Moral evil

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, by William Henry Smith.

Chapter three, Moral Evil.

Perhaps the reader relinquishes this question of degree, and limits his objection or his perplexity to one kind of evil, moral evil, crime, sin.

Pain and painful emotions he can understand as having a fit place in God's creation.

Do they not practice us in fortitude and other virtues? But pain given with vicious intention by one man to another, this must surely be attributed to some diabolic agency.

How can the God who punishes sin have also ordained its existence? How reconcile our notions of the justice of God with the belief that man in all respects the creature of God? This, with many minds, is the great difficulty that besets our subject.

That which, amongst animals or idiots, is mere hurt and injury becomes moral evil, becomes crime or sin, to intelligent man occupied with the interests of society or the presumed judgments of God.

Evil, therefore, becomes moral evil.

There is several types of evil.

There is moral evil and there is natural evil.

And we see that right here in the curse.

There is moral evil, meaning because Adam and Eve sinned, they passed on what we call a sinful nature.

Or the Bible specifically calls it the flesh, the aspect of us that is drawn away from God.

We want to rebel.

God gave us the choice, but to rebel against him means evil can come in.

And God still gives us the freedom to choose.

But yeah, go ahead, please.

Yeah, so this is coming from a piece that went live today at Catholic.com where I'm trying to remain very focused on addressing one specific reason that some might think God lacks goodness for allowing evil in our lives, whether that be physical evil or moral evil.

And that specific reason, Marcus, is that some people think the presence of evil counts against God's goodness because he has somehow failed us in permitting evil or wronged us.

The implication being that the prevention from evil was due to us.

And an example that's often given perhaps is like a lifeguard who's on duty and is watching the pool and sees a kid drowning in the shallow water, and the lifeguard is very able to go and save the child, and he chooses not to save the child but permits the child to drown.

We all intuit that the lifeguard, rightfully so in this case, that the lifeguard would be lacking in goodness, to say the least, precisely because the lifeguard failed in his duty to save the child, failed to give the child what was owed to the child.

And so the question becomes, with this particular charge, does God owe us preservation from evil? Is he bound in some way, shape, or form by justice to prevent evil within the world, whether that be physical or moral evil? And in this article at Catholic.com, Marcus, I answer no, at least.

It's a very limited answer.