6.3 Is there Evil in God? (SCG 1,39)
6.3 Is there Evil in God? (SCG 1,39)
If you think that God is “goodness itself,” then you are hardly likely to suppose that there is evil or badness in God. You will think, as Aquinas does at the start of SCG 1,39, that “it is quite evident that there cannot be evil in God.”9 However, in the same chapter Aquinas spells out a number of arguments for this supposition. Here I shall summarize them very briefly since, as you will note, they just elaborate on what Aquinas takes to be implications of what he has been saying in the SCG up to this point.
1. If God is goodness itself, then there can be no nongoodness in him.
2. If God’s essence is goodness, then there can be no evil in God unless God ceased to be God, which is impossible since God is eternal, as noted in SCG 1,15.
3. Since God does not have his being as existing alongside other things (as something that participates in being and is not Being Itself), then, if there is evil in God, it follows that God is essentially evil. But nothing can be essentially evil since evil arises in what exists, and is therefore good to some extent.
4. Evil is “the opposite of good.”10 But goodness involves perfection, and God is perfect without qualification (see SCG 1,28). So there is no evil in God.
5. An imperfect thing fails somehow when it comes to being actual. “Evil is a privation or includes privation.” But “the subject of privation is potency, which cannot be in God. Neither, therefore, can evil.”11
6. Things sometimes suffer from evil because something is thwarting them in some way. But nothing can mess around with God since God is wholly simple and is the reason why anything other than God exists and acts.