Throughout history, philosophers and theologians have sought to understand the problem of evil (POE.) The POE arises when one attempts to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with a good God. Traditionally, there have been various theodicies, defenses, and refutations that aim to provide answers as to why God allows evil (theodicy), why we may not know God’s reasons for allowing evil (defense), or why God probably does not exist or cannot exist alongside evil (refutation.) One attempt to understand the POE is called “the privation theory of evil,” which suggests that evil does not possess a positive existence and is merely the absence of goodness. “Evil,” writes Thomas Aquinas, “cannot signify a certain existing being, or a real shaping or positive kind of thing. Consequently, we are left to infer that it signifies a certain absence of a good.”1 Put differently, evil is the departure from the way things ought to be. Think about how we come to understand something as fundamentally bad. For instance, hearing loss is bad insofar as it lacks the goodness of hearing, or how it ought to be. Blindness is bad insofar as it lacks the ability to see properly. Brain damage is bad insofar as it lacks the ability for normal (good) cognitive function. Cruelty is bad insofar as it lacks a good character. The dead sunflower is bad insofar as it lacks what it ought to be, a healthy sunflower. Evil, therefore, does not exist by itself and is parasitically dependent upon the good.
“A squirrel,” writes Edward Feser, “which has been hit by a car may be unable to run away from predators as swiftly as it needs to; and a tree whose roots have been damaged may be unstable or unable to take in all the water and nutrients it needs in order to remain healthy. A defect of this sort is (to use some traditional philosophical jargon) a privation, the absence of some feature a thing would naturally require so as to be complete. It involves the failure to realize some potential inherent in a thing.”2
The inexhaustible foundation of reality (God) from which all things emerge, move, and have their being, is almost certainly good. This is because God is self-contained and necessarily actual—there is nothing he lacks. In other words, his properties are devoid of potential since he is already absolutely maximal. Some skeptics, however, have advanced the “Evil God Challenge,” in an attempt to undermine God’s goodness. The evil God challenge essentially demands explanations for why belief in an all-good God is significantly more reasonable than belief in an all-evil God. Perhaps it is reasonable to affirm the existence of intelligent agency behind the universe, but why believe it is all-good? Maybe God is, after all, evil. I can see some rationale behind this objection, but when pressed further, it simply falls apart. This is because a maximally evil thing makes no sense in the first place, since no matter what you do, you do it for something intrinsically good. Ted Bundy, for example, did not murder dozens of young women for the sake of evil itself. Rather, he did such for pleasure or to obtain something good for himself.
Now, pleasure by itself is, in fact, intrinsically good—even though Bundy went about obtaining it in the most horrendous ways imaginable. You could say Bundy was absorbing a spoiled or rotten form of goodness. By this logic, a maximally evil being appears impossible since, again, nothing is done for the sake of evil, but for goodness itself. “Something is perfect, then,” writes Feser, “to the extent that it has actualized such potentials and is without privations. But then a purely actual cause of things, precisely since it is purely actual and thus devoid of unrealized potentiality or privation, possesses maximal perfection.”3 All things are fundamentally good, for a foundational reality of evil is an unintelligible concept. The good takes metaphysical precedence over the bad, for goodness is a metaphysical entity or form of its own, whereas evil or badness is not. Therefore, while God may allow or tolerate evil, he does not appear to be the cause of evil.
“For he (Aquinas) takes it to imply that God does not cause evil, considered as a substance or positive quality. Aquinas holds that God causes only the being of all that can properly be thought of as existing (i.e., actual individual things with all their positive properties.) On his account, therefore, evil cannot be thought of as caused (creatively) by God. It is, he thinks, real enough (in the sense that it would be mad to say nothing is bad or defective or sinful.) But evil, Aquinas argues, is not created. Its “reality,” he says, is always a case of something missing. And it provides no positive grounds for supposing the existence of God is impossible or improbable.”—Brain Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. p. 253–254
“The whole of classical Christian tradition, after all, understands God himself as the source and end of all being, and hence as the Good as such. Thus the ontological status of evil must be a pure “privation of the good” (a view often mistakenly said to have been invented by Augustine, but in fact one long antedating him, in both pagan and Christian thought.) Having no proper substance, evil cannot constitute the final cause or transcendental horizon of the natural will of any rational being; to suggest otherwise is to embrace an ultimate ontological, moral, and epistemological nihilism; it is to suggest that God himself is not the one Good of all beings, the one rational end of desire. Whatever one wishes must then be what one sees as being “good” in some sense or another, however perversely.”—David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation. p. 174–175
Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae, 1a, 48, 1
Feser, E. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. p. 30
Ibid, p. 30
Great thoughts! Definitely resonates