Does God Cause Evil?

The answer to this question depends on the sense in which one understands “evil.” If “evil” is being used to refer to adversity, the answer is clearly “yes.” In Isaiah 45:7 we read, “I form the light, I create darkness, I make peace and create evil [adversity or calamity]; I, the LORD, do all these things.” and in Amos 3:6b “If there is evil [adversity or calamity] in a city, will not the LORD have done it.”

If one is talking about moral evil, the answer depends on the meaning of “cause.” If by “cause” one is referring to the proximate cause of sinful actions, the answer is an unqualified “no.” God is not allured to sin and does not allure anyone to sin. God does not put evil thoughts and desires in the hearts of otherwise good people to bring about wicked actions.

It is not unusual for non-Calvinists to accuse Calvinists of believing that God causally determines all that will occur in His world. This accusation is only true in the sense that evil would never have existed had God not purposed to permit it to occur in his universe, and he has determined to permit sinful events to occur so that he might demonstrate his glory [the sum of his glorious attributes]. 

Those who oppose the Calvinistic view seem to imagine that Calvinists believe the manifestation of God’s glory involves somehow making God more glorious than he is or that somehow intending wickedness to occur and providentially using the sinner’s fallen nature to bring about his sovereign purpose gives God more glory than would intrensically belong to him. In reality, nothing can make God more glorious than he is. The issue is that God could never have demonstrated his grace and mercy had he not determined to permit sin to enter his world. Conversely, he could never have demonstrated his holiness and justice apart from sin’s entrance.

The issue here is whether evil would ever have entered God’s world had he not determined to permit it. Keep in mind that one must distinguish between permitting evil to enter and determining to permit its entrance. God does not merely and passively let sin occur. God has determined to permit evil to occur because he has a purpose for it. That does not mean that God must insinuate evil thoughts and desires into a sinner’s heart and actively cause evil to occur. When we say that God has determined all that occurs in his world and is sovereignly superintending all according to his eternal decree, we do not mean that God is the proximate cause of all that occurs. The proximate cause of and the blame for any and every sin is to be found in the sinner’s nature and not in the divine decree.

Of course, those who believe in libertarian free will cannot understand this since according to their enigmatic view, what is in a person’s heart can have no part in determining their choices or actions. This idea, of course, flies directly in the face of Jesus’ teaching about what defiles a person. He said, it was out of the heart, the control center of a person’s being, that “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, false witness, blasphemies, occur (Matt. 15:19). There is a vast difference between saying that God has determined to use the evil that lies in a sinner’s heart to accomplish a good purpose and saying that God puts evil thoughts and desires in sinner’s hearts, causing them to sin, in order to bring about a good purpose.