What is required for God to be distributively just? Not very much, according to Thomas Aquinas. It is sufficient that God create a world that makes sense, that obeys reasonable laws, containing things that are well-designed, although never perfectly designed:
“Hence Dionysius says (Div. Nom. viii, 4): ‘We must needs see that God is truly just, in seeing how He gives to all existing things what is proper to the condition of each; and preserves the nature of each in the order and with the powers that properly belong to it.’” (Summa Theologiae I, Q21, a1)
God’s justice consists in creating a stable world, in which each creature belongs to a natural kind, endowed with consistent powers and potentialities.
Modern biology informs us that God has created a world in which living things arise through a process of evolution. Natural selection guarantees that living things are generally well-designed for their ecological niches. This is true so long as the world is stable enough that those ecological niches do not change very rapidly and radically. And that is indeed what we find. Although many species have become extinct over the long period of life’s history on Earth, there have always been varieties able to adapt to new conditions. Simultaneous mass extinctions have been the exception rather than the rule. God’s distributive justice to creatures consists in His providing those creatures with a stable set of powers with in a generally stable world.
This is how the 20th century English theologian Austin Farrer puts the point:
Let it be assumed that God cares for the sparrow. What form will his caring take? By his creative action by his continual sustenance and direction of her natural life. And this, as we have previously agreed, will be imperceptible to us, except in so far as it is manifest in the working of nature….
It must never be forgotten that God is the God of hawks no less than of sparrow, of microbes no less than of men. He saves his creatures by creating in them the power to meet the every-changing hostilities of their environment. And so, though individuals perish and species die out, there is a world of life. (Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, pp. 92-24)
Rational animals, like human beings, are a special case. We should expect that a just order would be one in which those who are virtuous have a better chance at happiness and at discovering the truth than those that are vicious. A virtuous disposition should be positively correlated with other good things. We find this to be true. In the case of happiness, the connection is essential: being morally and intellectually virtuous is partly constitutive of happiness, as Boethius argued in The Consolation. Virtue is its own reward, and vice its own penalty.
God’s justice is compatible with great evils being committed by human beings, even the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, or the Great Leap Forward. These are predictable consequences of the fallibility and limitations of human intelligence and the exercise of voluntary choice. God’s justice consists in His respecting the outworking of such natural tendencies in the course of human history.
Distributive justice only applies to cases in which God intentionally distributes benefits and ills as rewards and punishments. For the most part, these “weals and woes” are distributed by chance, by a kind of cosmic lottery. The lottery is fair, so long as all encounter the same odds. We don’t call a lottery unjust if the winner is not uniquely deserving of the prize. (See Peter van Inwagen, “The Place of Chance in a World Created by God”)
If God does reward and punish, we can predict that He will do so in accordance with perfect distributive justice, but natural theology is silent on the question of whether such divine judgments will be rendered.
The providence of God does not eliminate the reality of chance. The chancy distribution of goods and ills does not respect individual merit. Boethius makes this point in The Consolation of Philosophy. The Biblical Book of Job makes the same point: Job suffers terrific losses, despite the fact that he is the most righteous man alive. Here is how the author Ecclesiastes put it:
“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.” Ecclesiastes 9:11 (RSV)
Jesus makes a similar point in the Gospel of Luke:
“Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” Luke 13:4 (RSV)
Austin Farrer argues that chance or “accidentality” is logically inseparable from the concept of a physical universe. God creates a world of functionally distinct individuals, not a single Cosmic Machine. It would be wrong to expect God to eliminate all conflict and mutual tensions.
The Analytic Thomist 