McCabe on Evil

“It is true that not everything we see is evidence for the goodness of God (sin is not evidence for the goodness of God), but the point is that it is not evidence for his badness. This odd situation arises because we do not see the goodness of God in itself. The meaning we give to phrases like ‘the goodness of God’, or the word ‘God’ itself, derives not from what we know of the nature of God but from what we know of creatures. It is as though we only had a few fragments of a map of God. Everything we can see on the map points to his goodness, but there are many bits missing. The holes in the map (sin and evil) are places where God is not shown to be good. They are not places where he is shown not to be good. The world is a bad map of God. But it is not the map of a bad God”

--Herbert McCabe Faith within Reason, p.92.