Could God be Evil?

Questions from the Unsettled Mind

This question haunted me for a very long time during my slow philosophical education into the Faith. I could clearly see why God had to be all-knowing and all-powerful if he were infinite, but why good? It wasn’t until I read into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles that I finally understood the essential nature of divine goodness, something, it turns out, that some 1,500 years earlier, Socrates had already realized! Socrates assured his followers that he feared nothing from death, because, he said, the affairs of a just man are not a matter of indifference to the gods. It follows that the gods love justice, a principle that becomes crucial to the conclusion of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates showcases the surpassing value of justice not only in this life but also in the next. Socrates knew that the gods ultimately had to be just, because justice lies at the bottom of all things. Because he also understood that the Greek pantheon mixed good and evil in its gods, Socrates often talked about “the God,” the God he could not name but knew had to be perfectly just. After the Athenians began to regret killing Socrates, they constructed an altar to this unnamed or unknown God, an altar that some 400 years later, St. Paul pointed to as honoring the true God whose Son, Jesus Christ, had become incarnate into the world. St. Paul realized that Socrates had it right, that to truly understand the nature of the divine, we must identify God with goodness. But why?