If God is the Creator of all things, as traditional theists say, and evil exists, then wouldn’t that make God the creator of evil? And if so, how could he be an all-good God?
That conclusion creates a dilemma for a theist who holds to the classical conception of God. If we affirm that God created evil, then he’s not all-good. But if we say that God didn’t create evil, then something would have existence without having God as its source, which in turn would mean God isn’t the creator of all things. Neither consequence is compatible with the traditional conception of God.
So how is a classical theist to respond?
The key strategy for dealing with this dilemma is to challenge premise two: evil exists in the world.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Karlo, how could you possibly deny that evil exists in the world? Just look around. It’s everywhere.”
I do not deny that evil “exists” in the sense that evil is a real phenomenon in the world. People really do suffer. People really do sin. But I do deny that evil “exists” in the sense that it is an existing thing that could have God as its creator. This becomes clear once we understand what evil is.
So let’s spend a little time on that.
There are two kinds of evil: moral and physical. Moral evil, or what philosopher Brian Davies calls “evil done” (176), is evil caused by the abuse of human freedom—that’s to say, sin. Physical evil, or “evil suffered,” refers to any sort of suffering, decay, or corruption caused by nature or sin. This is also sometimes called “natural evil.”
Now, evil, whether physical or moral, is a privation of a good. It’s also a privation of being, since for Aristotle and Aquinas, goodness and being are convertible with each other (see ST I:5:1).
And by “privation,” I do not mean merely a lack, but a lack of due good or being—a good, or being, that’s supposed to be there.
To flesh this out a bit, let’s take physical evil first.
Consider a tree, which lacks eyesight. We don’t say its lack of eyesight is a bad thing—or a physical evil. Why? Because a tree isn’t the kind of thing that’s supposed to have eyesight. Eyesight doesn’t belong to its nature.
But we do say blindness is a physical evil for a human being. Why? Because the person lacks the sight that he ought to have, given the kind of thing he is—that’s to say, given his nature as a rational animal.
We can flesh this idea out with the simple example of a sock with a hole in it. This analogy doesn’t work perfectly, since a sock is an artifact, unlike a tree. But the hole in the sock is akin to physical evil in living things. It’s missing or lacking what ought to be there, given its nature—namely, fabric.
Notice that in these examples, physical badness—or physical evil—is an absence or deprivation of a good or being that belongs to each thing, given its nature. Blindness is the absence of sight for the eye; the hole is an absence of fabric for the sock. Both the person and sock lack what is perfective of their natures. In other words, they both lack a duegood.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to moral evil. What is it about murder that makes it morally evil, or bad? You’d probably say, “It takes the life of an innocent human being.” And you’d be correct.
But why is it morally evil to take the life of an innocent human being? You’d probably say, “It’s an injustice.” And you’d be correct again. (For the full answer, see here.)
Now, notice that injustice implies a deprivation of justice—a failure to live in accord with the order of justice, which demands that we give another person his due. Taking the life of an innocent human being is also a failure to love our neighbor, which nature also inclines us to do. Whether we look at it from the perspective of a failure in justice or a failure in love of neighbor, there is a lack of actuality in the order of human behavior that nature prescribes.
The takeaway from these reflections is that evil, whether moral or physical, is essentially a gap between what actually is and what should be. As Brian Davies writes in his book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, when we call something bad or evil, “we are lamenting an absence of being, the fact that what could and should be there is not there” (177). Remember, as I said earlier, that the lack of a due good is a lack of what should be, because being and goodness are convertible.
Now, if evil is a lack of being, then it’s not actual, for all things are actual insofar as they have being. And if evil is not actual, having no principle of being to distinguish it from nothing, then it’s not a real existing thing. To use the technical jargon, it’s not an existing substance.
This is not to say that the absence of being is real, since there actually is a hole in the sock, the defect in the eye actually is there, and the failure to choose the good actually occurred. But the lack of the due good or being is not a subsistent or actual thing in and of itself that has positive qualities and attributes.
With this understanding of evil, we’re now in a position to show how evil, whether physical or moral, cannot be something that God creates.
In the classical tradition of philosophical theology (the study of God by reason, apart from divine revelation), “being” is the proper effect of God as the first cause. God is the ultimate source of being for all real (actual) and really possible beings. Only that which is real can be attributed to God as a proper effect of his creative action. For more on this, check out part one of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, question eight, article one.
So if evil is the absence of being (what is not there), and God can create only being (what is there), then it follows that God cannot make evil to be.
Davies puts it succinctly: “What is not there cannot be thought of as made to be by the source of the being of things.” Therefore, we conclude with him that “evil, including evil suffered, cannot intelligibly be thought of as something which God has made to be.”
We now have the relevant information to refute the atheist’s argument. Recall that he argues that God and evil are logically incompatible because God must create evil, since he is the creator of all things. But as we’ve shown above, God doesn’t create evil, because evil is not an existing entity with being. Therefore, the argument fails.
The presence of evil doesn’t put the theist in the pickle atheists expect. Evil can be a real fact of the world, yet we don’t have to say God is a malevolent Creator.
***This article was originally published by Catholic Answers Magazine Online on May 6, 2026.