Providence and the Problem of Evil

Overview

In lecture six, Bishop Barron examines God’s providence and how God directs the world He created, using the metaphor of an author and a novel to illustrate God’s absolute yet non-competitive relationship with creation. We explore the universality of divine providence, the nature of human freedom as the ordering of desire toward the good, and the problem of evil through Thomas Aquinas’s view that God permits evil only to bring about greater goods that would not otherwise exist. The lecture concludes by examining the Book of Job as a biblical response to suffering, emphasizing that while we cannot fully grasp God's providential design, we are called to surrender in faith to God's ultimate purpose for creation.