Does Evil Undermine Gods Existence

Does the existence of evil undermine gods existence? From the standpoint of Aquainas, it does not. Granted, this may pose some pose some problems for Aquaina’s conception of God’s character, depending on how one reads Aquaina’s arguments for God’s character, or existence. But the problem of evil, in itself, should not be considered the sole disqualifier of the notion of God’s existence. For starters, Aquainas lays out a number of arguments for why we should suppose that God exists, independent of the fact that evil happens from time to time. And while Aquianas holds that God is essentially good, he also holds that evil is a relative evaluation; that what we consider to be evil may not, from God’s poin of view, be considerd evil by the same

These arguments for God’s existence tend to rely on the assumption of an unmoved mover as the basis of all things created in the universe and, what’s more, a designer of the universe. God is, for Aquainas, the efficient cause of all things in the universe, the initiator to any change, the designer of all complexity in the universe, the source of its potential for being. This, at the outset, supposes that God exists. So before we have even gotten to the problem of evil, we might well assume, if we adopt Aquianas’ point of view, that God exists independent of whether we find God to be evil. Thus it seems that if evil exists, this may not be because God is absent from our lives, but rather, that God has a certain character we might evaluate to be evil on occassion.

In other words, if we cannot properly deliniate between good and evil, because God does not tell us, and if things happen which are both good or evil, it seems God is not even a necessary component of our moral universe. So if we see evil, or good, or something which defies our ability to define as either good or evil, there should be no reason for us to suppose God exists as the arbiter of that Good or