Why Does God Not Eliminate Evil? Because God Created Beings Capable of Love and Therefore Capable of Refusing It
Catholic teaching holds that God could have created a world of automatons, incapable of sin, incapable of harm, incapable of choosing wrongly. But such a world would also be incapable of love, because love requires freedom.
Love that cannot be refused is not truly love. A programmed response may resemble affection, loyalty, or obedience, but it lacks the essential quality that makes love meaningful: the ability to choose it freely. God desired more than creatures who would merely follow instructions. He desired sons and daughters who could know Him, respond to Him, and enter into a genuine relationship with Him.
That freedom, however, carries risk. The same freedom that allows a person to perform acts of extraordinary kindness also allows that person to act selfishly, cruelly, or destructively. Freedom opens the door to both virtue and vice. God did not create evil acts, but He created free creatures capable of making decisions that can either align with His goodness or reject it.
This helps explain why Catholic theology insists that evil is not a "thing" God created. Evil has no independent existence of its own. Rather, it is the privation of good, the absence or corruption of something that ought to be present. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of the good that God intended.
When a person lies, the evil is not in the gift of speech itself. Speech is good. The evil arises when that good gift is misused. When a person commits violence, the evil is not in the strength, intelligence, or will God created. Those are good. The evil is found in the distortion of those gifts away from their proper purpose.
In this view, evil is not evidence that God failed in creation. Rather, it is evidence that God created beings with genuine freedom. A world containing free persons is capable of both profound love and profound suffering. God judged that a world where love is freely chosen is better than a world where obedience is mechanically guaranteed.
The mystery remains difficult because the consequences of evil can be devastating. Yet Christianity teaches that God never abandons His creation to evil. Instead, He enters into human suffering through Christ, bears its weight on the cross, and works even through human failures to bring about a greater good. The God who permits freedom is also the God who continually calls His creatures back to the good for which they were made.
Freedom makes love possible. The tragedy of evil is the price of that freedom. But the glory of love is that it could have been refused and was chosen anyway.
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post inspired by A Theology for the Rest of Us by Arthur Yavelberg
Book description
If God exists and is good, why is there evil? Avoiding such questions underlies the spiritual emptiness and anxiety in today's world. A Theology for the Rest of Us explores how to approach the divine through Eastern and Western religious traditions without dogma, challenging readers to "be you lamps unto yourselves."
In a time of internecine wars and all kinds of abuse of authority and trust, too many good, thoughtful people are "voting with their feet" and turning away from organized religion. Popular "spirituality"-a sort of mysticism-lite articulated in memes-is often unsatisfying as well.
A Theology for the Rest of Us is a straightforward approach to the fundamental questions of religion and philosophy:
- Does God exist?
- Is there free will?
- What is 'evil'?
This book draws on the traditions of the East as well as the West-Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism in addition to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-to see what can make sense in today's world. Whether exploring the implications of 17th century Enlightenment philosophers, quantum physics, or the insights of writers such as Dostoyevsky and Alan Watts, the reader is offered a rational, coherent approach that can provide understanding and a basis for hope in a world where the spirit has been all but decimated by doubt and worse.
Most important, the reader is encouraged to sift through these sources and choose what resonates and what does not. As the Buddha taught so many years ago, the Prime Directive is "Be ye lamps unto yourselves." A Theology for the Rest of Us makes teachings accessible to those who have already begun their spiritual journeys, validating their questions and showing that reasonable answers are available.
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