28. God and evil
28. GOD AND EVIL
I don’t understand how to get God off the hook for all kinds of evil in the world He created. How can we trust Him completely if He is implicit in evil?
Augustine says that God is not the author of evil because He is not the cause of tending to non-being. (a) The order of the universe requires . . . that there should be some things that can and do sometimes fail. . . . (b) The order of justice . . . requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners. And so God is the author of the evil which is penalty, (c) but not of the evil which is fault (I,49,2).
There are three kinds of evil: (a) the evil of physical imperfection or failure or emotional suffering (e.g., death, disease, or depression), (b) the evil of punishment, or penalty for moral evil, and (c) the evil of fault, or sin. All three have this in common: they all destroy something good.
God is the author of being, not nonbeing. Therefore God is not the author of evil. But He (a) allows physical imperfections for the sake of preserving the order of the universe, (b) wills the punishment of sins for the sake of preserving justice, and (c) allows sin to be chosen for the sake of preserving free will. In all three ways He is perfectly good, and perfectly trustable.
It is possible, but not easy, for us to accept and love these three things God does.
(a) We wish He would instantly re-create the universe and make all of it physically perfect and pain-free.
(b) And we wish He would let us get away with sin without punishing us; that there would be no punishment and no justice, only mercy.
(c) And we wish He would make us instant saints by force and zap us into the Beatific Vision in Heaven rather than tolerating our slow and sinful, twisting and turning earthly roads to Heaven.
But (a) would mean the end of pain and therefore also the end of compassion and courage; we would become flabby, amoral, lazy, spoiled, and inhuman, like the people in Brave New World.
And (b) would mean that He, and therefore we too, would cease to be moral at all, for justice is presupposed by all virtues, especially mercy: If there is no justice, how can mercy go beyond justice? And justice requires punishments.
Temporal (temporary) punishment is necessary not only for justice but also for our rehabilitation, to make us good; and goodness is necessary to make us perfectly happy; therefore it is His desire for our happiness, that is, it is His mercy and compassion and love for us, that demands that we be punished because that is what is best for us, that is what we need, even when it is not what we want. The very tenderness of His tender love requires “tough love”.
And (c) would make us zombies or robots. A Heaven we entered without our own will and free choice would be like an A on a test that our father took for us instead of our taking it ourselves.
So in all these ways in which He tolerates evil, He does so only out of His goodness. The practical “bottom line” of this theology is that we can totally trust Him and love Him, for He is the author of only good and not evil in all three of these ways.
This means that we can pray, “Thanks, I needed that” when we experience pains, even when we don’t see or feel that we needed it. That’s called faith.
If we don’t have that kind of faith, but want it, we can pray, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”