Did God Create Evil? Privation, Isaiah 45:7 and the Fall

Did God create evil? No. Evil is not a thing that could be created; it is the absence of a good that ought to be present, as blindness is the absence of sight in an eye. God made everything good, and evil began when creatures He made good turned away from Him. Below we set out the question at its strongest, read Isaiah 45:7 in context, carry the answer into natural evil, and weigh the rival accounts of how evil relates to the attributes of God before testing the classical answer against five published objections.

Key takeaways

• God did not create evil, because evil is not a substance. For Augustine and Aquinas it is a privation, the absence of a good that a thing should have.
• Isaiah 45:7 speaks of disaster sent as judgment. In Aquinas's terms God is the author of the evil of penalty, never of the evil of fault.
• Natural evil is the suffering outcome of good processes, which God sustains as good and whose suffering He permits.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) places the origin of evil in finite creatures made good and able to fall. The Reformed decree risks making God evil's author; open and process theism clear Him by limiting His knowledge or power. FICT keeps His sustaining total and His goodness untouched.

Did God create evil? What the question is really asking

The question usually arrives as a short argument. God created all things. Evil is something. Therefore God created evil. Each premise looks safe. The first is the Christian doctrine of creation, and the second seems to be the plain witness of any hospital ward or news broadcast. If the conclusion follows, the question of God and evil is settled against God at the root, because a God who made evil would be its source and not merely its judge.

The stakes are set by Scripture itself, which describes God as "the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he" (Deuteronomy 32:4, NIV). If evil were one of His works, that sentence would be false.

The question also has two halves, and an answer must cover both. Moral evil is the evil that agents do: lies, cruelty, betrayal, murder. Natural evil is, in one standard definition, evil for which "no non-divine agent can be held morally responsible," evil "chiefly derived from the operation of the laws of nature," as Wikipedia's article puts it. An earthquake has no motive and a tumour no will. An answer that blames human choice for every evil has said nothing yet about the second half, and the second half is where many answers stop.

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Why did God create evil? The question at its strongest

The strongest statement of the question comes from a Christian. Before Augustine could answer it, he asked it more sharply than any skeptic has since:

"Where, then, is evil, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or has it no being at all? … Whence, therefore, is it, seeing that God, who is good, has made all these things good?" (Confessions VII.5)

Augustine had spent years among the Manichees, who answered with two eternal principles, one good and one evil. A Christian cannot take that exit. If God made everything from nothing, as the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo holds, there is no rival principle and no stubborn raw material to blame. Whatever exists, God made.

Scripture then seems to answer the question in the affirmative. God says to Cyrus through the prophet:

"I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things." (Isaiah 45:7, NIV)

The King James Version renders the middle line "I make peace, and create evil." Amos asks, "When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it?" (Amos 3:6, NIV).

The Reformed doctrine of the decree sharpens the point. The Westminster Confession teaches that God "did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin" (chapter 3.1). The skeptic reads the first clause and asks how the second can survive it, if everything that happens is ordained, and evil happens. The question behind every search for why did God create evil is this one: whether a God who ordains all things can stand outside the evil among them, as the doctrine of the sovereignty of God must say He does.

Natural evil sharpens it again. A tsunami drowns children who chose nothing. Nobody's will produced it, so it seems to come straight from the way God made the world. David Hume gave the question its famous form in the mouth of Philo, "Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?", the dilemma treated in our article on the Epicurean paradox.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, begins exactly where Augustine did.

The classical answer: evil is a privation, not a creation

Augustine's own answer is the one the church has kept. Evil is not a substance. It is a privation: the absence of a good that ought to be present in a thing according to its nature. A stone is not blind, because sight does not belong to a stone; an eye that cannot see is blind, because sight belongs to an eye. Augustine reached the conclusion in the same book of the Confessions in which he asked the question: "That evil, then, which I sought whence it was, is not any substance; for were it a substance, it would be good." In his handbook on faith he gave the shortest version: "For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?" A wound, he says, "is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance." When the wound heals, it does not go somewhere else. It ceases.

Aquinas made the doctrine exact. "Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 48, a. 1). Evil has no proper cause of its own; it has a cause "not directly, but accidentally" (I, q. 49, a. 1), as a defect that follows on a good agent acting through something that fails. The tradition that grew from this is set out in our article on Thomism.

Scripture supports each step. "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, NIV). "God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes" (Ecclesiastes 7:29, NIV). "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone" (James 1:13, NIV). "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, NIV).

Isaiah 45:7 does not overturn this once it is read in its place. The verse closes an oracle to Cyrus (45:1-7) whose refrain is "I am the LORD, and there is no other." It is aimed at rival gods and at any dualism that splits the world between a god of light and a god of darkness. The word the King James renders "evil" is set against "prosperity"; it is disaster, the ruin of nations, and Amos 3:6 belongs to a judgment oracle on Israel (Amos 3:1-2). Aquinas supplied the distinction that settles both texts: "God is the author of the evil which is penalty, but not of the evil which is fault" (I, q. 49, a. 2). A just sentence is not a sin.

The privation answer defeats the syllogism, because its second premise is false: evil is not "something" in the sense that creation requires. It strains at the next question, though. A privation is always a lack in something God made and holds in being. So the answer to "did God create evil?" moves the question on, and it becomes the question of responsibility.

Volume One, where the series lays its foundations, is free to download.

Is God responsible for evil? Where the rival answers strain

Is God responsible for evil, if every failing creature is His creature? Not as its author, every Christian tradition answers; they divide on how close He stands to it, and each serious answer protects something true.

The Reformed answer, following John Calvin, refuses to let anything fall outside God's will. Calvin rejected the idea of "bare permission" as an evasion. Reading the first chapter of Job, where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans rob Job of everything, he concluded, "we infer that God was the author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments" (Institutes I.18.1). The strength of this account is security. No evil escapes God, so no evil can defeat His purpose. Its strain is the sentence the Westminster divines had to add, "neither is God the author of sin," which the account affirms without showing how it holds. The Confession's own reply is the doctrine of second causes: by the decree "nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established." That reply is sound as far as it goes, but it names the creature's agency without saying why the defect in its act is not traced back to the decree that established it. Our articles on Calvinism and on the permissive will of God take up that tension in full.

Open theism answers from the other side. God gives creatures libertarian freedom and does not know in advance every free choice they will make, so the evil they choose is theirs and not His plan. The strength is moral clarity: God is not the author of the evil He hates. The strain is double. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the view, "there is no guarantee that everything will work out as God wants in the end." And free will explains only moral evil; open theists "must also seek additional explanations for God's allowance of the devastation and suffering brought about by natural disasters."

Process theism goes further still and makes responsibility its main charge against the classical God. In the Stanford Encyclopedia's account, "Process theists argue that this makes God responsible for evil and suffering in a way that contradicts divine goodness. On the classical view, for example, the crimes that disfigure human history are the fault of human beings, but they are also God's doing." The process God "acts by persuasion rather than by coercion," so He neither causes evil nor can He prevent it. That clears God completely, at the cost of the God who creates from nothing and can promise that evil will end.

None of these three teaches that God created evil. They differ on how close He stands to it, and each pays for its answer somewhere: the Reformed in the clarity of God's innocence, the open theist in the certainty of His promise, the process theist in His power to create and to finish what He began.

The same encyclopedia records the classical reply, "the distinction between divine permission and divine causation," and that reply is only as strong as the account of evil beneath it. Permission is the subject of its own article. What remains here is the prior question: where evil comes from, if God made only good.

The Many Beings series works through each of these rival accounts volume by volume.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers: where evil came from

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. On the origin of evil it keeps what the Reformed decree rightly guards, that nothing exists or acts apart from God, without making God the author of evil. And it keeps what open theism and process theism rightly guard, that evil begins in the creature, without trimming God's knowledge or power. The statement of FICT sets the position out in one place.

What God made was good, and only good. Evil in our frame is real, culpable and grievous, and it is privative. Volume Two's glossary states the conclusion: evil "is not something God created, but rather a departure from His goodness." Human evil in this life is finite. It is not the settled, final rejection of the good that would put God's omnibenevolence itself in question.

Evil came from creatures that were made good and could fail. The question "why could they fail at all?" has an answer, and it is not a defect God built in. Volume Two teaches that the first humans "were created righteous but with Finite Free Will," and that "Their fall was not an act of absolute power, but a failure of finite sustainability." A finite creature can choose righteousness in every instance, yet it cannot guarantee its own righteousness forever by its own resources. Fall was therefore possible, "not because righteousness is impossible, but because impeccability is excluded by created finitude. This does not make God the author of sin." God is righteous by nature. Creatures, when righteous, are righteous "by maintained obedience under God." That is Ecclesiastes 7:29 in the language of being: made upright, they went looking for schemes.

God's relation to the good and His relation to the evil are not the same. Volume Two states the asymmetry in one sentence: "God sustains and enables the finite good, whereas finite evil He permits without ever authoring it." He holds in being the creature, its power to act and every positive reality in its act. The defect is the creature's. Aquinas gave the image the tradition has used ever since: "whatever there is of motion in the act of limping is caused by the motive power, whereas what there is of obliqueness in it does not come from the motive power, but from the curvature of the leg" (I, q. 49, a. 2). God is the ground of being of the walk, never the cause of the limp.

Natural evil follows the same pattern. The earth's processes, its tectonics, weather, growth and decay, belong to the good order God made. Volume Two puts it this way: "The processes named above belong to the good created order; what sin introduced is death and suffering as their outcome." God's word to Adam names the cause: "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17, NIV). Paul describes the result and its limit: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Romans 8:20-21, NIV). The argument does not depend on dating when animal suffering began. It depends on the difference between a good process and its suffering outcome.

So did God create evil? He created the good things in which evil occurs, and He sustains them still. He did not create the lack. Why He permits it, and why He created a world in which it could arise, are further questions, answered in our articles on why God allows suffering and on why God created.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, traces this account from its definitions to evil's final defeat.

Did God create evil? Five objections from the literature

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. Five of them press directly on the claim that God did not create evil, and most come from inside the church rather than outside it: from the Reformed compatibilism of Paul Helm and his students, from Karl Barth, and from Christian writers on animal suffering.

If God knowingly permits sin, isn't that the same as causing it?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

The philosopher Steven Cowan, writing in Faith and Philosophy in 2011 and following Paul Helm, argues that the line between permitting and causing does no moral work. The libertarian usually claims an advantage here: God cannot guarantee that free creatures will never sin. But Volume Two's own account of heaven says God can give the redeemed conditions under which they freely keep righteousness. If so, God could have supplied such conditions now, and instead chose conditions under which sin is inevitable, for the sake of redemption. Where God's purpose is the same, Cowan contends, knowingly permitting a sin and causing it carry no morally significant difference. "God permits but does not author" would then be a distinction without a difference.

The answer lies in where the inevitability sits. Volume Two says sin is inevitable "in our present, fallen condition," for "fallen humankind." That condition is the result of the fall, not a stage God set to produce it. The first humans were made righteous and able to stand, and their fall was a failure of finite sustainability, a real possibility for any finite creature. So God did not choose conditions under which the first sin had to happen. And the stability of heaven is not a gift God could have handed out in place of the creature's own decision; Volume Two describes it as the confirmation of an orientation already decided. Permission keeps its meaning.

Did God curse innocent animals for human sin?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Ronald Osborn's Death before the Fall (IVP Academic, 2014) presses a hard question, framed on its publisher's page as "Did God punish innocent animals with a curse because of human sin?" If natural evil traces to the curse of Genesis 3, then it is a judicial act of God. A sentence is something a judge does, not something he merely allows, and animals that never sinned bear it. On this reading the classical claim that God permits, rather than causes, the suffering of the natural order cannot stand beside a curse that God Himself pronounced.

The verse answers the charge in its own words. "Cursed is the ground because of you" names the cause, and the cause is Adam's choice. The curse is the just consequence of that choice, pronounced as its outcome, not a fresh divine initiative to inflict suffering on creatures who did nothing. That is Aquinas's distinction again: God may be the author of a penalty without being the author of a fault. Nor does the account need to claim that every animal death began at the Fall. Volume Two states that its argument does not depend on that timing, so nothing about predation rests on the verse.

If God causes every natural event, doesn't He cause natural evil?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

This objection comes from inside the classical tradition. The doctrine of concurrence holds that every event has two true causes at once: the created cause, working within the world, and God, who holds the whole transaction in being. The series itself affirms this in its volume on physics. But earthquakes and harmful mutations are physical events. If God is a true cause of every one of them, He is a true cause of the very events that make up natural evil. And natural evil has no creaturely will to carry the blame, so the free-will answer is not available.

The answer is the distinction between an event's being and its defect. God's causing reaches the being of each event, the reality of the process and its power, and never its defect. The processes themselves are good, and what the fall introduced is death and suffering as their outcome. Volume Two's asymmetry applies here too: God sustains and enables the good, and He permits the evil without authoring it. As in Aquinas's image of the limp, the motion comes from the power and the fault from the failing limb. The physics volume states the same clause in one line, so the two volumes say one thing.

Is predation evil at all, or just nature?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Holmes Rolston III, in a 1994 essay in the journal Zygon, turns the privation account against itself. Citing Aquinas's remark that lions and hawks eat other animals by their nature, he argues that predation fulfils the predator's nature rather than depriving it of anything: "When animals act 'like beasts,' as nonmoral beings, nothing is amiss, evil, or ungodly." If evil is the absence of a due good, and predation removes nothing due, then predation is not evil, and the classical account has misfiled it.

The answer is that the evil in question was never the predator's appetite. It is the prey's suffering, a real loss of the prey's own well-being in time, and that loss is a privation in the strict sense. Rolston himself grants it: "from the perspective of any particular animal as prey, being eaten is a bad thing." The lion's nature can be fulfilled while the gazelle's good is lost. The privation account applies to the second without denying the first, which is why natural evil is classed by the suffering it involves.

Is evil outside God's providence altogether?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Karl Barth, in the third volume of his Church Dogmatics, as Nicholas Wolterstorff has reconstructed him, takes a different route. Evil, for Barth, is the "nothingness" that opposes God's rule. It cannot be explained, and it must never be placed alongside the other things God's providence governs. Any account that finds evil a place in God's plan, even as something permitted and overruled for good, has already tamed it. On this view the classical answer does not dissolve the problem; it relies on one contested model of providence and calls the result a solution.

The classical account does not tame evil. In Volume Two evil "remains genuinely evil and offensive to God, necessitating His judgment or atonement through Christ," and God's stance toward it is "temporary permission coupled with ultimate judgment and redemptive overruling." The series also offers its account as the best explanation among rivals, tested by comparison, and it says what counts as an objection. A reader who sets a different starting point in its place "has relocated the disagreement rather than resolved it," and that alternative must then pass the same test across the same range of Scripture and argument. Barth's refusal is such a starting point.

The full argument behind each of these answers is in Volume Two.

Frequently asked questions

Is evil just the absence of good?

In the classical sense, yes. Evil is a privation, the absence of a good that belongs to a thing by its nature, as blindness is the absence of sight in an eye. That does not make evil unreal. Blindness is real, and so is cruelty; neither is a thing God made. The good in which the lack occurs, the eye or the will, is God's work. The lack is not.

What does Isaiah 45:7 mean when God says He creates disaster?

The verse closes an oracle to Cyrus that insists there is one God and no rival power. The word the King James renders "evil" is set against "prosperity" and means disaster, the judgment God brings on nations. Aquinas's distinction applies: God may author a just penalty, never a sinful fault. So the verse does not teach that God created evil in the moral sense; it teaches that no power but God's governs the rise and fall of nations.

Did God create Satan?

God created a good angel, not a devil. Jesus says the devil "was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth" (John 8:44, NIV); the devil is what that angel made of himself by turning from the good. His fall is a creature's failure, not God's creation of evil.

What is natural evil?

Natural evil is suffering that no creaturely will chose, such as earthquakes, disease and the suffering of prey. It is the half of the problem that free will alone cannot explain. On the classical account the processes behind it are good, and the evil lies in their suffering outcome, which God permits without authoring.

Will evil last forever?

No. Evil is temporary, and it stands under God's judgment and final defeat. A privation can be healed, as a wound heals and leaves nothing behind. Scripture promises a day when "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" (Revelation 21:4, NIV). Why God permits evil for a time, rather than ending it now, is the subject of our article on the best of all possible worlds.

Where to go from here

The question "did God create evil?" looked like a question about God's power: could He have kept evil out of what He made? It turned out to be a question about what evil is. Once evil is seen as a lack rather than a thing, the search for its maker ends in the creature that failed, and the God who made it good is still holding it in being, still able to heal what it lost.

Volume One lays the foundation for that argument, and it is yours free. The rest of the series carries the same method into evil, time and change.