off with it and suffering than without it and without suffering? Try asking a teenage sex slave or a murder victim’s family or any oppressed people and I bet most of them would answer that they would prefer a world where people’s actions were limited to good actions.

And yes, good comes out of evil, but evil comes out of good as well. I’ve seen it happen many times. And yes, I’ve heard the argument that all this “evil” will make sense when viewed from God’s position…like the evil is a necessary part of some divine artwork. Can’t buy that either…it seems inconsistent with the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God…If he were those things, couldn’t he have created this divine artwork without allowing evil?

So to answer the question of how do I deal with it, I am not sure yet. I am working my way through these options:

1. Do as other posters have suggested and revise the classical definitions of God. This makes a lot of sense to me. If Christ is the “image of the invisible God” and Christ was helpless on the cross and helpless to stop his betrayers, doesn’t it follow that God may be helpless too? It sometimes gives me comfort when I am going through something rough to think that God understands the helplessness I feel at being unable to change people and situations.
2. Just leave it a mystery and try to live out my faith and change the world in small ways. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In SILENCE by Shusako Endo, one of the final lines, addressed to Jesus after a long period of reflecting on the problem of evil, reads, “Even if you had been silent, my life would have spoken of you.” It seems that the only way God can work to improve the world is for humans to conform themselves to that ideal of love and carry out God’s work for him. So I try to remember that.
3. Or, I have to admit, I come very close to losing my faith almost on a daily basis because of this problem.

Interesting topic! I was actually going to ask this myself but then I found your thread. Thanks!

 

[davidv]

{snip}
So to answer the question of how do I deal with it, I am not sure yet. I am working my way through these options:

1. Do as other posters have suggested and revise the classical definitions of God. This makes a lot of sense to me. If Christ is the “image of the invisible God” and Christ was helpless on the cross and helpless to stop his betrayers, doesn’t it follow that God may be helpless too? It sometimes gives me comfort when I am going through something rough to think that God understands the helplessness I feel at being unable to change people and situations.

If we believe Christ’s words, He was not helpless on the cross. He was there as a free offering of Himself. So, what you propose cannot follow.

1. Just leave it a mystery and try to live out my faith and change the world in small ways. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In SILENCE by Shusako Endo, one of the final lines, addressed to Jesus after a long period of reflecting on the problem of evil, reads, “Even if you had been silent, my life would have spoken of you.” It seems that the only way God can work to improve the world is for humans to conform themselves to that ideal of love and carry out God’s work for him. So I try to remember that.
   !

Since each of us is finite, and God infinite, a certain amount of mystery is necessary. However, that doesn’t mean we must abandon pursuit of the understanding that we can acquire.

1. Or, I have to admit, I come very close to losing my faith almost on a daily basis because of this problem.

Interesting topic! I was actually going to ask this myself but then I found your thread. Thanks

At times like these it would be wise for all of to remember the fathers prayer in Mk 9:24

Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

 

[JLongoria]

I’m going to throw this out there, and I honestly want to know what the rest of you think.

I’ll start by saying that it seems that the problem of evil is nothing more than a way of trying to herd Christians in to the big fish tank of irrational thinking that secularists like to do (David Hume being the first one to try this); the argument is always presented as, “how can you worship a God that allows this to happen to you?”

However, I think a Christian can fairly easily answer the problem.

It’d do us well to define the One, True God in an argument like this. We can go with St. Aquinas’ view point of omnipotent and eternal, the being to which all perfections are assigned; in fact, He’s the only being to which this applies.

God’s attributes are contained within Himself. His omnipotence, His immutability, His will, are all things that are incorporated in to His perfect nature. That’s the important thing here: that His perfections exist within Him. I make this distinction, in similar line of thought with St. Aquinas and Francis Oakley, because some tend to argue as if though God exists in a similar manner as us, which is false (with the exception of Christ’s time with us).

The argument usually tends to imply that perfection creates perfection, yet nowhere in rational thought is there some maxim indicating that a perfect being should be able to instill perfection in to His creation. In fact, we exist outside of God, and are therefore imperfect by logical necessity.

This lends to an answer of moral evil, by explaining why we have our free will.

As St. Aquinas writes,
It is written (Ecclus. 15:14): “God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel”; and the gloss adds: “That is of his free will.”

Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Q83, Article 1

Elsewhere, St. Aquinas makes a distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers, a powerful distinction that is often overlooked by many. The absolute powers are the active powers effective within God’s eternal existence; the power to create, the power of omnipotence. His ordained powers are powers that are “passive”, being those that are enacted outside of Himself.

Now this part I’m sort of iffy on, so bear with me. Since these powers exist outside of God… well, they can’t be perfectly enacted. God’s Will then does not surpass our own free will in this created, temporal existence because God’s Will enacted within creation, and outside Himself, is not perfect (again, by logical necessity).

Why does Christ ask us to endure for His sake, and to pick up our crosses and follow Him? It is surely God’s Will that no evil should fall upon us; if we are to believe Scripture and Tradition, it might be hard to argue otherwise. God loves us, though we might not deserve it. We answer by saying that the entirety of Christian life is not for pleasure and reward in this life, but in the eternal reward that is taking part in His existence, and being fully ensconced in the Body of Christ as part of the Church Triumphant (which is why those who are saved become perfected in death).

Moral evil is something that all Christians are opposed to, but something we know must exist. Christians are implored, by Christ Himself, to endure that which we must, in order for assurance of salvation (which, by the way, is a power I’d place with God’s eternal powers).

Not quite sure as to what we can say about *natural evils *(inclement weather and things of the like). But I have faith that there is an answer…

 

[SeekingCatholic]

I’m going to throw this out there, and I honestly want to know what the rest of you think.

Sure.

I’ll start by saying that it seems that the problem of evil is nothing more than a way of trying to herd Christians in to the big fish tank of irrational thinking that secularists like to do (David Hume being the first one to try this); the argument is always presented as, “how can you worship a God that allows this to happen to you?”

No, that is NOT how the argument is always presented in philosophical circles, and you might start with a little intellectual honesty and refrain from poisoning the well.

However, I think a Christian can fairly easily answer the problem.

Hah. Christian theologians and philosophers have been grappling with it for centuries.

It’d do us well to define the One, True God in an argument like this. We can go with St. Aquinas’ view point of omnipotent and eternal, the being to which all perfections are assigned; in fact, He’s the only being to which this applies.

God’s attributes are contained within Himself. His omnipotence, His immutability, His will, are all things that are incorporated in to His perfect nature. That’s the important thing here: that His perfections exist within Him. I make this distinction, in similar line of thought with St. Aquinas and Francis Oakley, because some tend to argue as if though God exists in a similar manner as us, which is false (with the exception of Christ’s time with us).

OK, fine.

The argument usually tends to imply that perfection creates perfection, yet nowhere in rational thought is there some maxim indicating that a perfect being should be able to instill perfection in to His creation. In fact, we exist outside of God, and are therefore imperfect by logical necessity.

Whoops. First a perfect being is able to instill some perfection to His creation, otherwise it wouldn’t exist at all. Lesser beings than God still have some perfections, just not all of them, in this sense “imperfect”, but you are trying to equivocate and use “imperfect” in the sense of “defective”.

This lends to an answer of moral evil, by explaining why we have our free will.

As St. Aquinas writes,
It is written (Ecclus. 15:14): “God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel”; and the gloss adds: “That is of his free will.”

Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Q83, Article 1

In scholasticism free will arises as a consequence of God creating rational creatures.

Elsewhere, St. Aquinas makes a distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers, a powerful distinction that is often overlooked by many. The absolute powers are the active powers effective within God’s eternal existence; the power to create, the power of omnipotence. His ordained powers are powers that are “passive”, being those that are enacted outside of Himself.

Now this part I’m sort of iffy on, so bear with me. Since these powers exist outside of God… well, they can’t be perfectly enacted. God’s Will then does not surpass our own free will in this created, temporal existence because God’s Will enacted within creation, and outside Himself, is not perfect (again, by logical necessity).

God’s “ordained” powers refer to secondary causality, but He is still the First Mover, according to scholasticism, even he wills that secondary causes should intervene. Thus His Will is perfectly enacted, even if He delegates causal agency to other entities. By this logic it is not his perfect will that an apple drops to the ground, since here only His ordained powers are at work.

Why does Christ ask us to endure for His sake, and to pick up our crosses and follow Him? It is surely God’s Will that no evil should fall upon us; if we are to believe Scripture and Tradition, it might be hard to argue otherwise. God loves us, though we might not deserve it. We answer by saying that the entirety of Christian life is not for pleasure and reward in this life, but in the eternal reward that is taking part in His existence, and being fully ensconced in the Body of Christ as part of the Church Triumphant (which is why those who are saved become perfected in death).

This is an acceptable response to natural evils that we endure, but not to the question of moral evil.

Moral evil is something that all Christians are opposed to, but something we know must exist.

No. An omnipotent God has the power to prevent all moral evil. The claim is that moral evil is gratuitous, not being necessitated for the sake of a greater good.

 

[JLongoria]

It’s my understanding that St. Aquinas thought of the potentia de absoluta as somewhat of a “hypothetical possibility”, rather than something that is present and enacted.

I’ve got a good article for you to read on it, if you’re so inclined.

Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers

I must say that I rather believe that the problem of evil, if it’s going to involve this distinction, is going to require the inclusion of theology as well as philosophy.

No, that is NOT how the argument is always presented in philosophical circles, and you might start with a little intellectual honesty and refrain from poisoning the well.

In philosophical circles, maybe not so much. Yet in its current fashion, that is how it is typically presented; deny that much all you want, but the argument always takes on this air of “supremacy”, an almost “I gotcha!” moment for atheists and secularists.

Hah. Christian theologians and philosophers have been grappling with it for centuries.

Please, don’t start by being impolite. I’m very aware of the history of this problem; I just don’t believe that the problem is all that big and bad as many would portray it.

Whoops. First a perfect being is able to instill some perfection to His creation, otherwise it wouldn’t exist at all. Lesser beings than God still have some perfections, just not all of them, in this sense “imperfect”, but you are trying to equivocate and use “imperfect” in the sense of “defective”.

Whoops. Why can’t creation exist if there is no perfection in it? Hasn’t the Church always taught that is because of Man’s fallen, and imperfect, nature that Christ’s sacrifice is necessary? And what’s more is that all of creation is fallen, and still awaits its redemption.

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

Romans 8:22-23

It’s always been my understanding (and not mine alone) that the only reason creation exists is because God wills it to be so.

Rational beings though we are, our will and our intellects are not created perfectly. We can’t even discover God on our own; we require His unending grace. Thus may we be brought to perfection, but that is not our unchanging nature.

God’s “ordained” powers refer to secondary causality, but He is still the First Mover, according to scholasticism, even he wills that secondary causes should intervene. Thus His Will is perfectly enacted, even if He delegates causal agency to other entities. By this logic it is not his perfect will that an apple drops to the ground, since here only His ordained powers are at work.

Side note: Yves Simon would be rather disappointed with your references such as “according to scholasticism”, seeing as there was no scholastic doctrine of unity…

You bring up a good point, but also consider that concerning moral evil (that is, evil imparted upon humans by other human beings), humans are not always seconary agents of God’s will. Because of the free will that results from being rational creatures (and if you suppose the disction of potentia de absoluta et ordinata, by merely being creatures that exist outside of God’s perfection), moral evil occurs by the very fact that we fail to act as secondary agents in the Will of God.

We’d be careful to use “The Laws of Nature” as an arguing point. That line of thinking didn’t arise until the likes of Newton and Boyle, which as a result attempted to make the argument an entirely philosophical one, almost undermining the prior theological sensibilities of the Scholastics.

We can’t hardly disagree if we say that, “if everyone loved and followed God, there would d be no evil”. It’s true; we’d then be secondary agents in God’s will, bringing His will to enacted perfection in us - as is His intention. We’d erradicate moral evil right then and there.

This has yet to happen.

We can’t be so quick to run our philosophical mouths (I’m equally as guilty of this) without paying attention to the theological nature of the argument as well. If we believed in a God that was more of a god (in the lower-case), this argument probably wouldn’t apply to Catholics, or Christians in-general, as severely.

Yet it does because we believe in the One, True God, and we have an entire Tradition of God that we must adhere to if we wish to keep this thoroughly Catholic.

 

[MindOverMatter]

No. An omnipotent God has the power to prevent all moral evil.

Yes, but at the expense of freewill. God’s nature is love; God cannot contradict his nature; however this is not a limitation, but a consequence of the nature of being God. For example, God cannot exist and not exist at the same time; and neither would we expect an all powerful God to do so. Since being all powerful only means that God has all the power, or is the root of all the power that exists. If God did not exist, he would not be all powerful. Being all powerful, does not mean that God can do irrational and meaningless things. Therefore, God being love, has given us the freewill to conduct ourselves and our destiny as we so please.

The claim is that moral evil is gratuitous, not being necessitated for the sake of a greater good.

First we have to know what the greater good is by nature, in order to claim that it is not necessary. Since we do not know; it simply a matter of faith. One must believe, if one so chooses, that God has good reasons for allowing evil. We must also accept that there is also such a thing as good in the world as well as evil, if we are to speak of an evil. If the greater good, that which is the end goal of reality, is greater then the finite suffering that we will experience in this life, then God is justified in allowing evil; since God is the greater good, and so unification with such a being ought to be desired by man. It is objectively true that God is worth suffering for, dying for, and risking eternal hell for and that is why we exist despite those harsh realities and possibilities. Are refusal to accept such a truth, is not due to our having knowledge to the contrary, but is due to our being deceived by our own selfish concerns on earth, in the here and now. But if we truly knew heaven, we would know that it is worth being raped for, murdered for, slaughtered for, poisoned for, abused for, bombed for, and any other horrible thing that you could think of. As far as hells concerned, it is impossible for good people to go there. You ought to desire the greater good; the greater good is eternal, and therefore a life time of rejection has eternal consequences. Your freedom is respected, and as soon as we accept that God owes us nothing, we understand that it is we who condemn our selves. If the good that comes out of existence, outweighs evil, (e.g. you in heaven) then God is justified.

If we take God out of the picture, and replace God with a different concept such as a utopian society where everybody benefits, it is evident that we all desire the greater good that could come from such a society, even though we may greatly disagree about what such a society ought to be like. And despite the fact that it could all go wrong, people could die, people could suffer, people could rebel against the greater good, the mere fact that such a good is obtainable, brings worth and value to the possible suffering of our children and future generations, and so some feel and many have felt that it justifies it; and we can say that we do it because we love our children, because the greater good is worth it, and we want the greater good for future generations despite the sacrifices we have to make now. But if we are so concerned with the possible suffering that our future unborn children may endure, and think it to be for no reason, then we should all be sterilized, so as to allow the human race to become extinct. Then there will be no more suffering.

If there is no such thing as heaven or the greater good, then I agree. Evil is gratuitous. Forgive me; let me refrase. If there is no God, then there is no difference between one act or the other. There is no good or evil. First we must accept that there is a God, and then we can ponder as to why he allows evil.

 

[SeekingCatholic]

I must say that I rather believe that the problem of evil, if it’s going to involve this distinction, is going to require the inclusion of theology as well as philosophy.

I don’t see how. This distinction is a philosophical one.

Please, don’t start by being impolite. I’m very aware of the history of this problem; I just don’t believe that the problem is all that big and bad as many would portray it.

Sed contra, I believe the problem is much worse than most see it, and certainly worse than seen by many apologists, who are easily refuted.

Whoops. Why can’t creation exist if there is no perfection in it?

Think about it. Does has a soul in heaven have absolutely no perfection at all? The fact that a rational entity has an intellect and will; these are perfections.

Hasn’t the Church always taught that is because of Man’s fallen, and imperfect, nature that Christ’s sacrifice is necessary?

Yes, but the Church has certainly not taught that man’s nature was always fallen and imperfect in the sense of “defective”.

And what’s more is that all of creation is fallen, and still awaits its redemption.

Due to original sin only, and not due to any intrinsic defect at the time of creation.

It’s always been my understanding (and not mine alone) that the only reason creation exists is because God wills it to be so.

Yes.

Rational beings though we are, our will and our intellects are not created perfectly. We can’t even discover God on our own; we require His unending grace. Thus may we be brought to perfection, but that is not our unchanging nature.

But why aren’t they created “perfectly”, with all the perfection demanded by their possession by a rational creature?

God could create rational beings with perfect wills and intellects; he could have “taken a mulligan”, so to speak, with regard to original sin, or done many other things. You seem to be regarding the present state of affairs as necessary whereas it is only contingent.

You bring up a good point, but also consider that concerning moral evil (that is, evil imparted upon humans by other human beings), humans are not always seconary agents of God’s will.

This is true.

Because of the free will that results from being rational creatures (and if you suppose the disction of potentia de absoluta et ordinata, by merely being creatures that exist outside of God’s perfection), moral evil occurs by the very fact that we fail to act as secondary agents in the Will of God.

You seem to be regarding moral evil as necessary, and a necessary consequence of free will. That won’t wash.

We can’t hardly disagree if we say that, “if everyone loved and followed God, there would d be no evil”. It’s true; we’d then be secondary agents in God’s will, bringing His will to enacted perfection in us - as is His intention. We’d erradicate moral evil right then and there.

This has yet to happen.

But if this is His intention, that why doesn’t it happen? If the answer is our resistance to Him, then why doesn’t He act to overcome that, if He is omnipotent?

We can’t be so quick to run our philosophical mouths (I’m equally as guilty of this) without paying attention to the theological nature of the argument as well. If we believed in a God that was more of a god (in the lower-case), this argument probably wouldn’t apply to Catholics, or Christians in-general, as severely.

Yet it does because we believe in the One, True God, and we have an entire Tradition of God that we must adhere to if we wish to keep this thoroughly Catholic.

That’s true. That’s why the “free will defense” doesn’t work. It denies the traditional concept of God’s omnipotence.

 

[MindOverMatter]

The fact that a rational entity has an intellect and will; these are perfections.

The perfection is in the end that such things were created for; and that is God. The perfection of Man, is found only in the union of Man and God, for Man is nothing by itself.