There are two proposed suggestions about how evil is to be understood.
1 - Evil is a substance, a power, a thing. It exists in its own right. We will call that substantial evil.
2 - Evil is only a distortion of good - essentially it is good in the wrong place and time and has no existence of its own. We will call that parasitic evil. Evil is not something that exists on its own, but it is something we truly suffer and do because it is the corruption of what is good.
In light of the suggestion that evil is a mere lack of good or even a
substance or intelligence. Or that some evils are one and others the other.
And some a mixture of both.
If evil were a real but hidden force we would need to be prepared for how operates through existing
goods - rather than appearing independent. We would expect it to manifest not as
an obvious opposing substance but as a distortion, misuse, or corruption of what
is otherwise good. No effect of evil tells us either way if it is a substance or
not. The privation theory never claimed to be proven but only a
provisional theory. It does not then rule out the possibility that evil has a
more substantive basis - it merely hopes that it does not.
St Thomas Aquinas’ privation theory explains evil as the absence or corruption
of a due good, but it does not fully account for why such absences generate the
depth and intensity of suffering that we observe. It largely assumes that
the loss of good is inherently experienced as painful without explaining the
mechanism by which this occurs. By contrast, if evil were understood as a
positive force or power acting upon beings, the causal link between evil and
suffering would be more direct: suffering would arise not merely from absence,
but from the active imposition or operation of that power. Therefore, while the
privation theory offers a metaphysical description of evil, it leaves an
explanatory gap regarding suffering that a substantive account of evil appears,
at least initially, to fill more straightforwardly.
It is entirely possible that the reason suffering happens is that at some level
we detect that there is some evil power attacking us.
If there is such a power then God if he exists is responsible for creating it and is thus evil. The lack doctrine seeks to hold that he made only good and nothing is totally bad. It would be thus overthrown.
St Thomas Aquinas and Christianity made a huge error. The gap between the supposed "mere privation" and the suffering is not crossed. A nothing should not have that effect.
Thus all their claims about evil fitting the love of God are useless.
Worse, we all know that we contribute something to our own suffering. We can hurt ourselves by being too negative. If Christianity thinks the sufferer is the reason why the lack hurts so much then that rules out compassion and sympathy in so far as they are to blame. It has to think that. If it did not, it is still open to the suggestion and that remains hard-faced and offensive.
Is God connecting the lack and the suffering? That is very cruel and engineered.
Is it Satan?
The claim, associated with Thomas Aquinas, that a completely evil being would cease to exist rests on the assumption that existence itself is a good that cannot be wholly divorced from goodness. However, this argument is not decisive. It is logically possible to conceive of a being that retains the minimal goods required for existence—such as structure, awareness, or power—while directing all of its capacities toward harmful ends. In this case, the being would not be “pure evil” in the sense of lacking all good whatsoever, but it could still be wholly evil in its intentions and actions. Moreover, if such a being were unable to cease existing and required existence in order to continue causing harm, then its persistence would not contradict its evil nature but would instead enable it. Therefore, the idea that complete evil is self-annihilating does not conclusively rule out the possibility of a maximally evil agent; it only shows that some minimal conditions for existence must remain.
If it is Satan then God is the one who gave him the power to join the two and is still worse than him.
The connection doctrine is merely a guess. People are suffering and we guess a theology over it - we do not own their suffering. Their suffering is not our faith project. The connection doctrine leaves us open to toxic assumptions and must be thrown out.