More on God and Evil.

Dear Juan Carlos:

I have been visiting your page, which I always find valuable and stimulating. In my wanderings there I came across this article (The Experience of Evil and the Idea of God. Reflections on a great mystery, by Fernando Renau) which seemed to me very good. I would like to add some arguments that I personally find very strong in this matter of the existence of evil and pain in the creation of God, who is perfectly just and good.

The author does well to separate circumstantial evil from moral evil. In my opinion, moral evil is prior to material evil. As we know, there was one who sinned in the beginning and in his pride wished to be like God himself, and with his sin dragged along many of his angelic brothers, and, with Adam, all of humanity. In the case of Adam and Eve it seems that something in the very matrix of creation broke when the human original sin was committed. Children would be born in pain, the earth came to be cursed and condemned to produce thistles and thorns. And not only that, but we now know that, in order to rescue humanity from so evil a step, the very Son of God had to become incarnate and die a horrendous and undeserved death on the Cross.

Moral evil, then, exists. But have you noticed that, if one observes oneself carefully while asking these questions that the author of the article poses… there would seem to be a contradiction? Bear with me for a minute and I will try to explain to you what I have in mind.

When I say that evil exists (moral or material), I am making a comparison without realizing it, since evil in itself is nothing but a painful or harmful alteration of the good.

Nothing is in itself evil until an injury is done to someone’s virtue or dignity, more often to both. And if, when I say “moral evil exists,” I must acknowledge the initial premise that this evil is modifying a greater and prior good.

If we say, as some do (so-called philosophers), “God has failed and evil is in him as much as good,” we are invoking a morality, a rule of judgment superior to that of the ‘God’ we are speaking about.

And where does that rule of judgment come from? Who but someone or something superior to the very God we think we are judging could have created it? And there we are back to square one: we have unwittingly discovered a God morally superior to the one we thought we were judging, and we must begin our judgment all over again.

Hence the condemnation of God by man is not possible, for “his invisible attributes [God’s] make him manifest from the creation onward,” and there is no way to deny his absolute goodness.

A poet I admire says in one of his verses, “I am an ordinary man, deceived between pain and pleasure,” and how apt that observation is, for, taking into account what I concluded before: pain, evil, whether moral or material, is nothing but the mysterious consequence of sin. And what is sin but trying to live, act, and think apart from God and from the evident good and beneficial principles that He gives us through our conscience?

Hence this mysterious paradox of a God who is perfect but must allow evil to exist as sufficient proof that rebellion against his just will is a madness that brings only pain and death in every case without exception.

Hence the attack of the “culture of death” on virtue and on human dignity. The court of the god of this world, his entire kingdom, is nothing but a miserable caravan of sad corpses. Despite their misinterpreted freedom, the courtiers of the Devil are all slaves. But how different the case of our glorious King, is it not? He who humbled himself unto death on the Cross has a marvelous court of Saints, Prophets, and Angels, as numerous as it is full of glory and everlasting life and purity. So that there may be fulfilled what Our Lady exclaimed at the Annunciation, indicating that divine mercy fills the hands of the humble with good things but sends the haughty away with nothing.

Without knowing it, the “philosophers” who sit in judgment on God condemn the god of this world, the Devil, the eternal rebel who introduced defiant evil into the universe. And so, without meaning to, they give glory to the God of heaven who exists forever and ever, and with whom “there is no variation or shadow due to change,” because he is Holy and perfect in all his works, even though he must tolerate evil in order to justify our freedom to adore him and acknowledge him as Father.

I send you a great embrace

Carlos

Boston, March 13, 2001.

 

Author: Fernando Renau.

Contributor: Carlos Caso-Rosendi, USA

Source: Apologetica.org