This study will investigate the problem of good 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 and of itself, but would be seen as evil because it represented an absence of goodness, or a severe distortion in something which is itself essentially good. The act of adultery, for example, would be seen as evil not in terms of the physical act of sex, which is essentially good and a creation of God, but would be evil in that it is a distortion of that essential goodness, or an absence of fidelity. This explanation would hold true for "natural" evi...