Problem of Evil | Catholic Central 

Hi Little Strappy, we are so sorry to hear that your dad left you. We are not on a place to judge your father but realize that you are suffering. While the reasons he left may not have been evil ones, what you are feeling now is despair and is often the result of the negative influences that come from large events in our life. If you and your mum are still suffering, we would urge you to find support from family and friends, let them know what you are feeling. Be true to them and yourself, listen to them and be open to reconciliation with your father, if the opportunity presents itself.

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Hi PotterBricks, thank you so much for the kind words. It is posts such as these that makes us feel like we are doing what we are called to do. May God bless you as well.

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I've also never heard of a baby murdering anyone. Do babies not have free will then? Of course it's obvious that babies don't have the ability to do that, which begs the question: Why is it so important that we have the ability to harm each other? And if it is so important that we can do evil, then why limit that ability? If humans had the ability of damn each other, would we have more "free will"?

@Chad: God's free will is always governed by the good, no matter how mysterious his idea of the good may seem to us. God also gives us free will and, as such, it is up to each of us how we use it. Some may use it for the good ("stepping in to help") in imitation of the goodness God reveals in Jesus. Some may use it for evil (the assailant), contrary to what God wants for us all.

@@CatholicCentralVideos Hi, thank you for taking the time to address my question. Hope you don’t mind bearing with me while I try to make sense of your answer. “God wishes our free will to also be governed by the good ("stepping in to help"), the human good as revealed by himself in Jesus.” If God’s will is governed by the good, and if God’s reason for not intervening to stop a murder is that he wants people to be able to exercise their free will, it follows that allowing people to exercise their free will (i.e. not stepping in to help) is good. If stepping in to help is good, and not stepping in to help is *_also_* good, then what reason is there to think that God would prefer that a bystander step in to help, as opposed to not stepping in to help? Jesus telling us to be good to one another wouldn’t answer that question, because both options are good.

@@royms2000 Those are good questions as well.

@royms2000, We’ve been pondering your idea of limits. Babies, we think you’re saying, are limited in their ability to hurt others even though they have free will, so why can’t adults be limited in the same way? Let’s take our ability to speak, which can either help or hurt. Why doesn’t our brain include some kind of biochemical mechanism that automatically limits our speech when it veers toward hurt? God had a better idea for that (as usual), and it’s called conscience, designed to govern not only our speech but all our actions and behaviors. Conscience doesn’t control us like a car with a speed-limiter. It’s something we forge ourselves through reason and experience and discipline and God’s help. Conscience preserves our dignity as human persons made in the image of God’s freedom. This is good in the largest cosmic sense. Failure to put limits on our abilities by mindfully and morally applying our conscience is our failure, not God’s. (See our episode on Formation of Conscience). Your second point, royms2000 - why not expand free will to include the freedom to damn others? - is really hard to imagine: thousands upon thousands of us condemning each other to eternal perdition whenever we feel like it. Apparently, God couldn’t imagine it either.

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It may interest you to know that that was one of the first gags we scripted for the whole series!

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Exactly, Stephen, we know suffering and pain because of the natural order of things. “All creation is groaning,” says Paul in Romans 8:22. Remember, this is different from saying that suffering and pain is punishment for sins we have individually committed. We all know good people who have died from disease or mishap. Jesus tells us that God “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45). Saints and sinners will each know suffering as well as gladness, “a time to mourn and a time to dance.” All in the natural order, for now. We wait in Christian hope for the time when the present order will become the more perfect order of Paradise, like the vision of the Garden in Genesis. In that new Eden we will experience the promises of Revelation where suffering and pain will be no more, and every tear shall be wiped away.

Hi Dennis, thank you for your insight. We, as Catholics, believe that we were given the ability to choose our own paths. As we move along our path, we are presented with choices to do good and choices to do evil, but we make that choice, God does not make it for us. But you are saying that since God gave us that free will, he is ultimately responsible for our choices. We would have to disagree with that. Suppose a person grows up in a home that is filled with love and compassion, they are given everything they need in life and are doted on by their parents. Suppose, in their high school years, that same person starts to hang around with a group of bad kids. It starts innocently enough, maybe skipping a class here and there, but eventually he chooses to go down the wrong path. Eventually our person finds themselves in a life of crime. This is an oversimplification, but, would you blame the parents? Even if they did and continue to do everything possible to help their child? In your example, from a Catholic perspective, we're a bit at odds with your logic. First of all, we do not know that a person, let alone a child, is doomed to Hell for stealing an apple. For an act to be a sin, the person has to have the ability to discern that they are making a sin, so this child - who has no way of making that discernment - would not have been in a state of “grave mortal danger.” Also, as a society, we might condemn this child for stealing and some really hardened people might say this poor child deserved what he got, but we as Catholics believe that God is merciful. His love and patience overrides everything we do here on earth. As Catholics, we do not believe that this child - or any child - would automatically be damned.

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Hi Fabio. Yes, bad things happen to animals and, unlike human beings, these animals are innocent. As such, nothing they do can be considered “evil.” Much of the time, this fact makes their suffering even more poignant than our own. The predatory food-chain and other perils of the wild that animals experience seem especially harsh to us. Nature too, then, experiences the mystery of evil, “groaning in labor pains” (Romans 18:22) as it shares our own broken journey toward the ultimate good that God wills for his creation -- the vision of “shalom,” a kingdom of peace and justice where “the wolf will lie down with the lamb.” (Isaiah 11:6). Until then, Jesus asks us to “proclaim the gospel to all of creation” (Mark 16:15). As good stewards of creation we must minister to those of God’s creatures who have neither voice nor choice. We need to enforce all civil laws against acts of cruelty to animals. We need to live in harmony with creation and in ways that do not destroy natural ecosystems and entire species just because of our own insatiable appetites. We need to reconsider how our consumption affects the health of God’s creation, our home, which we have poisoned, plowed over, and polluted in the name of meat for our tables. We must do all of this and more, with the hope that “creation itself will be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Romans 18:21)

Are you referring to animal abuse or predator and prey? If animal abuse, that is caused by humans. That is our issue. If predator and prey, that is how nature is. You need to have a balance in nature. Animals need to kill eachother to survive.

Hi Keith, would you care to enlighten us? What have we missed?

@@CatholicCentralVideos You video is based on the free will defence where evil is the consequence of the negative choice resulting from man's ability to choose between good and evil. This defence lays the blame completely on Man where god does not seem to have or exercise any control (if god had control then there's no free will). It's a convenient way to exonerate god from also having a malevolent nature (although the old testament is full of such instances) and this defence does not answer all questions relating to suffering or evil. You did make a mention of the Holocaust; how does this free will defence fit in here? Six million of god's chosen were deprived of their capacity of exercising their own free will. Where's the logic in that? Secondly, you attribute to god human emotions: you say that god suffers with us. Do you actually know that? We as humans attribute to god human emotions in order to feel a connection while at the same time profess that god is a supernatural being devoid of a physical body or human weaknesses. Finally, you say that evil is just a temporary worldly thing because eternal life is the prize and reward for those who suffer. So basically you're saying that while life can be unfair, all this will be better in the afterlife. Why is this apologetic belief acceptable to you? It is not to me. I do not accept a being that holds a carrot in front of me as a prize in order to do its bidding.

Hi Keith, Thank you for your passionate response, not only to our episode but to the problem of evil itself that fills you with such moral outrage. St Augustine would call this an "Instance of Desire", a heartfelt yearning for the good, the true and the beautiful, words that many use to describe God. But how could God be these things and still allow the evils you speak of? Some might answer by wondering if these qualities could even exist without their opposite. Can we know what harmony is unless we know discord? Can we have a sense of the good if there is no darkness to measure it? Without its opposite does truth cease to be a meaningful virtue? Most of us would find these formulations unsatisfactory, even tasteless, especially at street level where we suffer the consequences of such a universe - a beautiful planet where hurricanes wander freely, a beautiful humanity that freely wills pillage and suffering. We believe these conundrums would be unanswerable if the Creator were, say, the deists’ Clock Maker who winds up his universe and walks away. But if the Hebrew Bible teaches us anything it’s that God does not walk away. God is a “jealous” God (Exodus 34:14). And for the iron-age writers of the allegorical potboiler that much of the early bible is, a jealous God is a God who cares. The inconstancy of the Israelites causes Yahweh to wail like a jilted lover. But if we think it almost quaintly anthropomorphic that scripture assigns human emotions to the Deity, the New Testament denies such a claim, as God brings his love to us in a form we can see and touch, entering his universe of goodness, truth and beauty as Jesus to suffer with us on the cross. The great Jewish chronicler of the horrors of the holocaust, Elie Wiesel, was asked where God was when a boy was hanged in Auschwitz for all the prisoners to see. “God is here,” he replied, “He is hanging from the gallows.” The evil logic of the holocaust that his readers sought to penetrate is turned on its head by the recognition that God truly, physically walks, lives and suffers with us and because of this we shall prevail. Jesus experiences rejection and betrayal as we do, weeps for his dead friend Lazarus as we would do, and his excruciation in the worst torture the Romans could inflict changes everything. His rising liberates us from the existential anguish of a life without meaning or hope. We do not have to wait to die to experience the reality that in this universe we will suffer but we will never suffer alone, and we will also know goodness, and troves of beauty, and a truth that sets us free.

In Genesis, we read that after God created humankind, he declared all that he made as being "Good". The Catholic Church teaches that there is evil in this world but since the world is the creation of God and God cannot create "bad" then the world is good.