THE PROBLEM


OF EVIL:

“Videbam Satanam sicut fulgor de caelo cadentem.” ¹

Exonerating God

By Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor, Boston Catholic Journal

(Revised June 4, 2026)
 

No single factor is invoked more often in people turning away from God, or in their failing to believe in Him, than the occurrence — note that I do not say the “existence” of evil, especially as it manifests itself in suffering.

The occurrence — not the existence — of evil appears incompatible with God, or at least a coherent conception of God as both — and simultaneously — absolutely good and absolutely powerful. That God and the occurrence of evil should coexist appears logically contradictory and ontologically incompatible. The one is effectively the abrogation of the other. The existence of God, it is argued, precludes (or ought to preclude) the occurrence of evil, and the occurrence of evil precludes (or ought to preclude) the existence of God.

While we can readily adduce empirical evidence, that is to say, tangible instances, of evil to discredit the existence of God, the availability of evidence to corroborate the existence of God, on the other hand, is so exiguous that even when such instances are invoked, they are deemed extraordinary events in the affairs of men; indeed, events so far from commonplace that we call them miraculous — that is to say, inexplicable interventions conditionally attributed to God in the absence of alternate explanations that may yet be forthcoming. Whether or not this is a sufficient, if concise, summary, the general implication is clear: evidence of evil overwhelmingly exceeds evidence of God. If sheer preponderance is the criterion to which we appeal, God loses. 

Evil comes as a scandal to the believer who asks, “How can this be, given the existence of God?

To the disbeliever no such scandal arises — only scorn for the believer who is left in perplexity, unable to deny the existence of God on the one hand … while equally unable to deny the occurrence of evil on the other.

We appear to be consigned to either nihilistic resignation in the one camp (understanding evil as somehow ontologically inherent and rampant in the universe …. although we cannot explain why), or an unreasoned and therefore untenable affirmation of the existence of God — despite the contradictory concurrence of evil — in the other. Both appear to be damned to perplexity. 

Neither has satisfactorily answered the question implicit within every occurrence of evil:

“Why?”    

The Problem ... and why we must respond to it

Before we begin our attempt to arrive at an answer to the problem of evil, we must first clearly summarize and completely understand the nature of the problem itself.

While this may appear obvious, all too often our efforts to make sense of the experience of evil in our lives and in the world fail to adequately address implicit or unstated premises apart from which no answer is either forthcoming or possible.

Failing to follow the premises, we fail to reach a conclusion.  Instead, we reflexively seize what is incontrovertible (the occurrences of evil) and … understanding nothing of its antecedents, satisfy ourselves that it is entirely a mystery — in other words, utterly incomprehensible to us — in fact, so opaque to our ability to reason it through (which we do not) that we throw up our hands in either frustration or despair … declaring that either it is the will of God in a way that we do not understand, or that there can be no God in light of the enormities that we experience.

In either case — whether we affirm that God exists despite them, or deny that He exists because of them — we confront the experience of evil as an impenetrable mystery. Such a facile answer, I suggest, is not a satisfactory state of affairs at all. 
 

Antecedents  
We can only speculate upon the pre-Adamic origin of evil.

That evil preceded the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise is clear. However, we are given no explanation of the genesis of evil as it predated the creation of man. We only know that it had already manifested itself in the Garden — as something already extrinsic to it and antagonistic toward it. That is to say, in the Creation Narrative, we encounter from the outset the parallel existence of the serpent (a personification of evil) with man prior to the Fall.

I say parallel because the serpent possesses a supernatural existence parallel to and contemporaneous with, the created nature of man, much in the way that the supernatural being of Angels coexists with the natural being of men. 

While we are unable to explain evil prior to the creation of man (simply because no narrative exists to which we can appeal apart from one utterance of Christ in Saint Luke 10.18: “I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven”), we are not, however, for this reason absolved from explaining not only how evil came to obtrude upon the affairs of men, but why it is not incompatible with our conception of God as all-good and all-powerful.

Theodicy

Philosophy calls this endeavor a theodicy. We needn’t be intimidated by this, nor think ourselves unequal to it, as we shall see.

To further compound the issue, the problem is no mere academic matter from which we can stand aloof as so many theorists to hypothetical abstractions. It is a problem that vexes us, and lacerates us at every turn, believer, and unbeliever alike. It has a direct and painful bearing upon us; it affects us, afflicts us, and, yes, sometimes crushes us.

Despite the refuge that the believer has taken in the notion of mystery, or the cynicism to which the unbeliever consigns himself in hopeless resignation, each cry out, equally, “Why?” — especially when the evil experienced or perpetrated is an effrontery to justice or a violation of innocence.    

The skeptic — most often a casualty of evil — cannot reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of God. The two appear to be … not just rationally incompatible … but mutually exclusive. What is more, the empirical evidence of evil is far more preponderant and far more compelling than any evidence that can be readily adduced to the existence of God.

The believer, on the other hand, is painfully perplexed, and sometimes deeply scandalized, by this seeming incompatibility which often buffets the faith which alone sustains his belief — the faith that, somehow, the occurrence of evil and the existence of God are not, in the end, irreconcilable.

First and foremost, then, it is critical to be clear about the context in which the problem first occurred, and from which all subsequent instances follow.

Even before this, however, and as we have said, we must be absolutely clear about the problem itself which, in summary, follows: 
 

The Problem Summarized: 

•  We understand by God an absolutely omniscient Being Who is absolutely good and absolutely powerful.       

•  A being deficient in any of these respects — that is to say, wanting in knowledge, goodness, or power — we do not understand as God, but as less than God. 

•  An absolutely good and absolutely omniscient Being would know every instance of evil and would neither permit it because He is absolutely good, or, because He is absolutely powerful, would eradicate it.

•  Suffering and evil, in fact, occur. 

•  Therefore, God, from Whom evil cannot be concealed, cannot be absolutely good and absolutely powerful. 

 •  If absolutely good, God would eradicate all evil and suffering — but does not, and therefore, while all-good, He cannot be all-powerful.

•  Conversely, if absolutely powerful, then God could abolish evil and suffering but does not, and therefore, while all-powerful, He cannot be all good. 

•  Hence, there is no God, for by God we understand a Being perfect in goodness and power.                 

Until we are perfectly clear about this, we can go no further. Unless we fully grasp the magnitude of this problem, we cannot hope to understand the reasons why men either fail to believe in God or having once believed, no longer do so. The occurrence, the experience, of evil, as we had said in our opening, appears as nothing less than a scandal to believers, and the cause of disbelief in unbelievers. 

It need not be so.

For our part, we must be prepared to follow St. Peter’s exhortation,

“being ready always to satisfy everyone that asks you a reason of that hope which is in you.” ²

Hence, we begin.       

 

The Solution to the Problem of Evil  

As mentioned earlier, any attempt to come to terms with the problem of evil vis-à-vis the existence of God inevitably entails linguistic and conceptual complexities, especially in the way of suppressed premises, or unstated assumptions. It is absolutely essential that these latent features, these uncritically assumed concepts long-dormant in language, be made manifest.

What really is the problem of evil, and what really is the nature of God in its simplest formulation?

Can God really be exculpated ? …. Can He be exonerated of this ontological cancer that we call evil? And, most importantly, what is the real nature of evil itself?

All too often we are too facile with our answers through some articulation of faith that we are not adequately prepared to defend.

Our confrontation with the problem of evil is the greatest confrontation of all — for it is, in the end, not only the genesis of all that we suffer but remains the apocalyptic culmination of all that has been and ever will be.  
 

The Solution Summarized  

The problem of evil and suffering is a moral problem with existential consequences that extend to, and are manifested within, the universe of experience.

Evil, therefore, cannot be understood apart from moral agency, especially as it pertains to man of whom it is predicated as either an agent or a casualty. That is to say, man either causes evil, is a casualty of evil, or both.

An all-good and all-powerful God would not create man imperfectly. If He chose to create an imperfect man, He would not be all-good; if He was unable to do otherwise, He would not be all-powerful.
 

Free Will     
Free will  is a perfection in man. If we do not concede that free will is a perfection, then we cannot not concede … to this concession … which is to say that we cannot hold ourselves free to disagree with it, and deem this better than to be free to disagree with it, which is logically untenable.

In a word, if free will is not a perfection, then it pertains more to the notion of perfection that the will not be free. However, apart from free will, there is no universe of moral discourse; nothing meritorious and nothing blameworthy, no intention, action, or event in the affairs of men that is susceptible of being construed as either good or evil — and, consequently, no action is good, and conversely, none is evil — for we maintain that there is no evil and no good pertaining to the actions of men. 

But there is evil.         

And there is good.     

To claim otherwise is counterfactual. Our daily experiences confirm this.

What is more, if I am not free not to love God, then my loving God — or anyone or anything else, for that matter — is without value, for we do not ascribe the notion of valuation to that which proceeds of necessity.

That the sum of the interior angles in any triangle is 180 degrees possesses nothing in the way of valuation. We do not say that this is good or evil. It is geometrically necessary. If we agree that free will is a perfection (that it is better to possess free will than not to possess it), then in creating man, God would have deprived man of a perfection in his created nature, had He not endowed man with free will — a notion that would be inconsistent with either the goodness or the power of God, or both.

Eve already knew … was acquainted with … good … for the Garden of Paradise was replete with everything good, and devoid of anything evil. Eve experienced no want, no privation. We must keep this in mind, given our classical understanding of evil as “a privation of good.”

We must first be clear that Eve chose to know good and evil.    This is a far-reaching, and portentous statement.

Eve, by nature created good, therefore chose … not to know good, the first term, with which she was already naturally acquainted … but she chose to know the second term as well: evil. Eve already knew good, but she knew nothing of evil, for only good existed in the Garden of Paradise, and she herself was created good.        

Now, it is not possible to know evil without (apart from) experiencing evil, any more than it is to know good without experiencing good. We cannot know, understand, or comprehend, pain and suffering without —that is to say, apart from — experiencing pain and suffering — any more than we can know, understand, and comprehend the color blue without, and apart from, experiencing the color blue. We simply cannot “know” blue abstractly: all the nuanced metrics of physics and chromatics that can be explained to us in the greatest detail will never yield the experience of “blue”— or so much as approximate it.     

In choosing to know evil, therefore, Eve inadvertently, but nevertheless necessarily and concomitantly, chose to experience the evil of which she erstwhile knew nothing.

It was not the case that Eve was conscious or cognitive of the deleterious nature of evil (for prior to Original Sin, as we have said, Eve had only known, experienced, good).   

What is more, no one chooses what is evil except through misapprehending it as a good, for every choice is ineluctably a choosing of a perceived good, even if the good perceived is intrinsically evil.

The most evil act is latently a choice of a good extrinsic to the evil act itself. Man only acts for, and is motivated toward, a perceived good, however spurious the perception or the perceived good. It is impossible to choose an intrinsically evil act apart from a perceived extrinsic good motivating the intrinsically evil act. 

Eve’s choice, while free, was nevertheless instigated through the malice and lie of Satan who deceived Eve that an intrinsic evil — explicitly prohibited by God — was, in fact, an intrinsic good, which it was not.

I hasten to add that the susceptibility to being deceived does not derogate from the perfection of man, for the notion of deception is bound up with the notion of trust, which is an indefeasible good. The opposite of trust is suspicion which already, and hence anachronistically, presumes an acquaintance with evil.  

In choosing to know evil, Eve’s choice necessitated, and hence, precipitated, those conditions alone through which evil can be experienced, e.g., death, suffering, illness, pain, etc. 

Her choosing to know evil bi-conditionally entailed the privation of the good, the first term, through which alone we understand its privative, evil, the second term.

Evil instantiates no esse ⁷ (that by which something is, i.e. has being), no act of being by which something exists in reality and in which any positive attributes or predicates can inhere — for evil has no substance: which is to say, evil possesses no being of its own apart from the good of which it is only privative: it is a negation in part or entire.

For this reason, we see the two terms occurring diametrically in the Book of Genesis at the beginning of Holy Scripture where they are spoken of in terms of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which alone, in all the Garden of Paradise, Adam and Eve are forbidden by God to eat. ³

The existence of the good, does not, as some suggest, still less necessarily entail, the experience of evil. The existence of the good, does not, as some suggest, still less necessarily entail, the “existence” (the experience) of evil. Adam and Eve in the state of natural felicity in the Garden of Paradise knew good apart from any acquaintance with, or any conception of, evil.

Evil necessarily implicates good, but good in no way necessarily implicates evil. The notion of knowledge by way of contrast and opposition is confined to relatively few empirical instances and always yields nothing of what a thing is, only that in contradistinction to what it is not.

To know what a thing is not tells us nothing of what it is. We do not know the color “blue” by its opposition to, or in contrast with, nor in contradistinction to, a “not-blue”, for there is no existent “not-blue.” There are only other colors we distinguish from blue — but we do so without invoking the notion of contrast or opposition. I do not know blue as “not-red” (or, for that matter, through invoking any or all the other colors). We know blue in the experience of blue only. If there is an “opposite” of blue, or a corresponding negative to blue, it can only be the absence of color — not simply another color that is “not-blue,” for in that case every other color would be the opposite of blue — and the opposite of every other color as well.   

Once again, in Eve’s choosing to know evil, she consequently and concomitantly chose the conditions under which alone such knowledge was possible. Among the conditions informing such knowledge are death, suffering, illness, pain — all that we associate with evil and understand by evil. 

Far from being culpable, God had warned Adam and Eve to avoid the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

“But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. *
[de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali ne comedas : in quocumque enim die comederis ex eo, morte morieris.]         (Genesis 2.17)      

To argue that the goodness of God is compromised by His injunction against the plenitude of knowledge through His forbidding them to eat of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” is spurious inasmuch as it presumes to hold knowledge, and not felicity, to be man’s greatest good. In withholding complete knowledge, it is mistakenly argued, God deprived man of an intrinsic good.

But this is the very argument of the devil.

Felicity, or complete happiness, not omniscience, or complete knowledge, is man’s greatest good, and only that which redounds to happiness is good for man, not that which redounds to knowledge, and the two do not necessarily coincide.  

Evil is a privation of the good; consequently, to choose evil is to choose a privation of the good: specifically, that which vitiates or diminishes the goo

The Negation of Evil

To maintain, furthermore, that man can know evil, suffering, illness, and death without experiencing evil, suffering, illness and death is equally unacceptable. By this line of reasoning, one whose vision is color-deficient can know the color purple without ever experiencing the color purple, or that one can know what is bitter without experiencing bitterness, or know “hot” without experiencing hotness. Purple, bitterness, hot — no less than evil, suffering, illness, death (and all that we understand by “evil” — are not concepts in the way, for example, that a simple binomial equation (1+1=2) is a concept independent of anything existentially enumerable. We can know concepts but we cannot experience concepts.

On the other hand, we cannot say of experiences that we possess an a priori conception of them, that is to say, prior to the experiences themselves. In other words, in our present discussion we cannot be said to “know” evil in any merely epistemic sense — nor can we even remotely approximate it in any noetic sense prior to the experience of evil— and this, I argue, is entirely logical, for we cannot know “what is not.” We cannot know a negation anymore than we can experience nothing.  And this, essentially, is the “negation” that we call “evil.”

But one may argue that in our encounter with evil we immediately recognize a privation — some kind of existential deficit, if you will; that we confront a negation, one that we immediately understand as a privation of a good that should be. And how, then, can we perceive, recognize, intuit, (“know”), that what we encounter is in fact an evil if we have no conception of evil?

To such an objection we must ask, how can one be said to know something that is not? And this is not to say that evil does not occur. I am simply arguing that we cannot know what is not, only what is, and what is possesses being.

And Being is the most fundamental good.  Indeed, it is the absolute Good, for “Deus sit ipsum esse” ⁸ — God is Being Itself — the “Ego Sum Qui Sum” ⁹

We know the privation of good — which we understand as evil — only inasmuch as it is a privation of being. We can only be said to “know” what is not only by knowing (the being of) what is — and of which we find a deprivation of being. But we do not, and cannot, know evil in se. For there is nothing to know.

Why God is not Responsible 
    for the Occurrence of Evil

God, then, is in no way culpable of, nor responsible for, the “existence” of evil. The occurrence or experience of evil neither derogates from His goodness, nor detracts from His power:        

If God is all good, He would confer the perfection of freedom upon man in Adam and Eve, which necessarily involves the exercise of this freedom. A freedom that is not free to be exercised at will is no freedom at all.

However, to confer the perfection of freedom of the will upon man does not eo ipso imply that the exercise of the will necessarily involves a choosing between the good and the not-good or the less-good, still less a choice between good and evil. Presumably the exercise of this freedom prior to the Fall was exercised in choices between things of themselves inherently good, albeit distinguishable in attributes. The fig and the pear are equally good in nature, but differing in attributes, and to choose the one over the other does not to imply that the one is good and the other not-good or even less-good. The choosing to eat the one and not the other is simply a choice among alternative goods.       

Nor is the thing not chosen “less good” in itself than that which is chosen. It is good proper to its nature. The pear and the fig are distinctly, if differentially, nutritious and redound to health in appropriate measure.   

The notion of choice is only coherent in the context of right reason. Choice (the exercise of free will), is never gratuitous but is always in accordance with reason which alone mediates the choice to a coherent end. What we choose, we choose to coherent ends. In other words, we choose for a reason — and not spontaneously or gratuitously. Choices are always ordered to ends, whatever the choices themselves may be. 

One does not, for example, choose as the means to nutrition, a stone rather than a fig. The choosing of the fig does not imply that the stone is not good. On the other hand, one does not choose figs to build a house, rather than stones. This does not imply that the fig is not good. The nature of the fig redounds to nutrition, while the nature of the stone does not, while the nature of the stone redounds to building while the nature of the fig does not. One can still choose to eat stones or to build with figs, but such choices do not accord with ordered reason, which of itself is also an intrinsic good.        

Only God can bring good out of evil He does not will — but He nevertheless permits precisely through having conferred the perfection of free will in man. While God could not have endowed man with this perfection without simultaneously permitting the consequences necessary and intrinsic to it, He is not Himself the Author of the evil but of that perfection in man through which — not of necessity (for man is never compelled to choose — inasmuch as compulsion by definition abrogates choice) — man chooses evil and consequently becomes the agent of it. 

The occurrence of evil, consequently, is neither inconsistent with, nor contrary to, the notion of God as absolutely good and absolutely powerful.

The Scriptural Narrative as the Logical Antecedent:         

 

1. “And He commanded him, saying: Of every tree of Paradise thou shalt eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.” 3 2. “Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” 4