Why Doesn’t God Eliminate Evil? (A Catholic Dogma Reflection)
One of the oldest and most persistent questions in Christian thought is painfully simple: If God is all‑powerful and all‑good, why doesn’t He eliminate evil? Catholic dogma doesn’t dodge this question. Instead, it insists that the mystery of evil can only be understood in the larger context of freedom, love, redemption, and the final purpose of creation . 1. 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. Evil is not a “thing” God created; it is the privation of good , the wound left when a free creature turns away from the good it was made for. 2. Eliminating evil would mean eliminating freedom—and eliminating us. If God were to “remove evil” by force, He would have to override human will. Catholic theology is blunt about this: To...