Youcat commented through CCC - Question n. 51 - Part IV.

YOUCAT Question n. 51 - Part IV. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why does he not prevent evil?

(Youcat answer - repeated) “God allows evil only so as to make something better result from it” (St. Thomas Aquinas).         

A deepening through CCC

(CCC 314) We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history. But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us. Only at the end, when our partial knowledge ceases, when we see God "face to face" (1 Cor 13:12), will we fully know the ways by which - even through the dramas of evil and sin - God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest (Cf. Gen 2:2) for which he created heaven and earth. (CCC 324) The fact that God permits physical and even moral evil is a mystery that God illuminates by his Son Jesus Christ who died and rose to vanquish evil. Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil, by ways that we shall fully know only in eternal life.     

Reflecting and meditating 

(Youcat comment) Evil in the world is an obscure and painful mystery. Even the Crucified asked his Father, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). Much about it is incomprehensible. One thing, though, we know for sure: God is 100 percent good. He can never be the originator of something evil. God created the world to be good, but it is not yet complete. In violent upheavals and painful processes it is being shaped and moved toward its final perfection. That may be a better way to classify what the Church calls physical evil, for example, a birth defect, or a natural catastrophe. Moral evils, in contrast, come about through the misuse of freedom in the world. “Hell on earth”—child soldiers, suicide bombings, concentration camps—is usually man-made. The decisive question is therefore not, “How can anyone believe in a good God when there is so much evil?” but rather, “How could a person with a heart and understanding endure life in this world if God did not exist?” Christ’s death and Resurrection show us that evil did not have the first word, nor does it have the last. God made absolute good result from the worst evil. We believe that in the Last Judgment God will put an end to all injustice. In the life of the world to come, evil no longer has any place and suffering ends.  

(CCC Comment)

(CCC 286) Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason (Cf. Vatican Council I, can. 2 § I: DS 3026) even if this knowledge is often obscured and disfigured by error. This is why faith comes to confirm and enlighten reason in the correct understanding of this truth: "By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear" (Heb 11:3).    

(This question: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why does he not prevent evil? is continued)