If God Exists, Why Is There Evil and Suffering?
Short Answer
The existence of evil and suffering does not contradict the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God. Catholic teaching begins by distinguishing God's creation from the defects that arise within creation.
Everything God creates, insofar as it exists, is good:
“God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good” (Genesis 1:31).
Evil is therefore not a rival substance created by God. In the classical teaching of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, evil is a privation of a good that ought to be present—as blindness is the absence of sight in a creature naturally ordered to seeing.
Moral evil—sin—arises when rational creatures misuse their created freedom. God gives the creature its existence, powers and ability to act; He does not cause the defect by which the will turns away from its proper good. St James therefore teaches:
“God is not a tempter of evils: and he tempteth no man” (James 1:13).
St Thomas correspondingly distinguishes the evil of fault, of which God is not the author, from physical or penal evils which God may permit, or in justice sometimes positively inflict, without Himself committing evil.
Human suffering and death must also be understood in light of the Fall. The Council of Trent definitively teaches that Adam's sin brought the human race into a fallen condition involving sin, death and “pains of the body.” Yet Scripture expressly rejects the idea that every person who suffers must therefore have committed some particular sin deserving that particular suffering. Christ rejected precisely that reasoning concerning the man born blind and those killed in contemporary disasters.
Most importantly, divine providence does not mean that God approves everything He permits. God can permit an evil without willing the evil as evil, while ordering events toward goods that the creature could not otherwise foresee. Christianity does not claim that every particular tragedy can be completely explained to us in this life. It claims something greater: that evil cannot overthrow God's providence, that suffering can be transformed by grace, that injustice will not have the final word, and that God Himself entered human suffering in Jesus Christ and conquered sin and death through the Cross and Resurrection.
Why This Question Matters
For many people, evil is the most powerful objection to belief in God.
If God is good, why does He permit children to suffer?
Why disease, earthquakes, war, cruelty, disability and death?
Why does a murderer sometimes prosper while an innocent person dies?
Why does God not simply prevent every atrocity?
These are not merely academic questions. The Book of Job itself wrestles with the apparent prosperity of the wicked and suffering of the just. Job asks why the wicked live and flourish while innocent people endure affliction. Scripture therefore does not dismiss the problem or pretend that suffering is emotionally easy to reconcile with faith.
But the problem of evil also has to be stated correctly. There is an important difference between saying:
“I cannot presently understand why God allowed this particular suffering,”and saying:
“There can be no sufficient reason why God could allow it.”
The first may be entirely reasonable. The second is a much larger philosophical claim and requires proof.
Catholicism does not teach that we will understand God's providence exhaustively during earthly life. It teaches that God is infinitely wise and good, that nothing escapes His providence, that He never authors moral evil, and that He can order permitted evil toward good.
Understanding these distinctions is essential not merely for apologetics but for Christian life. Without them, suffering can appear to be evidence that God has forgotten us. With them, suffering remains genuinely painful and genuinely evil in the appropriate sense, but it is no longer meaningless.
What the Catholic Church Teaches
Creation Is Good
The Catholic answer begins with creation itself. Genesis does not portray matter or bodily existence as evil. After the creation of the world, Scripture declares:
“God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good.”— Genesis 1:31
This excludes the ancient dualistic idea that good and evil are two eternal powers struggling against one another.
There is one Creator.
Satan is not an evil god equal to God.
The devil is a creature who became evil through a defect of will. Evil therefore has no independent creative principle corresponding to God.
The First Vatican Council solemnly professed God as the one true Creator, infinitely perfect, who freely created spiritual and material beings and who continues to preserve and govern what He created. Dei Filius states that God “protects and governs” all created things by His providence, including events involving the future free actions of creatures.
The Roman Catechism likewise explains the first article of the Creed by teaching that God created all things from nothing and “preserves and governs” heaven, earth and everything within them.
Thus Catholic doctrine simultaneously maintains three propositions:
God is good and omnipotent.
Creation, insofar as it comes from God, is good.
Evil nevertheless genuinely exists in created things.
The question is therefore not whether evil exists, but what evil is and how it can exist in a world created by God.
Evil Is Not a Created Substance
St Augustine gives the classical Catholic explanation in his Enchiridion. Evil is not another kind of substance competing with goodness. It is a lack, corruption or privation of a good that ought to exist.
Disease presupposes a body that ought to possess health.
Blindness presupposes an eye naturally ordered toward sight.
A lie presupposes an intellect and language that ought to be ordered toward truth.
Augustine writes that what we call evil is an “absence of good.”
St Thomas Aquinas develops the same principle in the Summa Theologiae, I, q.48. Evil, properly understood, is a privation of due good.
This does not mean suffering is imaginary.
Blindness is painfully real.
Cancer is real. Murder is real.
Betrayal is real.
The point is metaphysical: the evil in these things is not some additional substance that God had to create. It is a disorder, corruption, deprivation or failure within something that, insofar as it exists, is good.
A murderer, for example, possesses many real goods: existence, intelligence, will, bodily strength and the power to act. The moral evil lies not in those created powers themselves but in their disordered use.
God Governs Everything by Providence
Catholic teaching does not solve the problem by saying that certain events occur outside God's control. That would deny providence.
The First Vatican Council teaches that God preserves and governs everything He has made and that even future events arising from free creaturely actions are known to Him.
St Thomas therefore says that everything is subject to divine providence. Yet providence can include God's decision to permit defects rather than prevent every possible defect.
Why? Because divine providence governs the whole order of creation, not merely the immediate comfort of each individual creature at every moment. A world containing rational freedom, courage, mercy, justice, sacrifice, forgiveness and martyrdom contains kinds of goods that presuppose the possibility—or actual presence—of difficulties and evils to be confronted.
This does not make evil good. Nor does it mean that humans may deliberately perform evil so that good will result. Catholic morality expressly rejects doing evil that good may follow. Rather, it means that God is sufficiently powerful to permit creatures to cause evil without surrendering His ultimate governance of creation.
The Fall Changed the Human Condition
Christianity adds another truth that natural philosophy alone cannot discover: mankind does not presently exist in the condition in which God originally established the human race.
The Council of Trent's Fifth Session, 17 June 1546, definitively taught that Adam's disobedience caused him to lose original holiness and justice and that, through that sin, he became subject to death. The Council further rejected the proposition that Adam transmitted only “death and pains of the body” without also transmitting original sin.
St Paul gives the scriptural foundation:
“By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death.”— Romans 5:12
The Roman Catechism describes Adam's fall as the source of mankind's “common misery and universal calamity,” teaching that Adam became subject to the evils described by Trent and that these consequences descended to his posterity.
This means that Christianity does not teach that the present world represents human existence in its original integrity. Humanity is fallen.
Death is not presented as man's original supernatural destiny. Scripture says:
“God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.”— Wisdom 1:13
Yet the Fall must not be abused as an explanation for every individual tragedy, as though we knew that a particular victim suffered because of a particular personal sin. Christ explicitly forbids that inference.
Historical and Theological Evidence
Not All Suffering Is Punishment for a Personal Sin
When Christ and His disciples encountered a man blind from birth, the disciples asked:
“Who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?”Christ answered:“Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents.”— John 9:2–3
Christ was not denying original sin. He was rejecting the proposed direct connection between that man's blindness and a particular personal sin committed by him or his parents.
The same principle appears in Luke 13. Christ mentions Galileans killed by Pilate and eighteen people killed when a tower fell at Siloe. He expressly rejects the idea that their unusual deaths proved they were greater sinners than others. Instead He turns the event into a universal call to repentance.
Therefore the Catholic position is not:
“If you suffer, God must be punishing you because you personally did something especially wicked.”
Such reasoning resembles the mistake made by Job's false comforters. The more precise doctrine is that suffering and death belong to the fallen human condition, that some temporal evils can indeed have a penal or corrective character under providence, but that we normally cannot infer from an individual's suffering either his guilt or God's particular reason for permitting it.
St Augustine: God Can Bring Good Out of Evil
St Augustine's principle is fundamental.God, he explains, would not permit evil in His creation unless His goodness and omnipotence were capable of bringing good from it.
Notice what Augustine does not say.
He does not say evil becomes good.
He does not say cruelty is secretly virtuous.
He does not say suffering is painless.
He says God's providence is greater than evil. A creature can intend evil while God, without sharing that evil intention, can incorporate the permitted act into a larger providential order.
The supreme example is the Crucifixion.
The betrayal of Judas, false testimony, cowardice, injustice, torture and killing of the innocent Christ were genuine sins.
Christianity does not call those acts good. Yet through the very Passion brought about by human wickedness, Christ accomplished man's redemption.
The Cross is therefore the definitive Christian demonstration that God can permit an evil action without becoming its author and can draw from it a good immeasurably greater than the perpetrators intended.
St Thomas Aquinas: God Is Not the Author of Sin
St Thomas treats the question with exceptional precision in Summa Theologiae, I, q.49, a.2. He distinguishes the evil of fault (malum culpae) from the evil of punishment or suffering (malum poenae).
Moral fault arises from a defect in the creature's voluntary action. God is therefore not the author of sin.
Aquinas explains that whatever positive reality exists in a sinful act—existence, movement, intelligence, bodily action—ultimately depends upon God as first cause. But the disorder by which the act fails to conform to right reason and divine law proceeds from the deficient secondary cause: the creature.
Aquinas uses an analogy. The power that moves a damaged leg causes the motion; the deformity in the limp arises from the defect in the leg.
This distinction is essential. Without God, the sinner could neither exist nor act. But God does not contribute the moral deformity that makes the creature's choice sinful. Consequently, divine concurrence with creaturely action does not make God the sinner.
Why Does God Not Prevent Every Sin?
God certainly could prevent a particular sinful action.He could prevent the murderer from reaching his victim. He could remove the tyrant. He could suspend ordinary physical causality whenever someone intends evil.
But Catholic theology does not define divine goodness as the obligation to prevent every misuse of creaturely causality.
Aquinas explains that universal providence may permit particular defects where preventing every defect would exclude goods belonging to the larger providential order. He gives the example that without persecution there would be no patience of martyrs.Human freedom is one such genuine created good.
But free will must not be turned into an oversimplified slogan.
The Catholic argument is not that freedom logically requires sin. The blessed in Heaven possess freedom without sinning, and God could prevent any particular sin if He chose.
The point is instead that God has chosen to govern rational creatures as genuine secondary causes rather than as puppets. Their actions have real consequences. He may permit their abuse of freedom because His providence is capable of ordering even that abuse toward justice, mercy, conversion, heroic virtue or other goods beyond the sinner's intention.
What About Natural Disasters and Disease?
Free will alone obviously cannot explain an earthquake, congenital disease or many forms of physical suffering. Catholic theology therefore does not reduce the entire problem of evil to free choice.
St Thomas distinguishes moral fault from natural corruption and suffering. Created material beings are finite, mutable and capable of corruption. In the physical order, the good of one process can involve loss in another: generation and corruption, nourishment and decay, life and death among lower creatures form part of the interconnected natural order.
Human suffering, however, has an additional revealed dimension because man was originally elevated by God to a condition possessing gifts lost through Adam's Fall. Trent therefore specifically connects human death and bodily pains with original sin.
A particular hurricane, illness or accident should not normally be described confidently as God's punishment for a particular person's sins unless revelation itself provides that interpretation.
Providence is certain. Our knowledge of the specific providential purpose behind every event is not.
Suffering Can Acquire Supernatural Meaning
After the Fall, God did not merely leave mankind to suffering.He entered it.Jesus Christ was innocent, yet He suffered betrayal, abandonment, scourging, crucifixion and death. This permanently destroys the notion that suffering proves a person is rejected by God.
Christianity goes further: when received with grace, suffering can become a means of sanctification.
St Paul writes:
“We glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience.”— Romans 5:3
And:
“To them that love God, all things work together unto good.”— Romans 8:28
Hebrews likewise teaches that divine discipline can bear “the most peaceable fruit of justice” in those exercised by it.
Again, this does not mean Christians should seek suffering for its own sake or fail to relieve the suffering of others. Quite the opposite. Christ healed the sick, fed the hungry, comforted mourners and commanded mercy.
The Christian is required to oppose injustice, care for the afflicted and relieve suffering where reasonably possible. What Christianity denies is that suffering is therefore meaningless whenever it cannot be removed.
The Main Objection
The strongest objection is not merely:
“Can you imagine some possible reason why God might permit evil?”
A more serious form is:
“Even if some suffering could be justified by freedom or character formation, surely the enormous quantity and intensity of apparently pointless suffering makes an infinitely good and omnipotent God improbable. Why would God permit the torture of children, genocides, terrible diseases, earthquakes, lifelong disabilities, or the suffering of animals when He could prevent them?”
This is often called the evidential problem of evil. It differs from a strict logical argument claiming that God and evil are absolutely incompatible.
The objection instead argues from the amount, distribution and apparent pointlessness of suffering. That is a serious objection and should not be answered merely by saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”
Response
Permission Is Not Approval
First, God's permission of an event must not be confused with moral approval of it. God permits every sin that occurs in the minimal sense that He does not prevent it.
But Scripture remains unequivocal:
“God is not a tempter of evils.”— James 1:13
A murderer may will death because he hates his victim. God may permit the act while willing neither the murderer's hatred nor the moral disorder in the act.
Different agents can therefore relate to the same historical event under radically different intentions.
This distinction is most evident at Calvary: men sinned in crucifying Christ; God employed the Passion within His saving providence.
Our Inability to See a Reason Does Not Prove That No Reason Exists
Second, the evidential argument commonly moves from:
“I can see no adequate reason for this suffering”
to:
“There probably is no adequate reason.”
That inference is much less certain if God exists. If God possesses perfect knowledge of every event, every free choice, every consequence across history and every person's eternal destiny, while our knowledge is confined to a minute portion of those relationships, it would be surprising if we could reconstruct the complete providential purpose behind every tragedy.
This is not an excuse for irrationality. It is recognition of an obvious difference in cognitive standpoint. If God's wisdom exceeds ours, then some divine reasons would predictably exceed ours as well.
The Book of Job reaches essentially this point. Job is not finally given a detailed causal explanation for every suffering he endured. He is confronted instead with the enormous difference between God's knowledge of the whole order of creation and man's limited perception of it.
Innocent Suffering Does Not Mean the Victim Is Guilty
Third, Christianity agrees that innocent people can suffer. Jesus Christ is the supreme example.
John 9 and Luke 13 explicitly prevent us from treating unusual suffering as proof of unusual personal guilt. Because humanity exists socially and physically within a common fallen world, one person's actions frequently affect another.
A drunk driver can kill an innocent family.
A corrupt ruler can impoverish millions.
Parents transmit genetic conditions without personal wrongdoing.
Natural events can injure those who did nothing to cause them. Catholic doctrine therefore makes no promise that temporal circumstances will distribute pleasure and pain exactly according to individual moral deserving. Final justice belongs to God.
Christianity Cannot Be Evaluated as Though This Life Were the Whole Story
If bodily death ends personal existence, then many injustices appear permanently unresolved. Christianity expressly denies that premise.
Man's ultimate end is eternal. There will be resurrection and judgment. The sufferings of this life are therefore not the total measure of what any person receives from God.
St Paul writes:
“The sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come.”— Romans 8:18
The Christian argument is not that future happiness makes present cruelty unreal. It is that temporal evil cannot be evaluated as though temporal existence were the entirety of human life.
If eternal life is real, an earthly tragedy—even an immense one—is not the final chapter of the person's existence.
The Cross Changes the Question
Christianity's deepest answer to suffering is not a philosophical syllogism.It is Jesus Christ crucified.God did not remain distant from suffering and demand that creatures endure what He would never touch.The eternal Son assumed human nature.He knew hunger, exhaustion, betrayal, injustice, physical agony and death.The apparently greatest triumph of evil—the judicial murder of the innocent Christ—became the instrument of the Redemption.Thus Christianity does not tell the suffering person simply:“God has reasons which you do not understand.”It also says:God has entered suffering Himself.And the Resurrection declares that suffering and death do not have the final word.
What We Can and Cannot Conclude
Established Catholic doctrine: God is infinitely good, omnipotent and provident. Creation as such is good. God governs everything He has created. Moral evil is not authored by God. Adam's Fall brought original sin, death and bodily suffering into the human condition. Christ redeemed mankind through His Passion, Death and Resurrection. These propositions rest upon Scripture and authoritative magisterial teaching, especially Trent and Vatican I.
Certain or common theological teaching: The Augustinian-Thomistic analysis of evil as a privation of due good, the distinction between moral fault and penal or physical evil, and the principle that providence may permit particular evils for the sake of greater goods are firmly embedded in the classical Catholic theological tradition.
Strong theological conclusion: The existence of evil does not constitute a logical contradiction of an omnipotent and perfectly good God. Once the distinctions between causing, permitting, moral fault, physical suffering, created freedom, providence and final justice are understood, the alleged contradiction disappears.
Disputed theological questions: Catholic schools have historically differed about the precise manner in which divine causality, grace, providence and human freedom relate to one another. Thomists, Molinists and other approved schools have not explained every aspect identically. The Church's doctrine does not require settling all of those controversies before answering the problem of evil.
What we normally cannot know: We generally cannot identify the complete divine reason for a particular cancer diagnosis, accident, disability, bereavement or disaster. Providence is revealed; the detailed explanation of every providential decision is not.
Established historical fact: The Christian problem of evil did not arise as a modern attempt to rescue belief in God from atheism. Scripture itself—particularly Job—and major Fathers and Doctors such as Augustine and Aquinas directly confronted the suffering of the innocent, prosperity of the wicked, moral evil and divine providence centuries before modern atheistic formulations of the objection.
Disputed historical claims: No disputed claim concerning Church history, Vatican II, papal elections, secret societies or modern ecclesiastical events is relevant or necessary to establish the argument of this article.
What is not necessary to establish the argument: It is not necessary to demonstrate the precise purpose behind every individual suffering. The philosophical and theological question is whether evil is incompatible with God. Showing that God can justly permit evil within an order governed toward greater and ultimate goods is sufficient to defeat the claim of logical incompatibility.
Conclusion
The Catholic answer to evil begins neither by denying suffering nor by trivialising it.
Evil is real.
Human beings do terrible things to one another.
Disease destroys bodies.
Innocent people suffer.
Death separates families.
Scripture itself gives voice to anguish over these realities. But evil is not an independent substance created by God. Moral evil arises through the disorder of created wills. Human suffering and death belong to a world wounded by the Fall.
Divine providence remains sovereign over both natural events and free creatures without making God the author of their sins.
Nor does Catholicism teach that every suffering person is personally being punished. Christ Himself rejected such reasoning.
God may permit what He hates precisely because His omnipotence is capable of drawing goods from events that creatures intend for evil. The decisive proof is the Cross: mankind's greatest crime became, through God's providence, the instrument of mankind's redemption. We therefore should not claim to know why God permits every particular tragedy.
We can know something more fundamental: evil cannot defeat Him.
For the Christian,
suffering is terrible but not ultimate;
death is real but not final;
injustice may triumph temporarily but not eternally.
The answer to suffering is ultimately not that God explains everything to us now, but that He entered suffering Himself, redeemed it through Christ, and promises final justice and eternal life.
The question, therefore, is not merely “Why does God allow suffering?”
It is also:“If Christ rose from the dead, what does suffering mean in a world in which death itself has been conquered?”
That is where the Christian answer ultimately leads.
Primary Sources
Sacred Scripture — Douay-Rheims Bible. Particularly Genesis 1:31; Wisdom 1:13–14; Job 1 and 21; Luke 13:1–5; John 9:1–3; Romans 5:3–12; Romans 8:18–28; James 1:2–17; Hebrews 12:1–11.
Council of Trent, Session V, Decree Concerning Original Sin, 17 June 1546, especially propositions 1–5. English translation in J. Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848).
Session V — searchable text
1848 Waterworth edition — Internet Archive scan
First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, 24 April 1870, Chapter I, “God, Creator of All Things,” especially its teaching on creation and providence.
Official Vatican archive — Latin text
English text of Dei Filius
Roman Catechism / Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part I, Article I, on God the Creator and Governor of all things; Part I, Article II, on Adam's fall and the redemption of man.
Article I — God, the Father Almighty, Creator
Article II — the Fall and Redemption
1905 edition — Internet Archive record
St Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity, ch. 11, on evil as privation and God's ability to bring good from permitted evil.
Enchiridion, chapter 11
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, q.22, especially a.2, on divine providence and the permission of defects within the universal order.
Summa Theologiae I, q.22
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, q.48, especially aa.1–6, on the nature of evil, privation, fault and suffering.
Summa Theologiae I, q.48
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, q.49, especially aa.1–2, on the cause of evil and the distinction between the evil of fault and the evil of punishment.
Summa Theologiae I, q.49
Further Reading
Joseph Pohle, God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes, authorized English version by Arthur Preuss (St Louis: B. Herder, 1911). A dogmatic manual treating God's attributes, knowledge, will and providence.
1911 edition — Internet Archive/Open Library
Leslie J. Walker, “Divine Providence,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911). This article carries the ecclesiastical approval of its period and provides a useful synthesis of Scripture, the Fathers, councils and St Thomas on providence and evil.
Divine Providence — Catholic Encyclopedia
“Evil,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909). A useful summary of physical and moral evil and the classical Augustinian-Thomistic response to the problem.
Evil — Catholic Encyclopedia
These works are explanatory theological resources. They should not be confused in authority with Sacred Scripture, an Ecumenical Council, the Roman Catechism, or the Doctors of the Church cited above.
Related Questions
Does God Exist? — foundational article preceding this question.
Can We Know What God Is Like?
If God Created Everything, Who Created God?Why Did God Create Us?
Why Does God Allow Innocent Children to Suffer?
What Happens to Us After Death?
If God Knows Everything in Advance, Do We Really Have Free Will?
Why Would God Allow Me and So Many Others to Be Raised in the Vatican II Religion If It Is False? — existing True Catholic Faith FAQ. Read the existing article