By David G Bonagura, Jr.
I was listening to the podcast The Bible in a Year when these lines from 2 Chronicles 28:3 appeared: “[King Ahaz] burned incense in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, and burned his children as an offering, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel”.
“Pause that,” my six-year-old son interrupted. I hadn’t realized he was listening more attentively than I was. “Why did he do that?” My son grasped the gravity of the matter, and his tone revealed revulsion and confusion. “Because he was evil,” was my startled and uninspired reply. But little children have a way of outpacing their parents, especially when they receive unsatisfactory answers. “Why was he evil?”
“Because he chose to disobey God,” my wife interjected. “When we do not follow God’s will, the human heart can turn toward darkness, and as a result people do evil things.” Our son, well-versed in The Lord of the Rings and inadequately formed in Batman courtesy of his older brothers, understood the connection between darkness and evil. The conversation ended there.
But I kept thinking, not so much about his question—the perennial problem of evil—but about how the reality of evil struck him on a visceral level. I usually think of “the problem of evil” in academic and apologetic contexts, which is not wrong, though the classroom strips evil of its shock and gravity.
When we confront evil face to face, rational answers, though they certainly play a role in dealing with it, can sound like a bamboo arrow striking a steel tank. That may explain why, when I encounter news of horrific evil, I move on as quickly as possible rather than dwell on it.
The academic and apologetic response to the problem of evil is correct. God, who is infinitely good and complete in Himself, created the world and the beings who inhabit it to share His love. Everything He created is, unlike Him, finite and subject to change; intellectual beings made in His image possess freedom, through which they have the power to choose good. But change can bring destruction, as with natural disasters and diseases; freedom can be misused to inflict evil on others. God permits evil to occur only because He can bring a greater good out of it.
This is a rational argument. But given the disturbing force of evil, this argument requires firm faith to be truly accepted. Those without faith are left bewildered at best, or angry at worst, as they witness evil unleashed or suffer it themselves. Twenty years ago, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and a non-believer, wrote that attributing good to God but excusing Him for evil seems to have “a double standard of a kind that would make even affirmative action look fair.”
A key ingredient in forming firm faith is a proper understanding of God, who cannot be understood simply as another person, not even as a super-person, subject to the same judgments or double standards as we are. He is fundamentally different from what we are.
When we judge Him according to human standards—including asking why He did not intervene to stop an evil—we commit a massive category error, similar to judging dogs by human standards. Should a domestic dog that attacks and kills a human be read its rights, imprisoned, assigned a lawyer, forced to wait months for a trial, given a selection of fine clothing for the occasion, and allowed to choose whether to testify in its own defense?
To us, the fact that God permits evil seems absurd, contradictory, unjust, cruel, and tyrannical. But God dwells in a realm that surpasses our understanding. Recognizing this fact is not excusing Him; it is acknowledging the reality of who and what He is.
God’s being includes His omniscience. For Him, unlike for us, past, present, and future comprise a single moment. He knows the good that will follow an evil before the evil occurs; we must wait and wonder whether that good will ever come, and even speculate what that good might be. “Under our condition of mortality,” writes St. Augustine in The City of God, “we cannot observe the whole design [of the universe], in which these little parts, which seem so unpleasing, fit together to form a scheme of ordered beauty.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge of faith is not trusting that God is the loving Father He has revealed Himself to be. When things do not go our way, we can quickly succumb to the pernicious temptation to reduce God to our level. “Let us reduce God to our own image; in the image of man we weaken Him, petty and whining we create Him.”
Then it is easy to blame God for our problems and incriminate Him when He does not respond. The incriminations generally follow three lines: He does not exist, He does not care, or He is vengeful.
None of these conceptions is true. The importance of the academic argument describing the nature of God and how evil coexists with Him returns here with force. It can rebuild the trust—the faith—we have lost if we are willing to wrestle with it seriously.
The argument lacks visceral force; it cannot heal wounds or remove pain. Yet it can help us heal spiritually by assuring us that, no matter how horrible things may be, God must be in control; He must be with us; He must have a plan for the situation, even if we do not see it.
When faith strengthens reason, especially the theological reasoning of the Church, reason can, perhaps unexpectedly, strengthen a faltering faith that is challenged and in need of a boost.
About the author:
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and translator of Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. An adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic International University, he serves as religion editor of University Bookman, a book review journal founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. His personal website is here.