God and Evil

in terms of the reality of God. Specifically, the study will focus on ways that philosophers seeking to explain or describe God have tried to also explain the presence of evil in the world.

The "problem" of good and evil in terms of the reality of God is in fact the problem of evil. How do we explain evil in a world, which is created and ruled by a God, by definition is "all goodness"?

As we read in Stumpf in his analysis of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most powerful apologists for

Christianity, "The problem of evil is aggravated by the argument that everything that exists comes from God. Since there is evil in the world, it would appear that evil, too, comes from God" (Stumpf 197). However, this would introduce a fatal contradiction into the consideration of God as an entity of pure goodness. How can anything evil come from an entity, which is purely good?

Aquinas, however, agreed with St. Augustine, an earlier

apologist for Christianity, both arguing essentially that evil is not a positive thing, but is rather an absence of goodness. In other words, "God is not the cause of evil because evil is not

a thing. Moral evil represents the absence or privation in something that in itself is good. In this sense, absence or privation consists of an inappropriate mode of action where the action as such is not evil" (Stumpf 197).

In this explanation of evil, evil would not be seen as a reality in a

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tradition introduces a basic contradiction which makes it extremely difficult for Westerners to conceive of a totally good God having anything whatsoever to do with evil. The introduction of the personage of Satan into the formula of God's reality solves one problem, but creates another. As Watts writes, It is inconceivable that there should be any common ground, let alone common cause, between God and Satan. The conflict seen here is so ultimately real and serious . . . that the suggestion that there is some profound, inner level at which God and Satan are at one seems to be the height of blasphemy (36). Watts argues that this apparently unbridgable dichotomy has been especially fostered by literary and artistic portrayals of the images of good and evil. That is, man's powerful fascina-tion with evil is often portrayed as being the product of the images of evil---either seductive beauty or outright horror. This evil allure may be exercised in two ways: through overt beauty---notably through the charms of the opposite sex---or through the direct fascination of horror itself. On the one hand there is the baited trap or the poisoned fruit of far and luscious form; on the other there is the vertiginous attraction of the d
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Approximate Word count = 4702
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)

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