I recently heard on a local Catholic Radio station talk show that God allows terrible evil in the world to make it easier for us to choose good. To me this sounds about as lame as another opinion I heard given in a talk by some seminarians a while back, on the same station, that said, God created Hell and made it so horrible so that we would be easier motivated to seek Heaven. These sound like very lame reasons. On the surface they sound good enough for the average pious but ignorant Catholic who listens to these “feel good” programs for inspiration. But I can’t buy them. Can someone point me to a scholarly source that I can trust for more believable answers? Thanks.
Hi Clark,
I certainly am not a "scholarly source’, probably I am a “a pious but ignorant Catholic” , but here is something to chew on.
In the intellectual battle for the minds of man, of the three modalities of non-believe - materialist, skeptic, and cynic - it is the cynic that poses the toughest challenge. It is the cynic that raises the question of the existence of evil when he asks, “Why does God allow evil?”
In any argument with the cynical materialist, believers must deal with the question: “If there is a God and God is good, why did he create a world that is so evil?” The presence of evil in the world has always been a mystery to mankind. What is needed to help counter the cynic’s argument is a practical answer that seems plausible. I, of course, do not know why God created evil, but I have arrived at an answer that seems possible and plausible to me. I am not a theologian, but I can read the dogmas and I can’t find in what follows anything that is prohibited by dogma.
To address evil we must first define it. I view evil in three modalities: personal evil (sin); social evil (injustice such as bigotry, slavery, tyranny) and natural evil (tragedy such as earthquakes, tornadoes, plagues). The question now is: why does God allow: sin, injustice, and tragedy? Here I address personal evil.
Before going further I can imagine the scrupulous jumping up and down and waving their hands in vitriolic disbelief when they read that I believe that God creates sin. No, I am not saying God created sin, I am merely presenting the question. Creation is an act of actualization of a possibility and an act is not evil until a possibility is actualized and in the case of personal evil, it is the person that actualizes the possibility (gives in to temptation) that creates the evil.
God is the realm of possibility, meaning that all things that are possible reside in the Mind of God. Evil is a possibility. But possibility is not evil. Whatever evil is possible doesn’t exist until it is actualized. For God to eliminate evil, He must first actualize it in a way that was separated from His own Being so that evil in no way was a part of Him. And as long as evil remains a possibility and not an actuality, it doesn’t exist. Consequently, the method God chose to eliminate evil was to create a scenario whereby evil could be actualized and eliminated bit by bit apart from Himself. Hence, the creation of human beings. God created us to eliminate evil.
God provided an example in the scriptures in temptation in the desert when after forty days of hunger Jesus was tempted three times and refused the temptation thus setting an example for humans to follow when tempted with a choice.
God recognizes the possibility of a sin of adultery that can only be actualized by a pair of humans. “Recognizing the possibility” is not evil; the possibility only becomes evil if the possibility is actualized when adultery takes place. If a pair of humans when confronted with the temptation to commit adultery, choose not to do so, they prevent the actualization of evil and effectively eliminate the possibility of that specific actualization of evil. A finite bit of the possibility of evil has been erased from the Mind of God. Given the repetition of all the specific occasions of sin that have confronted mankind and were actualized as evil will in some later repetition of that same specific occasion of sin will not be actualized until all the possibility of sin is eliminated from the Mind of God.
I can address the other modalities separately, but not now.
Yppop
Every advantage has a corresponding disadvantage!