Unbelieving or Skeptic World Has Held That

¶ … unbelieving or skeptic world has held that one question before those who believe in the existence of a Perfect and Just God. It is a question which asks, if God is the Creator of everything and He is good, perfect and just, why did He create evil and allow it to exist? One of the greatest doctors of the Catholic Church, St. Thomas Aquinas answers it point-by-point. He says that evil is not an essence, form or substance, which goodness possesses.

Rather it is the absence of that goodness, or the "privation of good (Aquinas). A created thing or creature is created for a purpose by God and that purpose is necessarily good, because God created it, and that creature's nature is directed at that purpose, which is good.

When the creature, by his or her own free will, decides not to opt for that purpose - directly or indirectly - he or she violates his or her own nature, which is aimed or directed towards his or her own good, and therefore, commits evil. It is through the vehicle of the human will, which is free, that evil occurs. But evil has no purpose or substance of its own, because and therefore God did not create it. Neither does He allow it.

It exists only because the human will, which is free, opts for it. Evil is viewed by St. Thomas as a non-being, neither an essence or a substance created by God. It is the result of the human will's falling short of the fulfillment of its own nature, which constitutes evil and sin. This is to love God. God created human beings with the free will to choose between good and evil, precisely because He is a perfectly just God.

He allows man the full responsibility for his or her choices (between good and evil). Peter Kreeft says more or less the same principle. The goodness of a thing or person depends on the fullness of its being. If the person or thing lacks anything in body or soul, then that person or thing is said to be lacking in his/her or its powers and instruments of knowledge and movement. his/her or its goodness is proportionate to that fullness which he/she or it possesses.

Inversely, as much as he or she or it lacks does he or she or it commits evil. Evil, he sees as either bodily or spiritually. Every person, for example, possesses the potential of walking and running. But if he/she is born or made lame, then that lack of power to walk and run constitute bodily evil (Kreeft 2002).

But if a person, as another example, chooses to steal from his/her neighbor or betrays this neighbor, then he/she fails to use his potential of loving that neighbor, and thus, falls short of his or her purpose, which is that he/she should honor his/.her neighbor's possessions, and which in turn, is good. He also says:."..the primary evil in moral actions is that which is from the object, for instance, to take what belongs to another. And this action is said to be evil.

(Kreeft) The genus of human beings is to love God and neighbor and to give each one his due. Bill King further examined the grounds expounded by Thomas Aquinas on both the matter of evil as not an essence and therefore, it not proceeding from God, Who is perfectly good and just. He clarifies that evil, though, has to be as real as everything that God created, including human beings, in order to do as much trouble as it has done to God's plan for humankind since the beginning.

He agrees with Aquinas that only what is actual can bring about something that is real while that which can do remains real. He then explains, from this agreement with Aquinas, that evil occurs only as an accidental principle of change and not the cause of the change by itself. A cause, nor could it have a formal or final cause. Instead, it was only a per accidens principle of change, and not the per se cause of change.

Much like white is the principle of change to black in the sense that it must begin as other than black, but white is not the cause of the change to black. Thus, the cause of evil would then be a good substance only accidentally. It has no direct cause by itself, and therefore does not proceed from God, but from the human will, which God made to be free because He is just.

To the further question as to whether God does not remain the Cause of even the principle of evil, being the First Principle in the series of causes and effects, he brings up Aquinas' explanation of the evil of penalty as differentiated from the evil of fault. The evil of penalty he finds necessary so that human beings will opt or strive for the perfecting of the universe or the cosmos, and such an intention is fit for God and justifies his attributes of perfection and perfect justice.

It tends to the perfection of both human beings.