agustine on human nature scholors args

agustine view (strength) before the fall

• will is God given and we can choose to do good or evil

• will is driven by selfless love

• friendship expresses cartias a s amior dei (love of god)

agustines view after the fall (strength)

• pride is adams sin

• will becomes divided and man is no longer able to control his libido, appetite or desiring aspect of the soul which is dominated by concupience

• sin is ontological, so no one is good

grace pelaguis vs augstine

• p= humans can live morally pure live after the fall as long as they try hard

• a= humans can only be saved through grace not good works

Dawkins evolutionary biology (weakness)

• it’s absurd to imagine that the corruption of all of humanity rests on two people if humans emerged from less sophisticated animal forms which lacked consciousness

• even if the fall is symbolic it doesn’t rid Christianity of its unhealthy obsession with sin associated with sex

• the idea that god saved humanity by killing his only son is sado-masochristic

psychology of sex - freud (weakness)

• rejects augstines’s view that original sin is transmitted through sexual intercourse and that pleasure is part of it

• sex isn’t just for reproduction but is a natural thing

• human disorders are usually environmental

kants the good will (weakness)

• augstine = salvatiom through grace but kant says salvation through reason

• there are powerful human emotions but no such thing is sin just a lack of reason

• moral life seeks to rise above animal instinics and rests on the good will and obdeince to reason

satre bad faith (weakness)

• rejection of human nature as it means that we can never truly be free and develop our own personalities

• man is condemned to be free and can make his own choices

• to deny our freedom and choose how we act is bad faith

repsonse to dawkins - barbour

• agrees that evolutionary biology means that orginal sin makes no sense

• but suggests that suffering, conflict and death all long proceed humanity

• gensis 3 is an imagtive story about how humans use their potential and relationship within the world

• creation fall and redepmtion arent single events but contuinous processes in each persons life

response to freud

• Agustine accepts human emotions and tires to take them into account

response to kant, reinhold niebuhr

• immoral society niebuhr though post-enlightenment thinkers have made it unfashionable to talk about sin

• isnt wrong to think that reason alone can bring about just and fair socieites

colin gunton (strength)

• modern debates fail to recognise Augustines important insight that science and philosophy do not consider the religious dimension of being a human