The mystery of Evil in God’s Creation

28 April 2019

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1. Holy Scripture begins with these verses and from these first words of Scripture we can affirm that God gave a beginning to everything that exists outside of Himself and He alone is the Creator and there is none besides Him. From time immemorial, the origin of creation has been a subject of great intrigue and mankind in every age has researched on how the world came into existence thereby leading to the discovery of scores of theories and beliefs, some of which even challenge the belief of the Catholic faith. Amidst all these challenges, our faith strongly re-iterates in the New Testament too that “By faith we understand that the world was prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Hebrew 11:3. However, there is one question that is often posed to our Christian faith that could leave us seeking answers. If the world does come from God’s wisdom and goodness, why is there evil? Where does it come from? God surely did not create evil as we read in Genesis 1:31 “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” So how do we understand the existence of evil in God’s creation? To this question no quick answer will suffice though the Christian faith and its teachings as a whole does answer this question.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches us that creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. With his infinite wisdom and goodness, God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained. God himself guides his creation towards this perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming perfect involves the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, constructive forces alongside destructive forces of nature. Therefore it is very much God's plan that physical good exists alongside physical evil and this will continue to be so as long as His entire creation has not reached perfection.

God is the sovereign master of his plan. But to carry it out he also makes use of his creature’s cooperation. God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own and thus cooperating in the accomplishment of his plan. Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate perfection by their own free choices. This is a choice between moral good and evil, it is about being either submissive and obedient to God or following one's own free will and rejecting the will of God. This freedom to choose could mean that they could go astray. Indeed, they did and have sinned. Thus it was through their sin that moral evil, which is more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause or creator of moral evil. It was a consequence of respecting the freedom of his creatures. God still permits it to exist because he respects the freedom of his creatures and mysteriously knows how to derive good from it.

From the Scripture we can see that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures. In Genesis 50:20 Joseph tells his brothers “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” The greatest evidence of the fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God greatly illuminates in his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. The rejection and murder of God’s only Son was the greatest moral evil ever to have been committed. But God, by his grace that “abounded all the more”, brought the greatest of goods out of this moral evil i.e. the glorification of Christ and our redemption.

Faith therefore gives us this assurance that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil. We may not fully understand God’s ways but through faith we can be assured that everything comes from God and without his knowledge nothing happens. If we look at an overview of the whole Christian faith we can see that it bears witness to this truth: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin, and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments, and his call to a blessed life to which all creatures are invited, but from which, they can also turn away by their free choice.