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, as 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.
For most, the target isn’t God’s power. Rather, it’s his goodness, 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 to save him. We say that lifeguard isn’t good; he’s malevolent. And we do so because we intuit that he intentionally did the child wrong, failing to give the help that was due to the child.
Now, notice that’s a charge of injustice. Help was due to the child, and the man 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 that the help needed from God to eliminate evil was somehow due to us.
Now, there are other ways someone might charge God of malevolence for permitting evil that go beyond the path of injustice. We will deal with those in future articles.
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? If he doesn’t, then the charge that he isn’t good for failing us in allowing evil doesn’t stick, since you can’t fault someone for failing in a duty to help when that help isn’t due.
So here’s the question: does God owe us the help needed to eliminate all evil—both physical and moral? If he doesn’t, then we can’t say he’s malevolent on account of doing us wrong by permitting evil.
Let’s begin with justice. And we can look to St. Thomas Aquinas for some help.
Justice is traditionally defined as rendering to another what is due. As Aquinas points out in the first part of his Summa Theologiae, question 21, article 1, there are two forms. 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.
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. We also know it from philosophy.
Insofar as God is the primary cause of any being outside himself, everything we have—our existence, abilities, time, and possessions—comes from God. So no matter what we try to 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.
This doesn’t mean that justice is absent from God. Aquinas does attribute distributive justice to God, though in a qualified sense. 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).
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.
This doesn’t mean God is the debtor (ST I:21:1 ad 3), like in the case of a governor who governs members who belong to the same order that he does: the state. God is not a member of the order that he governs. Furthermore, divine distributive justice is measured by the nature of the recipient, not by strict equality between recipients. Thus, 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. The reason is that the creatures in which physical and moral defects occur have a natural susceptibility to those evils, depending on the kind of things they are.
Take bodily death, for example. 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 along with inanimate matter, living material things are composed of form and matter. Think of a tree. It has matter—wood (or mostly wood)—and form—a principle by 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 matter that eventually takes on a new form.
Here’s the key point: if something actually happens to a thing, then it must have had the potential or susceptibility for it. 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 Aquinas can say that, in a sense, death is “natural to man” (ST I-II:85:6).
The bottom line 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.
The same reasoning applies to bodily defects. 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, defects occur in the material creature.
For example, human beings might be constituted with the power of sight, which does belong to their 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 failure.
With that in hand, it becomes clear why a living organism doesn’t have a claim to preservation from bodily death or defects: its nature is constituted by a principle that naturally entails corruption and death. How can an organism possess a natural claim to bodily incorruptibility and immortality when its nature is constituted by a principle that makes it naturally subject to bodily corruptibility and death? The answer is, “It can’t!”
So much for preservation from physical evil. What about moral evil? Is God bound by distributive justice to uphold intellectual creatures—whether human beings or angels—in moral goodness, so that their wills always conform to the order of good for the creature?
Again, I answer no. And the reason is that the very nature of a finite intellectual agent has baked into it a susceptibility to moral defect.
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 or perfection. And they do that through choices.
That 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. 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 reason 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 how 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.
All right! That was a lot, so let me sum up the argument.
God’s distributive justice demands that he give creatures what is due to them by their nature, but preservation from physical or moral evil is not something creatures are owed by nature because creatures are susceptible to such defects, given their respective natures. Therefore, the presence of evil does not establish that God has wronged us or failed to repay a debt.
This conclusion doesn’t mean that death, suffering, and sin aren’t real evils, nor does it tell us why God permits any particular tragedy. It simply means that if the charge is injustice, the existence of evil can’t do all the argumentative work by itself. We can’t accuse God of wrongdoing or failing us by not preserving us from evil.
Now, this doesn’t exhaust the problem of evil. It’s still fair to object that even if God isn’t malevolent on account of injustice, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways in which he is malevolent. If God just stood back and let evil happen without ordering it to some good, then he would be willing evil as an end of itself, which would make him malevolent. There’s also the question of whether perfect benevolence would still require that evil be eliminated.
Those are fair objections. But we’ll have to deal with them in future articles.