Pete Brown
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Dear Catholic Exchange:
I was wondering why God created evil. It is a huge question I have recently begun to wonder about and am yet to find an answer, I am a committed Catholic but I can’t actually think of a sensible reason for God allowing evil if He is all good. Also, in the book of Genesis we are to understand that it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat. If they didn’t have a knowledge of good and evil were they really understanding the seriousness of taking the apple? If not, surely the punishment of original sin and termination from heaven (until Jesus came to save us) is rather severe. I would greatly appreciate some clarity on these issues.
Thanks,
Jennifer Webster
Dear Ms. Webster:
Peace in Christ!
You ask very good questions, both of which touch upon a great mystery, the mystery of evil. Bear in mind that no mystery can be exhaustively understood. As the Catechism says, “Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question” (no. 309). Note that “Christian faith,” is not “the Christian faith,” meaning that a verbal explanation will not suffice. “The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil” (ibid., no. 324).
First, we must ask what is evil before we can try to understand in what way God could be associated with it. The glossary of the Catechism defines evil as follows:
The opposite or absence of good. One form of evil, physical evil, is a result of the “state of journeying” toward its ultimate perfection in which God created the world, involving the existence of the less perfect alongside the more perfect, the constructive and destructive forces of nature, the appearance and disappearance of certain beings (Catechism, no. 310). Moral evil, however, results from the free choice to sin which angels and men have; it is permitted by God, who knows how to derive good from it, in order to respect the freedom of his creatures (no. 311). The entire revelation of God's goodness in Christ is a response to the existence of evil (nos. 309, 385, 1707). The devil is called the Evil One.The first sentence really is the key to answering your question. Evil is not a thing in and of itself. It is the absence of a thing, namely good. Good is a thing which does exist in and of itself. It exists first and foremost in God who is His own supreme, eternal, and infinite Goodness. It is impossible that evil could exist in God. Evil is really a nonentity or a privation like darkness. Darkness is not a thing either but is really just the result when light is taken away. So good and evil do not have equal standing. Good exists in itself. Evil is a kind of parasite which exists only in some relation to things that are good.
This will become clearer when we consider the two primary types of evil which we humans experience: physical evil and moral evil. Examples of physical evils include natural disasters, diseases, sicknesses, and so forth. As the definition above indicates, all created things strive for perfection of their nature because this is how God has created the universe. Physical evil is largely the result of having a material universe where living creatures all try to seek their natural fulfillment, but sometimes they must do it at the expense of other creatures. Rabbits eat grass which is good for rabbits but bad for grass. Coyotes eat rabbits which is good for them but bad for rabbits. Still the whole cycle is for the greater good of all living things; when rabbits and coyotes die they fertilize the grass and whole pattern begins again. God's loving Providence is not too difficult to see in the truths of biology if they are seen with an open mind. In this limited sense, God can be said to have created evil. God created coyotes which are good in themselves. Yet in relation to rabbits coyotes are experienced as evil. Another example serves. God created the oceans which are good as are all things that God made. They are a major source of sustenance for people here on earth. But as it relates to the victims of the recent tsunami, the ocean probably seems quite evil right now. Also, God created bacteria which are good too as are all created things. But some bacteria can make people very sick, and so sick people will see the bacteria as evil in relation to them. This is one way in which God can be said to have “created evil.” He created things which while good in themselves can seem evil relative to other created things. But two things must be remembered about the evil that these things can produce. First, the evil results are really the loss or privation of some good thing, and are evil relative only to the being that experienced the loss. Even deadly bacteria are not completely evil for it is at least good in that it exists. Second, even the evil of privation of human life that bacteria may cause can and will be used by God to bring about some greater good — a person has to die of something after all to be able to enjoy eternal life.
Moral evil is a greater problem. Part of it is due to human free will with which God made us, knowing that we might misuse it. But again moral evil is most definitely a privation. The freewill of man is good as it is created but only becomes evil as it is misused or directed toward objects which are opposed to God. God who is all good can never be the direct immediate source of moral evil but He can be the indirect or mediate source. God created the devil with an angelic nature that was very good. Though the devil has freely misused that nature to cause great moral evil in the world, the nature that the devil possesses remains good and thus even the devil can be said to be “good” insofar as he exists as a created being. Again, in a limited sense God “created evil” though of course the devil was not evil when he was created. The devil became evil later by his own free choice. Still we ultimately cannot escape the question of why God allows the devil or evil men to continue in existence. Freewill by itself does not completely answer the question of why. The saints in heaven and the blessed angels are wholly free but do not sin. The same must be said of God who is both supremely free and supremely good.
St. Paul calls sin a great mystery (2 Thess. 2:7). One of the greatest minds in the history of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, believed that the existence of moral evil was one of the best arguments — and really the only argument against the existence of God. His ultimate solution is really borrowed from St. Augustine who says that even evil caused by human or angelic free will would not exist if it did not serve the greater good — that is, if God could not bring greater good out of it. God has allowed great evil through history because the privations in creation that it causes provide the occasion by which God acts superabundantly to fill up. Some evil is easily explainable this way. The greatest evil in human history-the evil of the crucifixion of Jesus, wrought at the hand of the devil and evil man, produced the greater good of our salvation. In other evil, it is admittedly harder to see the good that has come or will come but it is here that we must trust in God through Christian faith to show us the real reason that bad things happen.
Still God can never create evil as evil. He can only create good things which are evil only as they relate to other things (oceans, volcanoes, disease causing bacteria etc.). Or he can create good things which freely choose to corrupt their basic goodness (bad angels and bad men) and so are permitted to become evil — though in a manner that works in the end to the greatest good. Both moral and physical evils are quite real, though they have no existence at all except in relation to good things. These evils could not exist apart from God and His providential government of the universe.
Your second question pertains to Adam and Eve and their subjective culpability for disobedience to God's command and its effect on the rest of the human race.
First let us consider the doctrine of original sin itself which is expressed in the Catechism, no. 402:
All men are implicated in Adam's sin, as St. Paul affirms: “By one's man's disobedience many [that is, all men] were made sinners”: “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned. . . .” (Rom. 5:12, 19). The Apostle contrasts the universality of sin and death with the universality of salvation in Christ. “Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom. 5:18) (cf. Catechism, no. 403).Now your question about Adam and Eve amounts to what did the first parents know and when did they know it? You have stumbled upon what for ancient rabbis was known as a mashal which is a Hebrew word that roughly means “riddle.” The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, are full of these vexing interpretive questions. St. Augustine for one believed God added these mashalim to the scriptures to force its readers to be more studious. The question here is how can God hold man responsible for sin if he as yet has not eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Besides, would a just God not want his children to possess such knowledge and if so what is the meaning of the prohibition of the command to avoid eating of such a tree? God elsewhere in scripture strongly condemns those who lack the knowledge of the good and evil stating “woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” Such knowledge is so essential to the Christian life that the author of the letter to the Hebrews considers it the mark of the mature Christian (cf. Heb. 5:14).
Perhaps one solution to the riddle is that knowledge of good and evil amounts to “knowledge” in the sense of intimate familiarity. “Knowing” is referred to in other places in terms of marital relations; perhaps God does not want Adam and Eve to have an intimate acquaintance with good and evil that could only come from personal experience with sin. Adam and Eve' choice to sin is depicted elsewhere in the Bible in quasi-marital terms (Wis. 1:16) and Israel's numerous sins are described frequently as tantamount to adultery as the book of Hosea records along with many of the prophets.
Furthermore, it does not seem likely that Adam and Eve's disobedience was the innocent result of blameless ignorance. The test of obedience to which Adam and Eve were subjected presupposed that they had full understanding of the command and the deadly consequences for breaking it. God's threat of death as a result of disobedience must have been intelligible to Adam. The entire story makes little sense if this is not assumed. Eve at least was aware of the command of God and its consequences (Gen. 3:3). Beyond this, St. Thomas, like many theologians has posited that Adam must have possessed a kind of knowledge that went beyond what was proper to human beings in their created nature. Adam was supposed after all to exercise dominion over the whole earth, to name all the animals, and to keep the garden. Having just been created, the knowledge to do these things (which truly exceeds even what modern man has been able to achieve) could not have come from learning and experience as man's natural knowledge must. The only way Adam could know things that he had not learned was if this knowledge was infused in him. Aquinas called this infused knowledge preternatural knowledge. In this way, Adam could know of evil, disobedience, and death without having actually experienced it.
Beyond this, Genesis 2:24 states that Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed yet have to be clothed after their fall. From this St. Thomas deduced that the first pair originally had another preternatural gift called integrity. By this Adam and Eve could govern their lower appetites effortlessly; the weakness of the flesh which man suffered after the fall came only after their transgressions not before it. In a sense, the lofty state from which Adam fell makes him more culpable for his disobedience not less. Adam's failure teaches us that we would certainly have shared a similar fate; if the student blessed with preternatural knowledge and will flunked the test we can be sure that lacking these gifts we would fare no better. The failure of the first Adam ultimately sets the stage for the advent of Christ, the Second Adam (Rom. 5:12-14).
And it is in this way that Adam's sin affects all his descendants. The human nature which Adam imparts to his offspring suffers a great privation — it lacks what it really needs to achieve the union with God for which it was created. Christ superabundantly fills in that void with his own life which makes it possible for God to reign over creation through obedient mankind; Christ's obedience not only undoes the effects of what Adam did but it also achieves the obedience to God that Adam was made for but could not achieve on his own (Rom. 5:12-21). For this reason the Catechism (no. 405) teaches that
Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice; but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin — an inclination that is called concupiscence.There are two books which we might recommend for further reading on this subject. One is Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II which is a collection of Wednesday audience addresses aimed at penetrating into many of the mysteries of human life. A good deal of the talks is centered on the creation narrative and the story of Adam and Eve. Another outstanding title by Dr. Scott Hahn is called First Comes Love. Part of this book involves a speculative attempt to read the temptation and the fall story in light of Christ's triumph. Hahn develops the theory that Adam was really being asked by God to lay down his life for his beloved bride and that this was the essential test of his life. Thus Adam's trial by ordeal is one which all men must in some way undergo. Every man is asked to give his life as a gift to God — the real question is whether that life will be given as a gift or will simply eventually be taken. Both these titles are available through Benedictus Books (888-316-2640, CUF members receive a 10% discount).
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