Fr. Brian Davies, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Fordham University, has dedicated his academic career to studying and writing about the philosophy of religion, and has focused on the work of Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Davies explored the question of why, if God is all powerful and morally good, there is evil present in the world in a lecture held Tuesday night at Rice Commons
The lecture focused on Aquinas's rejection of the argument against the existence of God. According to Aquinas, God is not a morally good agent, despite popular belief.
“Aquinas views that God should not be thought of as a moral agent in the first place, meaning that God should not be thought of as something either morally good or morally bad,” Davies said. “Aquinas maintains that we do not know what God is … God is strictly non-classifiable."
Virtues are to only be associated with human beings, not God, Davies said.
“Aquinas thinks of virtues as what people need in order to flourish as human beings,” Davies said. “So he doesn’t think of God as having the cardinal virtues … Aquinas doesn’t think of God as being actually or possible virtuous.”
According to Davies, Aquinas believes it is difficult to attribute goodness to specific things, especially God, because the idea of goodness is concept-dependent.
“'Good' does not signify some distinct property had by all good things,” Davies said. “For him, the meaning of good is noun-dependent. There are good all sorts of things, but what makes them good make them different from kind to kind — goodness is, in a sense, relative. Aquinas thinks that creaturely goodness must somehow reflect what God is.
“Aquinas doesn’t think of God as containing creaturely goodness, but rather, goodness in creatures is a dim reflection of what exists simply and undivided-ly in God”.
The same argument applies to the subject of evil, according to Davies. Like goodness, Aquinas does not view evil as something of substance.
“Many things are generally in a bad way and he thinks that the sentence ‘evil exists’ makes sense,” he said. “On the other hand, he doesn’t think of evil as a substance. Since Aquinas thinks that victims of evil suffering certainly exist, he takes it for granted that God is causally accounted for their being victims of evil suffering. He does not think that the evil in evil suffered is any kind of substance — there is only evil suffered only inasmuch there is a lack of goodness, and Aquinas does not think a lack of goodness is something 'create-able'."
Aquinas believed there is a problem in the world, but the problem stemmed from a lack of goodness and obligation, rather the existence of evil, Davies said.
“Aquinas recognizes that there being something to be called the problem of evil, is rather a problem of why God has not created more goodness,” Davies said. “However, Aquinas does not believe that God has an obligation to create more goodness any more than God has an obligation to create at all."
