The Problem of Evil

For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?
- Augustine, Enchiridion (Marcus Dods translation, 1876)

How can an all good, all-powerful God allow evil to exist?

If God were perfectly good, He would want to destroy the evil in the world. And if He were all-powerful, then He could destroy evil if He wanted to. But there is evil in the world. Therefore it must be that either God is not all-good or He's not all- powerful. For, if He wants to destroy evil but can't, He must not be all-powerful; and if He could destroy evil but doesn't, He must not care (and is therefore not all-good). Consider a small girl dying slowly and painfully of leukemia. Her earthly father is frantic. If he could help her, he would, but he can't. But suppose there is a medical doctor who could help, but won't. We could never think well of that doctor, could we? This, the problem of evil, was the dilemma with which St. Augustine struggled for many years until his permanent conversion to Christianity, the religion of his beloved mother, Monica. His solution came to him, via the writings of Plotinus, from Plato. There is no evil, he concluded! What appears to be evil is just the absence of good, in the same way that darkness is simply the absence of light. There is love in all of us, and love is a good thing. And God has given us free will, with which we choose how we will express this love.

Some of us choose to love things above all else, and the lives of such people are disordered and miserable. For, though all things are good because they come from God, mere things are not worthy of the love we should have only for people. The life spent in love of things necessarily winds up in a dark gutter of evil and disorder (examples--Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, John Belushi ...). And the person who loves himself above all cannot be happy and fulfilled because he or she will wind up being lonely.

And it is wrong to love other people more than anything, for people are finite and imperfect, There is a kind of love that can only be satisfied by a transcendent being--God. So evil is just disordered love, a good thing gone bad. The only way to fight evil is~to love the proper things in the proper order: God first, then others, then self, and things last. In the same way that the Form of Goodness ordered Plato's world, the love of God orders Augustine's. A person who loves God and puts Him first will live a good life. It is easy to understand what it is to love things--houses, clothes, cars, jewelry; or to love oneself--thinking of oneself before everyone else; or to love others --husband, wife, children. But what does it mean to love God?

A recent newspaper article reported that a. certain man raped a 13-year old girl, then cut her arms off and left her to die. Can such a thing be explained in terms of "disordered love?" How can God permit such things to happen?

Bibliography

Augustine, The City of God, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.J., 1958.

Bourke, Vernon J. (editor): The Essential Augustine, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1978.

Hyman, Arthur, and James D. Walsh (editors): Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1973.