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Does God owe us protection from evil, and if he doesn’t provide it, does that make him unjust or less than perfectly good? In this episode, we examine Aquinas’s understanding of divine justice and argue that physical and moral evil do not establish that God has failed to give creatures something they are owed by nature.
Transcript
Some atheists think God’s existence and the presence of evil in the world are logically incompatible. The reasoning goes like this: if God were all-powerful and all-good, like classical theists say, then surely he would eliminate evil and not permit it. But evil is clearly present in the world… so, God must not exist.
Is that a successful argument against God? Stick around to find out!
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Alright—let’s start with getting a good understanding of the objection, or at least a version of it.
For most, the target isn’t God’s power. Rather, it’s his goodness. Atheists object to the compatibility between God’s goodness and evil in the world, the key assumption being that God’s goodness requires him to eliminate all evil—whether physical or moral. This is one version of what philosophers call the logical problem of evil.
But we need to ask, “Why is it that God can’t be good if he declines to stop bad things from happening to us?” For some, it’s because God has somehow wronged us, failing to give us the help that he ought to have given.
It’s the kind of accusation we make of a lifeguard who watches a child drown and does nothing, knowing it was his duty and was able to save him. We say that lifeguard isn’t good, he’s ill-willed. And we do so because we intuit that he intentionally did the child wrong, failing to give the help that was due to him.
Now, notice that’s a charge of injustice. Help was due to the child, and the lifeguard withheld it.
The same logic is embedded in the objection against God from evil. Insofar as it implies that God has wronged us—committed an offense against us—by allowing bad things to happen to us, he can’t possibly be all-good. But like in the case of the drowning child, that further implies the help needed from God to eliminate evil was somehow due to us.
Now, there are other ways someone might charge God of lacking in goodness for permitting evil that go beyond the path of injustice. We will deal with those in future episodes.
But here I want to deal with this question specifically: Does God owe us the help needed to eliminate all evil—both physical and moral? That’s an important question because for God to be good and still permit evil, he must at least not owe the elimination of evil. And if he doesn’t owe it, then we can’t say he lacks goodness on account of wrongful omission.
Now, to answer our question, we need to do two things. First, we need to understand what justice and debt mean when we speak about God. Second, we need to test the principle against hard cases: death, bodily defects (like blindness), and sin.
But before we dive in, I want to pause and thank my patrons for their financial support of this video-podcast. We at Catholic Answers appreciate your help and friendship. And for those of you who aren’t patrons yet, we invite to check us out at doctorkarlo.com with “doctor” spelled out..
Alright! Let’s start with justice.
Justice is traditionally defined as rendering to another what is due. That definition gives us three questions: Who is owed? What is owed? And what creates the debt?
I think here we can look to Aquinas for some help.
In the first part of his Summa Theologiae, question 21, article 1, Aquinas distinguishes two forms of justice. The first is commutative justice, the justice of exchange. If I borrow money, I owe it back. If you provide a service, I owe payment. A prior transaction creates a claim. The creditor can demand what is owed because the creditor has given something first.
The second is distributive justice, the justice of a governor ordering a community and giving to each member what fits that member’s place and condition. A parent may assign different responsibilities to children of different ages. The distribution is not based on an equal exchange. It’s based on what is fitting for each person within the order.
These two forms of justice are not interchangeable. Commutative justice asks, “What must be repaid because something was first given?” Distributive justice asks, “What is fitting for this recipient, given what the recipient is and the order in which the recipient exists?”
Now, as Aquinas argues, commutative justice doesn’t apply to God. Consider Romans 11:35, where St. Paul writes, “Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” The answer is no one! There is nothing that we could give to God and thereby demand repayment. Everything we have to give God is already a gift given to us.
We not only know this from scripture. But we also know it from philosophy.
Insofar as God is the primary cause of any being outside himself, everything that we have—our existence, abilities, time, and possessions—comes from God. So no matter what we try and give to God, it’s already a gift that he’s given us. And you can’t place God in a debt by returning to him what depends on him in the first place.
Now, there are two further related points here.
First, as pure being itself, God is not ordered to a good outside himself. A debtor is answerable to another because the debtor stands under an obligation created by some relation of exchange. But God is not one member within a larger order. Created things are ordered to God; God is not ordered to them as to a higher standard.
Second, commutative justice requires an equality of exchange—that’s to say the value of what is given and what is received is brought into proportion. But no such equality is possible between God and creature. The distance between Creator and creature is infinite. It’s not a difference of degree but a difference in order of being. God is infinite being. Creatures are finite being. So there’s no good that a creature can supply that would be infinite in value and thus be proportionate to the infinite dignity of God. Given that lack of equality, there’s no good a creature can give God that would place him under an obligation of repayment.
So when the objection says, “God owed me this and failed to provide it,” we have to ask whether it’s treating God as a equal party in an exchange. If so, then there’s an appeal to commutative justice, which simply isn’t a category that applies to God. And this isn’t some clever escape from the objection. It’s a claim about the kind of relation that exists between Creator and creature.
Now, this doesn’t mean that justice is absent from God. We can attribute distributive justice to God, though in a qualified sense.
Remember, distributive justice is the justice of a governor ordering a community and giving to each member what fits that member’s place and condition. Applied to God, Aquinas writes, “God exercises justice when He gives to each thing what is due to it by its nature” (ST I:21:1 ad 3). That’s from reply 3 in the previously mentioned article and question.
So, plants receive the powers appropriate to vegetative life. An animal receives sensation and appetite. A human being receives an intellective soul and bodily powers ordered to being used in and through matter—all the capacities that belong to rational animal life.
But two qualifications need to be made here.
First, God is not a member of the order that he governs. A human governor distributes goods within a community that already exists. God’s “distribution”—creating the members with their natures and powers—constitutes the order itself. It’s not an allocation within a pre-existing one.
Second, divine distributive justice is measured by the nature of the recipient, not by strict equality between recipients. In other words, the measure is intrinsic to a thing—what this kind of being requires to be this kind of being. A stone is not wronged because it cannot see. A human being is not wronged because he lacks the natural mode of knowledge proper to an angel. Different natures receive different perfections. And God distributes accordingly.
But, as Aquinas points out, even though God pays each thing its due, he himself is not the debtor (ST I:21:1 ad 3). The creature holds no claim over God. The debt, so to speak, terminates in God’s wisdom. God is faithful to the natures and order that he wills. He doesn’t make a human being while withholding what is required for anything to count as human.
Now, the question before us is whether God violates distributive justice when he doesn’t supply the help needed to eliminate evil—whether physical or moral.
I answer no! To see why that’s so, we have to wrap our heads around what evil is. Recall from a previous episode, “God—A Creator of evil?”, evil is a privation of being—a lack of a good or being that ought to be there given the nature of a thing.
For example, bodily death is an evil because the living creature—whether plant, non-rational animal, or rational animal—loses the union of matter and soul that nature requires for bodily life. And this is further due to the failure of material dispositions required for that union. As Aquinas explains in his De Anima, article 14, response to objection 20, in death “[the body] loses that disposition by which it prepared to receive life [from the soul]” (De Anima, Art. 14, ad 20, emphasis added). In other words, there is a “cessation of the requisite dispositions” of the body and a loss of vital metabolic functioning.
Blindness is a physical evil in an animal—whether rational or non-rational—because the animal lacks what it naturally has for its perfection, given the kind of thing it is. Blindness is not an evil in a stone because sight does not belong to the perfection of a stone.
The privation view of evil applies equally to moral evil. Take something like murder.
Murder is wrong because it’s a failure in justice. The behavior lacks conformity to the order of justice that nature demands. To state it more precisely, the behavior lacks being or actuality that ought to be there.
So evil—whether physical or moral—isn’t a positive reality—it’s a kind of gap between what is and what ought to be.
Now, if evil—whether physical or moral—is a privation of being or actuality, it becomes clear what is required for there to be no evil: God must supply being or actuality.
Let’s go back to the examples of bodily death and blindness. For there to be no death, God must continuously cause the actual functioning of the vital metabolic functions of a living thing. For there to be no blindness, God must sustain the proper functioning of the eyes for the power of sight to be successfully exercised.
The same reasoning applies to moral evil. For there to be no moral evil, God must continuously cause the behavior to conform to the order of justice. This means God must continuously move the will to follow what reason knows to be the order that’s due for the behavior.
Now, you might think that violates freedom. But that would be because of a particular conception of freedom, which I don’t share. Following St. Thomas Aquinas, I don’t think freedom is defined in relation to divine causality. Rather, it’s defined in relation to the non-necessitating attraction of particular goods known by the intellect and presented to the will. I affirm that God can cause the act of will without violating its freedom. I realize more needs to be said about that. But it goes beyond what I can deal with here. I plan to deal with it in a future episode. A great article to read on this is Steve Long’s “Efficacious Grace and Free Will: Taking Aquinas at His Word,” published in the journal Nova et Vetera, volume 22, number 4.
So, this leads us to the question that lies at the heart of our inquiry: “Is God bound by distributive justice to give the continued actuality needed for living organisms to not experience physical evil—like physical defects and death, and for intellectual creatures—both humans and angels—to not fall into moral defect?”
To answer that question, we have to figure out whether the actualities needed for the preservation from evil is due to the nature of the thing under consideration. Remember, as Aquinas said, “God exercises justice when He gives to each thing what is due to it by its nature” (ST I:21:1 ad 3).
Let’s take first the continued actuality of bodily life. As we mentioned, this is what’s needed to eliminate the evil of death. And this applies to all living organisms. So, the question for us is whether the continued actuality of bodily life is due to a living organism by its nature—whether that be a plant, a non-rational animal, or a rational animal (human being).
I answer that it’s not due. And the reason is that bodily death (and the corruption that leads to it) for living organisms follows from what is built into the nature of such things—it’s part of the package.
Consider that living material things are composed of form and matter. Think of a tree. It has matter—wood (or mostly wood)—and form—a principle in virtue of which the matter is a living, growing vegetative organism with a trunk, branches, and leaves.
Now, from experience, we know that living things, like the tree, lose their form. That’s what we call death. A tree loses its form when it’s burned or cut down. A human body loses its form—the rational soul—at death, and the body becomes pieces of matter that take on new forms.
And here’s the key point: if something actually happens to a thing, then it must have had the potential or susceptibility for it. For corruptible beings, this is due to the principle of matter that constitutes the living thing. Matter necessarily implies a natural orientation to corruption and eventually death. That’s why St. Thomas Aquinas can say in the first part of the second part in his Summa Theologiae, question 85, article 6, that, in a sense, death is “natural to man.”
So the bottom line here is this: because living material things are composed of form and matter, they are naturally susceptible to corruption and bodily death. And over time that susceptibility becomes fact. That’s just part of what it means to be a material, living creature. Bodily death isn’t some foreign imposition—it’s part and parcel of a material world with living things. And that kind of world exists because God willed it.
With that in hand, it becomes clear why a living organism doesn’t have a claim to preservation from bodily death: its very nature is constituted by a principle that naturally entails corruption and death. How can an organism possess a natural claim to bodily immortality when its nature is constituted by a principle that makes it naturally subject to bodily death? The answer is, “It can’t!”
Here’s how I’d put that argument in proper form:
P1: If preservation from bodily death were owed to a living organism, then bodily immortality would have to be something the organism possesses a natural claim to.
P2: But a living organism, precisely as a living organism, can’t possibly have a natural claim to bodily immortality because it possesses a nature whose material principle makes it subject to corruption and death.
C: Therefore, preservation from bodily death cannot be something God owes the creature; it could only be given as a gratuitous gift.
And this even applies to us human beings. Yes, we are immortal in virtue of our soul, which is of itself incorruptible. But because we are composed of matter, we are naturally susceptible to bodily death. Thus, bodily immortality isn’t due to us given our nature.
Now, someone might counter that Catholic doctrine holds that the first human beings were not subject to death, and that death entered as a penalty of sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms this in paragraphs 375-376. Aquinas teaches this as well in the first part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae, question 85, article 5. Does this not show that freedom from bodily death was owed?
It actually shows the opposite, and the reason is clear: the preservation was extrinsic, not a property flowing from human essence. As Aquinas teaches in the first part of his Summa, question 97, article 1, our first parents were preserved from corruption and bodily death by a special gift of grace so long as they remained subject to God. The Catechism affirms this in paragraph 376.
This is why the tradition classifies bodily immortality as a preternatural gift—praeter naturam, beyond nature. The standard enumeration of preternatural gifts is bodily immortality, impassibility (freedom from suffering), and integrity (the perfect dominion of reason over the sensitive appetites), to which is added the wholly supernatural gift of sanctifying grace. What defines the category is precisely that these gifts are not owed to human nature. They perfect and adorn a nature that is complete without them.
Alright! So much for bodily death. Let’s turn to bodily defects, like blindness for sentient beings. Does God owe material, living creatures preservation from these?
The answer is no. And the reason is related to why God doesn’t owe us the continuation of bodily life.
Even while material living creatures are alive, the internal material processes that sustain them and are ordered to their perfection are themselves subject to failing. And when they do, defect occurs in the material creature.
For example, human beings might be constituted with the power of sight, which does belong to its nature, but due to defects in the material processes needed for a successful organic realization of that power, the defect of blindness occurs.
Now, the debt of nature is discharged in the creation of the human being. God has given everything it needed to be the kind of thing it is, including all the root powers of the sensitive and rational powers of the soul. But since the defect follows from the “defectible” matter that makes up the nature of the human being in the first place, it follows that God is not bound to preserve the proper functioning of those material processes.
So, just as bodily death follows from something built into the nature of a material, living creature, so too physical defects. They follow from the principle of matter that makes up material, living creatures, which of itself is susceptible to fail.
And just as the debt of nature didn’t extend to preservation from bodily death, it doesn’t extend to preservation from bodily defects, since bodily defects follow from what the nature of a material, living creature is. Since God is only bound to give what is due to the nature of a thing, it follows God is not bound by distributive justice to preserve material, living creatures—like you and me—from physical defects.
To wrap up my comments on physical evil, I’ll say what I said earlier about bodily death: physical evil isn’t some foreign imposition—it’s part and parcel of a material world with living things, following from the material principle that constitutes the nature of material things. And that kind of world exists because God willed it. Thus, he is not bound to eliminate it.
Now, let’s turn to moral evil, which can be perpetrated by either human beings or angels.
Here’s the question: Is God bound by distributive justice to uphold intellectual creatures in moral goodness, so that their wills always conform to the order of good for the creature?
The answer depends on whether the will’s conformity to the order of good is due to the nature of the intellectual creature—whether a human being or an angel. Remember, as Aquinas teaches, “God exercises justice when He gives to each thing what is due to it by its nature” (ST I:21:1 ad 3).
So, is the actuality of the will conforming to the order of good due to the nature of the intellectual creature?
I answer no. And the reason is like the one we gave for why preservation from physical evil is not due to material, living creatures. The very nature of a finite intellectual agent has baked into it a susceptibility to defect—in this case, moral defect.
Let me explain.
Unlike God, intellectual creatures—human beings and angels—are not their own perfection. They are made such that they must direct themselves to achieve moral goodness/perfection. And they do that through choices.
It’s that very makeup—having to aim at the good—is what makes it possible to miss the mark. That’s what moral evil is: a failure to hit the mark of moral goodness.
God, by contrast, doesn’t have this mode of being. He doesn’t have to direct himself toward goodness because he is goodness. That’s why sin isn’t even possible for God.
So, just by being a creature, human beings and angels are morally defectible creatures. We have an inherent susceptibility to moral evil—a susceptibility that follows from the kind of intellectual agent that we are. And sometimes that susceptibility becomes fact—when we voluntarily choose against what reasons knows our natures to be.
That now puts us in a position to see why the actuality of the agent’s will conforming to what’s good for that agent isn’t due to its nature.
Consider that if preservation from moral defect were owed to an intellectual creature, then moral goodness would have to be something the agent possesses a natural claim to. But an intellectual creature, precisely as a finite intellectual agent, possesses a nature that is naturally susceptible to moral defect—per our prior reasoning. This means the actuality of moral goodness can’t be demanded by the intellectual creature’s nature. A nature that is naturally susceptible to moral defect can’t possibly have a natural claim to no moral defect—just like a nature that is naturally susceptible to physical defect can’t possibly have a natural claim to no physical defect. Consequently, preservation from moral defect—an upholding in moral goodness—can’t be something God owes the creature; it could only be given as a gratuitous gift.
Now, there’s another way to go about seeing this. Consider this question: “If an intellectual creature sins—whether it’s a human being or an angel—does that creature stop being the kind of thing it is?”
Think about yourself. When you sin, do you stop being a human being? Of course not. And the reason is because all the conceptual content of what makes a rational animal a rational animal—including his ability to have done otherwise—remains. So, the actual presence or absence of good order in a behavior is not essential to the nature of a rational animal. You can have one without the other.
What that tells us is that the actuality of doing good—actual conformity to the proper order that your nature demands for good behavior—isn’t essential to what you are as a human being. You can sin and still be a human being. The actuality of moral goodness doesn’t belong to your nature as a human being.
And the same is true for angels. They can sin and still be the kind of thing they are.
So, the actuality of moral goodness isn’t due to the natures of intellectual creatures. And since that’s true, it follows that God’s distributive justice doesn’t demand that he give it to them.
Alright! That was a lot.
Let me sum up the entire argument to provide you a conceptual framework to plug in the data:
P1: God’s distributive justice demands that he give creatures what is due to them by their nature.
P2: The preservation of creatures from evil—whether physical or moral—is not due to them by their nature.
Remember, that was because creatures have a susceptibility to defect—for some that’s physical defect alone (plants and non-rational animals); for others it’s both physical and moral defect (rational animals); and others only moral defect (angels). A nature that has a built-in susceptibility to defect can’t possibly have a natural claim to preservation from such defect.
C: Therefore, God’s distributive justice doesn’t demand that he preserve creatures from evil—whether physical or moral. To state it differently, physical and moral evil don’t establish that God has failed to repay a debt.
Now, notice how limited that conclusion is. It doesn’t say death, physical defects, or sin are not evils. It doesn’t say that any person’s suffering is insignificant. It doesn’t even claim to identify God’s reason for permitting a particular tragedy.
It also doesn’t remove our duties toward one another. We stand in relationships of justice with other human beings. We can owe protection, care, restitution, and help. God’s transcendence doesn’t excuse our negligence.
The argument simply shows that God has not wronged us—or failed to repay a debt to us—for not preserving us from evil. And although that conclusion is limited, it still matters, because God not owing us preservation from evil is at least one condition for God’s goodness to be compatible with his permission of evil.
And that leads me to what remains in discharging God of blame for permitting evil. Even if God doesn’t lack goodness on account of him not owing us preservation from evil, there are other ways in which he could lack goodness. If God just stands back and lets evil happen without ordering it to some good, then seemingly he would be willing evil as an end of itself, which would make him malevolent. Also, perhaps God doesn’t owe us preservation from evil, but it makes sense that perfect benevolence would do it anyway.
Those are fair points. Justice is not the whole of goodness, and the distinction between debt and gift doesn’t by itself answer every concern about divine love and goodness.
So, those are the places where the discussion must go next: from the question of “What does God owe?” to the question of “How is benevolence not undermined with God not helping us when he can?”
But we’re gonna save those questions for future episodes.
Well, my friends, that’s it for today.
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