Well, Professor Chalcedon was making us think last weekend, wasn’t he? I started a comment on his post The forbidden tree and realized that it was going to be 400+ words, which is a bit silly in comments, so here it is.
One of the early heresies of the Christian era was the Gnostic idea that God did not creat[e] evil. This is not what we read in Isaiah 45:7: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things – or in Genesis where He plants the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Evil thus existed before Adam and Eve – mankind came to know it through the fall of our first parents.
It seems to me that many are working very hard to not charge God with creating evil, but…John 1: 1-3 says this:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
That’s pretty comprehensive.
Dave Smith’s link says this:
Now evil is not something in itself, but a lack of something that should be present, e.g. a lie lacks in truth. God does not create evil since it is not a thing to be created. Evil is an imperfection, lack or void in God’s creation.
Huh? We are to believe that an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, creator God, created imperfectly. That doesn’t work very well with me.
Another link I found uses the analogy of a hole, saying this:
For example, holes are real but they only exist in something else. We call the absence of dirt a hole, but it cannot be separated from the dirt.
Which is all well and good but, the hole was created by the removal of the dirt-by something, water, ice, a chipmunk, a shovel, an auger bit, an asteroid, a thermonuclear bomb, whatever, the hole was created out of the dirt.
In industrial controls, we learn a very strict form of logic, because electrons don’t really care what we think, or feel, and in addition we live and die (professionally) by Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is almost always the correct answer. So let’s plot this out
IF: God is outside time, AND
IF: God created everything that was created, AND
IF: Evil exists
THEN: God created evil.
As Cathy said, “No true Scotsman…”
That does leave the question of why, though?
Like Dave’s link, I end up at the book of Job. Job is the only righteous man in history (and many Jews say he is apocryphal). The link puts it this way:
Job is a righteous, God-fearing man (Job 1:1); however, God allows Satan to inflict Job with horrible disasters and disease to test his loyalty. Satan wants to show God that Job’s faith is false (Job 2:3-7). Under intense suffering Job argues with “friends” about the suffering of the innocent. Towards the end God enters the debate and responds:
Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answer! Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding… [Job 38:2-4; NAB]
Will we have arguing with the Almighty by the critic? Let him who would correct God give answer! [Job 40:2]
God responds by telling Job that His wisdom and power are beyond man’s ability to understand. Also man is not in control of the universe: his virtues alone do not ensure earthly happiness. Job humbly closes the debate with the words:
I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know…Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes. [Job 42:2-6]
In truth, God doesn’t answer Job’s charge, does He? He changes the subject and asks Job, “Who are you to question Me?” Well, there’s no answering that, is there?
And that, I think, is where we end up. God did indeed create evil, just as created everything else. What we do not know, and may not know in this lifetime is why, although I suspect it was to help us to become more Godlike. But it’s well above my pay grade.
For me the real evil in Job, is not his suffering (testing we could say) all that he had is eventually returned at least double. But what about his first family, who were killed in the testing, they remained dead, a testimony to the power of evil.
And for those who want a set of sermons on Job, try Jessica’s favourite internet Pastor, Gervase Charmley, here.
All Along the Watchtower 
In what sense does dark exist? In what sense does cold exist?
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God created light, if I recall correctly, out of darkness. It is. Cold exists, exactly as the hole in the article, it does not exist without hot, but was created out of heat. Without heat, all motion, even molecular, simply stops.
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Yes as in the sense that Bp. Fulton Sheen describes: “The evil in the world must not make me doubt the existence of God. There could be no evil if there were no God. Before there can be a hole in a uniform, there must be a uniform; before there is death, there must be life; before there is error, there must be truth; before there is a crime, there must be liberty and law; before there is a war, there must be peace; before there is a devil, there must be a God, rebellion against whom made the devil.”
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When you say “created out of”, you’re suggesting that negation is a kind of creation but “not moving” isn’t a creation, it’s explicitly an absence, a desistence, a negation of motion. ‘Motion’ is a ‘thing’, ‘not motion’ is a ‘not thing’ (nothing).
Negations don’t gain existence from the things they negate, they only gain *meaning* by naming an absence.
Heat, as you note, is a measure of motion. “Cold” isn’t a ‘thing’ you can *add* to a hot object, you make something cold by taking its heat away.
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No, ‘not moving’ is a valid choice, to ‘not move’ By your logic, women can only be defined as the removal of something from men, but that is not so, they were created to be complimentary to men, hence out of man.
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So when something lacks heat, it’s because its molecules chose to stop moving?
And no, “woman” is not the absence of “man” nor the removal of anything from “man” [if you think that a “woman” is only the absence of a phallus, then you need to go talk to someone about birds and bees]. Woman is not a negation, woman is a reality — created as a complement of man.
If you really want to try to play this out of Genesis on a vaguely literalist ground, you’re argument is headed down a rough road insofar as God does not create darkness or “out of” darkness; He creates light by his Word. So is darkness an uncreated co-eternal, or does it not existence?
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That is the direct analogy of your argument. Am I making that argument, No it’s silly, but it follow logically from your statement.
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NEO, my understanding is as follows:
1. Physical evil is described as dis-order from the Good that God creates: death, storms and suffering that disorder places upon His creatures.
2. Moral evil is described as dis-obedience to the Will of God: so God cannot create a will do dis=obey Himself.
Now if Physical evil preceded Moral evil one could say that God ‘created’ evil.
But we know that God created the Angels first and that He did so with the gift of Free-will. So it seems that dis-obedience of the Angels (knowing that God would become incarnate in an inferior (material) being to bring salvation to us lowly material creatures refused to serve God’s plan. Thus, we have the first act of dis-obedience and evil: A secondary principle that was made create by the Primary Principle which is God and which is (by definition) All Good.
Man too, after being enticed to dis-obey God, receives the gift of free-will: in fact, he learns that he already had it and need only have been tempted to dis-obey to actually use it. So there is the fall: a moral evil against God now committed by Man.
God’s plan included His knowledge that we would fail the ‘test’ but since we are not spiritual beings that can see both the temptation but the consequences as well (like an angel) would (through God’s Goodness) provide a savior and a means of forgiveness as He molds and sifts and purifies mankind into those who obey and those who disobey. So that God has pre-knowledge of the fall of the Angels and the fall of man does not ‘create’ the evil done: but in His wisdom does not force obedience to those rational beings who know good from evil to choose freely to be a second principle of creation by freely harboring the desire to please and to do God’s Holy Will.
The consequence of sin is death and dis-order. It is a lack of life and a lack of order. God knew this and He also knew that His glory would never be more fully expressed than through Christ our Lord and Savior. So we have Gen. 3:15: the first Gospel. Such is power of evil to choose self over the Will of God. It is described as anger in the Bible. And the dis-order created is described as pestilence, plague, death, suffering and the other attendant evils. In order to be purified (as if by a refiners fire) we endure this and place our trust in the Primary Principle and become, in fact, secondary principles of creation and of doing God’s will. We have been given participatory license to let God work through us . . . or not.
Moral evil preceeded physical evil and therefore God did not create evil, but He allowed us to commit evil. And through our evil He created an even greater good: Jesus Christ. This is why the Church exclaims during Easter: “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”
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Either God created so-called physical evil, and I have doubts that natural forces are actually ‘evil’ BTW; or God created imperfectly, which can’t be so. But that’s the choice you’re positing.
For the rest, evil precedes all physical things. If evil wasn’t extant, the Adversary couldn’t have chosen it. God planted the tree of good and evil in the Garden, it already existed, it wasn’t (so we’re told) created in place.
God is Reason, and your logic doesn’t hold.
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That seems rather silly to me, NEO. God is light, God is good, God is beauty, God is truth, God is perfect reason, God is perfection, God is being. Non-being, imperfection, unreasonable, lies and distortions, ugliness, evil, and darkness are easily seen as lacking that which is already. You don’t create, that which is not, like light. But you do have the freedom to close your eyes and refuse to see it.
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I’ll agree that it’s a rather silly discussion, mostly because God flatly says, several times, that he created all of those things. I’m no Bosco, but I’m inclined to believe God when he speaks, YMMV, I suppose.
You go ahead and tell God what He doesn’t do, personally, I’m inclined to say, “Yes Sir!”
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I don’t recall reading that God created the void. Creation, if words have any meaning, requires that there is a substance, a thing that is created. A lack of creation is not a creation. Creation which is a sharing of the I AM by the creation of a receiver of the light and the truth and all the other attributes associated with God are an ‘isness’ or creative force by God. Where it is not then there is a stuation where it is indescribable and about as understandable as void or infinity. God is a giver and we are receivers. He does not deliver to us nothingness or lack of something but something. It is the fault of the receiver that it cannot perceive the light or good. But the lack of something is useful in making us desire that which truly is and seing the glory of that which is. Without the imperfections or the dark we would not be drawn toward the light or the good – for we perceive, when we rightly think, that we are lacking much and we have an inate desire to acquire the good. Otherwise light and dark, good and evil are mere choices like choosing spinach rather than peas for supper tonight.
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I did read it, and in fact Chalcedon and I quoted several instances of Him saying that.
But, in truth, we end up at the same place, He does all things to encourage us to choose the good.
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Between the idea of God ‘does’ and that God ‘allows’ exists a huge chasm and one that makes of God a tyrant rather than an All Good God. If such things are now blessed as created by God why do we not expect them to continue in Heaven as well?
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Listen to Gervase on Job. Linked in the article.
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Also, unable to suppress my pedantry, Occam’s Razor is “Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate” [though, technically it’s not even really Ockham’s, but whatever], and positing the “existence” of evil is actually a violation of the principle since so doing multiplies entities without necessity.
We have a light switch by the door; up, there’s light and down, there’s not light. It would be silly, wouldn’t it, to have a “dark switch” next to the “light switch”, wouldn’t it? And it would be silly because it’s an unnecessary multiplication of switches. One switch, in short, is “simpler” than two.
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But in many rooms you do. You turn on the ‘light switch’ when you enter, and when you leave at the other door, you turn on a separate ‘dark switch’. That is the definition of their functionality at that moment, noting that if you were passing in the other direction, their functionality would invert.
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OK, seriously? You’re calling it a “dark switch”? When a member of your family leaves the light on in a room they’ve left, do they get yelled at for not “turning on the dark”?
I’m starting to think I got sucked into a bit of trolling here…
If not, then I’d like to know the framework from which you’re working (e.g., Lutheran, Baptist, Evangelical, etc…?). The talking past each other we seem to be doing might well be explained by some fundamental difference of tradition.
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I’m extending what you say, is all. I see no fault in the logic. my background is easily discoverable here, and of little account anyway, because I’m working from a very simple statement. God is Reason, and God is Perfect.
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Ok… will you at least provide a source citation for your working axiom, “God is Reason”?
My asking after your perspective was only to discern what set of definitions you’re working from because we seem to be using different ones….
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Sure, it is the other and equally valid translation of “Logos” usually translated these days as “Love”
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[Oh, and maybe “in many rooms you do” but my rooms are much smaller than all that. Can I come over?]
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[ Code requires it in all habitable rooms with more than one entrance. 🙂 ]
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[Well either my rooms are not habitable or “entrance” has a weird definition… or most homes I’ve been in haven’t been wired in accord with the code (I’m assuming that’s the NEC). And I still don’t believe anyone makes a habit of telling people to “turn on the dark” when they leave one of these multi-entrance habitable rooms of yours. The on and off positions might be reversed according to circumstance, but it is only every “on” or “off”.]
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[Yes, I’m referring to NEC, for the real world means a door, separated by enough distance from another door that it becomes a safety issue to reach the switch. And yes, I’m playing with the words there, to make a point. officially the term isenergisedd/ not energized but you atr correct.
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If after each day of creation in the Genesis story God proclaims it good did He then bless evil as a good?
Does a good tree produce bad fruit?
For to say that God creates evil rather that he allows evil to show us the glory of Himself and all He creates, is to imply that God Himself is evil.
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If God created all things, and evil exists, then God created evil. Either that or God’s creation is imperfect, those are the only options on offer.
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For that to be true, God would have to have evil as part of His nature and His being. We do not act or create that which is not already present in our innermost being, our hearts and our minds. Ergo, God is both good and evil – quite the heresy. That He allows these things is easily written in Scripture as His creation because He could forbid it. But then it would lessen His glory as there is nothing very glorious about creating a meat or spiritual robot that does not choose the principles of dark and light, uncreate and create, entropy and fulfillment etc.
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Frankly I don’t see “God is all things’ as heresy.
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Evil is not a thing. It is more of the sense of entropy . . . heading toward the void.
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Is the devil one of the things that God is?
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Luther maintains in “Bondage” that
[..] “it is God the Creator who energises Satan, according to his nature, and such power as Satan has is held and exercised by God’s own appointment.”
and on page 52 that
“evil is brought to expression only by the omnipotent working of the good God. “Since God moves and works all in all, He moves and works of necessity even in Satan and the ungodly. But He works according to what they themselves are, and what He finds them to be; which means, since they are evil and perverted themselves, that when they are impelled to action by this movement of Divine omnipotence they do only that which is perverted and evil….”
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Thought-provoking! It seems to me we must distinguish between ontological evil and the evil we experience in the form of natural calamities. The latter must come from God, since He created all that is and will ever be. We cannot know why we experience these things as ‘evil’ or ‘calamities’ (which is another translation some versions of the Bible use), but that is how we do experience the wrath of nature.
In terms of moral evil, that, we can say, comes through the Fall. It raises the thorny question of why it was that Satan rebelled against His Creator without access to an apple, Eden or even a talking snake, but since our first parents were able to rebel because endowed with free will, we have, I think, to assume some such scenario with the Devil himself. Here, evil is a decision to ignore God and consitute ourselves as the final judge of our actions. That we choose to disobey the Divine will does not make God responsible for our choice, although it seems to me that the Incarnation suggests that He did not cease to love us or will the best for us and has offered us a second chance.
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I agree fully with that. Satan’s rebellion is an interesting extension of it, that has always troubled me a bit, not least because it shows that evil existed before the garden as well.
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“In fact, evil is simply a privation of something which a subject is entitled by its origin to possess and which it ought to have, as we have said. Such is the meaning of the word ‘evil’ among all men. Now, privation is not an essence; it is, rather, a negation in a substance. Therefore, evil is not an essence in things.”
“…it is possible, in the case of things made and governed by God, for some defect and evil to be found, because of a defect of the secondary agents, even though there be no defect in God Himself” –St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles
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Glad you found that. It is what I am trying to make clear but not as well as the Angelic Doctor.
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Indeed so, although we have to be careful here with how we understand ‘privation’, as it is the sin of our first parents which deprives us of the natural endowment from God; the part played by our own will in succumbing to sin is an interesting, if, as Pelagius found, perilous subject!
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Well yes, but the “evil does not exist” line was rather explicitly and extensively worked out by no less than the great anti-Pelagian, St. Augustine.
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Indeed, and here my theodicy is, of course, Augustinian, and we can take either of these syllogisms:
1) All things that God created are good; 2) evil is not good; 3) therefore, evil was not created by God. Or: 1) God created every thing; 2) God did not create evil; 3) therefore, evil is not a thing. Evil is spoiled goodness – at least in the moral realm. In the realm of nature, I wonder if we can speak of evil and mean the same thing?
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Yes, in fabric of this creation in which we live, and this spiritual darkness that requires faith, hope and charity to see God, likewise the ‘calamities’ are evident truths that God brings life from death, abundance to the fields by floods, and on and on we could go. God brings good from evil, bears a light in the darkness and we are unworthy of Him if we cannot trust fully in His Fullness of Being; He has all that we desire now or could ever desire. Without this ontological evil we might not see the necessity of prayers for protection and for sustaining the lives of ourselves or our loved ones. Our spiritual or moral choices would not seem to have anymore importance to us than whether it is raining or it is dry . . . it is just the way it is. To hate my enemies would be of no consequence and totally understandable. To see that God bears witness to the light in everything both physical and moral is to deliver to us hope that otherwise would be foolishness.
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I like the nuances you bring out here, C. They are to be found in the Hebrew so you are on solid ground here.
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Thank you, Nicholas – and I hope you are enjoying Canada.
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Thank you. Went whale watching today – God really made a beautiful world, even when it is frustrated by the fall.
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Yes, he did make a beautiful world. I cant wait to see how he outdoes this with heaven. I don’t know how he can outdo this.
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Wait, NEO, who is translating “logos” as “love”? [Our threads are going on too long so I cant reply directly to the comment where you made this claim.]
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That happens fairly often here. 🙂
Pope Benedict, for one. I wrote about it here:
https://jessicahof.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/god-is-reason-part-one/
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He didn’t make that a translation, he made an association. Love and “logos” are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they equivalent. Got any other examples?
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I suppose that if God is love then love made the world 🙂
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The simple answer if I may:
If God created both good and evil then both are created by His will. Please, explain why serving evil and wickednes is not also in accordance with the will of God? Both good and evil are clearly, in this instance, in accordance with His Will so no matter what choices we make both are in accord with His Almighty Will. Thereby there is no sin or concept of such. Morality is nothing but pious rubbish.
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We’ve offered the classic Augustinian answers above, although it is only fair to point out that not everyone has been satisfied with them. I think we have to believe that God is goodness and perfect and holy, and it follows that, being made in his image, we were made to be those things. Is Satan a ‘thing’? I think he is in so far as he is reverse image of God, he is what happens when we rebel against God eternally. You’d think we’d be a bit more averse to him than mankind appears to be. I really fail, utterly, to understand the Senate vote of PP – except in terms of evil in the world.
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Evil has overcome this world like a tidal wave C. It did not surprise me in the least . . . Satan has been unleashed.
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We have opened ourselves – and cannot be surprised at the result – St Michael defend us!
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Amen, C. I do not see how this is going to end well without some severe penance being done by mankind. We shall watch and see what God has in store for us and pray for His deliverance quickly so that this might not be a prolonged period of suffering and darkness.
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I fear we are suffering the early stages now. That so many condone what PP is doing is a shock to me!
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I guess I am numbed to being shocked anymore, my friend. Evil is rife and the dwelling place of goodness difficult to find.
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I had hoped the videos would, literally, open peoples’ eyes – but so many prefer blindness.
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Indeed. They have presented the moral evil of abortion as a good; a women’s health problem. So we have many a Christian today who will support those who have sold them on the idea that you can bring about a greater good by perpetrating unspeakable evil. Where O where were they when they were taught the faith they claim to believe? Or even worse . . . were they ever taught anything about their faith?
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I simply cannot comprehend how any human being could watch those videos and remain untouched.
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Mankind has become dead inside.
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So it seems.
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Nothing really new in that, though.
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What I think is new, NEO, is how pervasive it has become worldwide to our new set of socially accepted evils and goods. Most, of course, being turned upside down. I am baffled by the increase of evil that grew from the society that I was raised in.
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Yes, and I don’t disagree, but Queen Victoria would likely have said the same thing.
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They were not, or at least I was not, I learned it for myself.
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I know. Had I not studied the faith of the Catholic Church on my own . . . it would likely not have been taught to me either.
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In some ways, I wonder if the videos are not ‘too fit for the purpose’. They are hard to watch, because they are true, and many believe that ‘see no evil’ prevents evil. In truth, I find it hard to write about them, and I am pro-life, I suspect if I was pro-abortion, I would ignore them as well.
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Good points, Neo.
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As the Catechism says moral evil cannot be attributed to God ever. However, attributing physical evil or appearance of evil, mostly imperfectios, allows us to appreciate perfection and journey towards it. We are secondary agents of God’s creation: we alleviate pain, suffering, illness, feed the hungry and take care of the old, sick and the poor. Therefore, physical imperfections are there to lead us to bring about a greater good.
CCC:
310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.174 But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.175
311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.176 He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it:
For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.177
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Chalcedon: re “In the realm of nature, I wonder if we can speak of evil and mean the same thing?”, cf. Anselm, de casu diaboli, Ch. 11
NEO: Luther?!?! Awww man. I feel like I just got theologically Rick-rolled.
But, if we’re going to speak German anyway…
(God is all things. NEO ∧ ~∃God P. Tillich) ⇒ ~∃(all things)
∴ ~∃Evil
QED ;-P
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I’m not sure that Flew and other moderns would be overly convinced by the logic-chopping. It is not, after all, ‘mad’ to say ‘nothing’ is something, as nothing is the absence of something, so if I said you were having no food for a week, you would find that nothing became something for you, surely? So is it really true that ‘nothing’ is the same as ‘not something’? If so, what is the difference? I’ve never been sure quite what Anselm meant – other than showing how clever he can be with words. I think most people mean ‘not something’ when they say ‘nothing’, which may, of course, be why the latter is a word we often use and the former is a phrase not used outside of a narrow compass 🙂 He may ‘prove’ evil is nothing, in best schoolman fashion, but the devil is evil and is something – surely? Ah, getting back into Anselm reminds me why I loved the early Fathers so much – there’s no divide between spirituality and theology – rather as with Newman.
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