AUGUSTINES THEODICY

Augustine profile

4-5th century AD, bishop for 35 years
Criticised Rome’s values, similar to the rest:

1. life can be perfected - self help

2. society is just/just social order

“achieve bliss with their own efforts.”
it is our duty to be sceptical about power and be generous towards failure. abide by bible

Original perfection

Augustine believes that a perfect God could only create a perfect world ie. creation stories in genesis
Each thing is good in its own way - flowers add beauty in nature, led him to say that evil is an absence/privatation of Good - PRIVATIO BONI in the same way that blindness is an absence of sight or darkness is a lack of light, evil is a falling short of/lack of good

The Fall

Augustine thought the fall was why people had an absence of good in themselves.
Even before adam and eve, some angels having been made perfect misused their free will and fell from God’s grace and so hell was created - harmony of creation being disturbed
Garden of eden, adam+eve disobey God’s command by giving into temptation: broke harmonious relationship w God and subsequent evil stems from this
Evil/disharmony comes rom the fall - however, God’s benevolence shows that humans have not been abandoned.
Soul-deciding: we have to decide whether or not to obey God

Augustine’s theodicy KEY POINTS

• Everything made perfectly bby God

• All things fall short of this perfection due to the fall of both angels and humans

• Leads to a loss of harmony in nature, which in turn leads to natural evil

• People continue to fall short - leading to moral evil

• All humans deserve to be punished for the original sin of Adam and Eve and teir continuity of sinfuness

• We deserve this because we’re all ‘seminally present in the loins of Adam.’

• As God is fair, cannot stop evil and suffering as he cannot interfere with human actions

• Sent Jesus to Earth as a sign of his grace to give people the opportunity for people to go to heaven - limited election

• Just like a picture is improved with shadows, so too is evil apart of the natural balance of the universe is aesthetically pleasing as it is balanced. A world with evil and genuine free will better than a world without choice - Augustine compares this to a runaway horse is better than a stone which has no movement/perception

Strengths of Augustine’s theodicy

• All things fall short of perfection

• Fits with our experiences of the World, free will seems to cause most suffering

• Natural world might only be seen as ‘evil’ because of the way we see the world eg. a cat eating a mouse (Aquinas)

• McCabe supports the idea of privation - evil does not mean that God has fallen short of our expectations - we ourselves have

• God could not create evil, not a ‘thing’ so it seems logical with God’s character. Dissolves the logical problem of evil

• Augustine talks about interpreting a biblical accounts rather than a literal readings. Modern theology also accounts stories ie. genesis as a myth. Even without two literal first human beings, explains why innate sinfulness tends to make bad moral choices

• Human free will is important in the theodicy. Genuine free will requires the possibility that humans could choose evil

• It might seem unfair, but Augustine puts it down to the “secret yet just judgement of God”, indicating that it is inscrutable – impossible for us to understand – but we should have faith it is just. Augustine points to Psalm 25:10: ‘All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,’ and concludes: neither can his grace be unjust, nor his justice cruel”.

• Does seem logically possible that God allows evil because it’s either sin (moral evil) or punishment for sin (natural evil) or work of satanic entities (natural evil), children suffering from natural evil could just be the work of demons.

• G. K. Chesterton made the point that you could see evidence for original sin in the street

• R. Niebuhr said original sin was the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine

Limitations of Augustine’s theodicy

• Idea of being seminally present isnt fair/just - why are humans being punished for others sins?

• Requires a literal understanding of Genesis which is not always accepted by Christians (challenged by Science/Darwinism)

• It doesn’t make sense to say that everything was made perfectly by God, but then to say that it went wrong

• If God made a perfect wrong, then what went wrong? Why would anyone rebel in a perfect world? If humans chose evil then this implies that they must have a knowledge of it, so God must partly be responsible for evil

• Augustine’s explanation for natural evil, caused by the Fall of angels, seems alien to modern thinking which finds explanations for disasters - ie. movement of tectonic plates.

• The case of innocent children suffering natural evil destroys Augustine’s argument. He could maintain that adults deserve natural evil as punishment for original sin even though it’s not their fault they were born in sin. Augustine still thinks that giving in to original sin counts as a choice. However, he could not argue this about small children who are too young to choose to sin. There is no logically coherent way to claim that small children deserve to suffer. So, Augustine’s theodicy is not logically coherent and thus fails to solve the logical problem of evil.

Plantinga’s response to Augustine

Plantinga develops ‘free will defence’ of God+Evil. Argument intended to respond to Mackie’s logical problem of evil, which argues that it’s impossible for God and evil to exist together.

Argues that it’s possible for God/evil to exist together because evil is the result of free will.

As moral evil results from human actions, some object that free will cannot explain natural evil but Plantinga explains that it is logically possible for natural evil to either result from:

1. Free will of demons/satan

2. Free will of Adam and Eve justifying God in allowing natural evil into the world as punishment

Plantinga on why evil exists

Free will.
Plantinga believed that if God didn’t give us free will, our universe would have no value. Our lives would have been value-less: despite the downsides.

1. Evil is the result of the misuse of free will

2. God cannot remove evil without removing free will

3. Life would be valueless without free will.

4. Therefore better for evil to exist than not to

Evaluation defending Augustine

It might seem unfair, but Augustine puts it down to the “secret yet just judgement of God”, indicating that it is inscrutable – impossible for us to understand – but we should have faith it is just. Augustine points to Psalm 25:10: ‘All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth,’ and concludes: neither can his grace be unjust, nor his justice cruel”.

Augustine could still be right that human nature is corrupted by original sin, even if he’s wrong about the Fall being the exact means by which that came to be.

Augustine said that if you doubt original sin exists, ask yourself how you would behave if your city was involved in a catastrophic war. Would you go out on the street and try to help others, or would you hunker down with your family and try to defend what you have? This is the inclination towards self-love and away from love of your neighbor that characterizes original sin.

There is scientific evidence which supports human corruption and corruptibility such as the Stanford prison experiment.

It is also common knowledge that power is corrupting to people. When people gain the opportunity to sin and get away with it, they are more likely to do so.

Evaluation criticising Augustine

The case of innocent children suffering natural evil destroys Augustine’s argument. He could maintain that adults deserve natural evil as punishment for original sin even though it’s not their fault they were born in sin. Augustine still thinks that giving in to original sin counts as a choice. However, he could not argue this about small children who are too young to choose to sin. There is no logically coherent way to claim that small children deserve to suffer. So, Augustine’s theodicy is not logically coherent and thus fails to solve the logical problem of evil.

Pelagius: Augustine’s observations reflect his society, not human nature.

 The long habit of doing wrong which has infected us from childhood and corrupted us little by little over may years and ever after holds us in bondage and slavery to itself, so that it seems somehow to have acquired the force of nature”. – Pelagius

Although it might appear that we have strong forces within us that incline us toward evil, Pelagius argues that could simply be because of the way we are raised and it only appears to be our nature because of how thoroughly corrupted we are by our upbringing, which Pelagius refers to as being “educated in evil”.

We could add contemporary historical and sociological evidence to Pelagius’ point. Humans have progressed since Augustine’s time. Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. Steven Pinker attributes to the power of human reason that violence has decreased, even considering the 20^th century. The average human life seems more secure than at any prior point in history. If Augustine were correct that original sin caused an irresistible temptation to sin, then human behavior could not have improved, yet it has.

So, original sin does not exist and can’t be used to justify or explain evil.

Schleiermarcher logical error

A) How can a perfect world go wrong?

B) Adam and Eve must have had some knowledge of evil to be able to choose it. Where did it come from?

Scientific error

A) Contradicts Evolution

B) Biological error - seminally present

Moral error

Concept of Hell as part of design of the universe; did God anticipate it would go wrong?

If God has limited his omnipotence to allow free will, there is no guarantee that good will eventually defeat evil