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St augustine on freedom
St augustine on freedom
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One thing that philosophers are great at is asking big questions, usually without providing answers. However, Saint Augustine has a more direct approach to his speculation, often offering a solution to the questions he poses. One such topic he broached in The City of God against the pagans. In this text, Augustine addresses the problem of free will and extends his own viewpoint. Stating that humankind can have free will with an omniscient God, he clarifies by defining foreknowledge, free will, and how they can interact successfully together (Augustine, 198). Throughout his argument, he builds a compelling case with minimal leaps of faith, disregarding, of course, that you must believe in God. He first illustrates the problem of free will, that it is an ongoing questions amongst many philosophers, then provides insight into the difference between fate and foreknowledge. Finally, finishing his argument with a thorough walk-through on how God can know everything, and yet not affect your future decisions.
Before we dive into what Augustine has to say about free will, we must first understand what the problem is. In The HarperCollins Dictionary of Philosophy, the problem of free will is defined as:
“If all human actions are caused, then how can concepts found in our everyday experience such as blame, responsibility, duty. . . be made meaningful?. . . If God has complete foreknowledge of everything that will happen, and is also omnipotent, then God must have organized all things to happen the way in which God has foreknowledge that they will happen” (Angeles, 115-116)
What this quote says, is that how can we possibly be responsible for our own actions if God knows what we are going to do anyways, and if God does know everyth...
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...e a firm belief in God to apply to everyone, this same argument may be tweaked just a bit to fit an atheists point of view on free will, thus making it more accessible to everyone. Reading through Augustine's argument has only made my own belief's on free will stronger.
Works Cited
Angeles, Peter A. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Philosophy. 2nd ed. New York: HarperPerennial. 1992. Print.
Augustine, Saint. “Of the Foreknowledge of God and the Free Will of Man, Against the Definition of Cicero” Book V. Chapter 9. The City of God Against the Pagans. Ed. and Trans. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 198-204. Print.
Augustine, Saint. “Whether Necessity Governs the Wills of Men.” Book V. Chapter 10. The City of God Against the Pagans. Ed. and Trans. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 204-206. Print.
The Augustinian solution to the problem of free will and foreknowledge is given in chapter 30 of “The City of God” (Book XXII). Augustine maintains that free will is not absent in the City of God simply because
A foundational belief in Christianity is the idea that God is perfectly good. God is unable to do anything evil and all his actions are motives are completely pure. This principle, however, leads to many questions concerning the apparent suffering and wrong-doing that is prevalent in the world that this perfect being created. Where did evil come from? Also, how can evil exist when the only eternal entity is the perfect, sinless, ultimately good God? This question with the principle of God's sovereignty leads to even more difficult problems, including human responsibility and free will. These problems are not limited to our setting, as church fathers and Christian philosophers are the ones who proposed some of the solutions people believe today. As Christianity begins to spread and establish itself across Europe in the centuries after Jesus' resurrection, Augustine and Boethius provide answers, although wordy and complex, to this problem of evil and exactly how humans are responsible in the midst of God's sovereignty and Providence.
This is ultimately what is so shockingly egalitarian about Augustine’s Christianity in contrast to the thought of the ancients. The Supreme Good—eternal life—is accessible to both the simple and the sophisticated. One may either contemplate the duality of the universe and figure out where each aspect of creation fits into the scheme, or one may bypass the attempt to understand the temporal world in relation to heaven, but so long as one finally accepts faith and, through it, becomes obedient to God while discarding self-will, the extent to which one used reason in his life is irrelevant. Reason, except insofar as it is necessary in a basic sense for man to use it to accept faith to and differentiate himself from beasts, is not necessary for eternal life. What is necessary is the choice to stop exercising the self-will—to stop making choices.
It has been sincerely obvious that our own experience of some source that we do leads in result of our own free choices. For example, we probably believe that we freely chose to do the tasks and thoughts that come to us making us doing the task. However, we may start to wonder if our choices that we chose are actually free. As we read further into the Fifty Readings in Philosophy by Donald C. Abel, all the readers would argue about the thought of free will. The first reading “The System of Human Freedom” by Baron D’Holbach, Holbach argues that “human being are wholly physical entities and therefore wholly subject to the law of nature. We have a will, but our will is not free because it necessarily seeks our well-being and self-preservation.” For example, if was extremely thirsty and came upon a fountain of water but you knew that the water was poisonous. If I refrain from drinking the water, that is because of the strength of my desire to avoid drinking the poisonous water. If I was too drink the water, it was because I presented my desire of the water by having the water overpowering me for overseeing the poison within the water. Whether I drink or refrain from the water, my action are the reason of the out coming and effect of the motion I take next. Holbach concludes that every human action that is take like everything occurring in nature, “is necessary consequences of cause, visible or concealed, that are forced to act according to their proper nature.” (pg. 269)
“All that is certain about the matter is: (1) that, if we have free will, it must be true, in some sense, that we sometimes could have done what we did not do; and (2) that, if everything is caused, it must be true, in some sense, that we never could have done, what we did not do.” ( Moore: 1912: pg 90)
...lighted” Augustine’s body (Confessions VIII. 5, p. 148). In this example, regardless of Augustine’s want to will succumbing to God, he found that his habits had rendered him unable to. His will in favor of the lower things held Augustine tighter than his will for God, which caused Augustine to choose the lesser good, which left him “in the midst of that great tumult I had stirred up against my own soul in the chamber of my heart” (Confessions VIII. 7, p.152). His two wills tore at him until he fully abandoned his earthly lust for the spiritual Godly desires; supporting his conclusion that free will in favor of the lesser goods causes evil. Therefore, free will is the ultimate source of evil.
To establish a clearer understanding on the competing ideologies on the compatibility (or lack thereof) of foreknowledge and free-will, we will use Peter Kreeft’s (Boston College) story analogy; According to Mr. Kreeft, every good story has a sense of destiny, as if it were written by God. But every story also leaves its characters free. While lesser writers may jimmy and force their characters into molds, the greater the writer the more likely the characters will have a life and choice of their own. God, of course, is the greatest writer of all. Since human life is his story, it must have both destiny and freedom. This is of course Augustine’s point of view in City of God. Like Kreeft Augustine would contend that God is omniscient and not pre or post anything. This omniscience allows him to be present to everything. As such God does not need to look down into crystal balls, he does not have to wait for anything. Nor does he wonder what will happen. Nothing is uncertain to him, as the future is uncertain to us. Furthermore, God has no need to force our choice because he knows every possible outcome. However this is still problematic, if we are to consider God to be this omniscient author who knows every potential outcome to the story, it still leaves open the question of an unchanging story; does the story change to fit our actions (questionable if God is perfect), or do our actions change to be in line with the story, making free-will an illusion. This is
“Please tell me: isn’t God the cause of evil?” (Augustine, 1). With this question to Augustine of Hippo, Evodius begins a philosophical inquiry into nature of evil. Augustine, recently baptized by Saint Ambrose in Milan, began writing his treatise On Free Choice of the Will in 387 C.E. This work laid down the foundation for the Christian doctrine regarding the will’s role in sinning and salvation. In it, Augustine and his interlocutor investigate God’s existence and his role in creating evil. They attempt not only to understand what evil is, and the possibility of doing evil, but also to ascertain why God would let humans cause evil. Central to the premise of this entire dialogue is the concept of God, as relates to Christianity; what is God, and what traits separate Him from humans? According to Christianity, God is the creator of all things, and God is good; he is omnipotent, transcendent, all-knowing, and atemporal- not subject to change over time- a concept important to the understanding of the differences between this world and the higher, spiritual realm He presides over. God’s being is eidos, the essence which forms the basis of humans. With God defined, the core problem being investigated by Augustine and Evodius becomes clear. Augustine states the key issue that must be reconciled in his inquiry; “we believe that everything that exists comes from the one God, and yet we believe that God is not the cause of sins. What is troubling is that if you admit that sins come from… God, pretty soon you’ll be tracing those sins back to God” (Augustine, 3).
Hypothetically speaking, if there was a machine in the world that could able project the image of a person choosing to do tomorrow. Wouldn’t that entail tomorrow this person must do what was known in advance? In the end, despite the planning and deliberating, this person must choose exactly as the machine projected. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: “Does free will exist, or it just merely an illusion?” But, no machine with such capability existed in this world, and the only one with such power is God. The argument of God’s omniscient and human free will has gone for thousands of years, the core of this argument is if God was claimed to be all-knowing, hence in possession of infallible foreknowledge of human actions, therefore, humans should not have free will. The concept of God is all-knowing and human have free will is inherently contradictory, therefore, they cannot coexist. This argument implicated predestination and often resonated with the dilemma of determinism, because God was supposed to have given mankind free will.
Author Claudia Gray stated, “Self-knowledge is better than self-control any day” (Goodreads). Evil and sin exists in our world today and the temptation they bring bounds many human’s spiritual being. Finding the root of all evil is a hard and torturous concept to understand, but knowing one’s own free will helps bring understanding and deliverance from the evils of the world. Throughout the book Confessions Saint Augustine “ponders the concepts of evil and sin and searches the root of their being” (Augustine 15). The existence of evil is one of the most worrisome challenges a Christian or any individual deals with throughout life. Saint Augustine’s beliefs concerning the root of all evil and sins transforms as he begins to grow and develop in the knowledge of his free will and spiritual being. Early on, he believes “God created all things and evil is a thing, therefore God created evil” (Augustine 73-74). From this he conceives the notion that God cannot be good if he knowingly created evil. As Augustine begins to grow in his spiritual walk, his views begin to evolve as he questions his Manichee’s beliefs and explores the concepts of good and evil. From his inquiring Augustine develops the question, what is evil and what if evil did not need creating? He asks, “Do we have any convincing evidence that a good God exists” (Augustine 136-137)?
The concept of free will has developed slowly, though ancient philosophers did address the subject when trying to reconcile intentional action with religious concerns about human and divine freedom. It wasn’t until the end of medieval times that the modern-day understanding of freedom as a completely undetermined choice between alternatives was introduced. However, it is unclear how to reconcile contemporary science that acknowledges the in...
This paper will critically discuss these theories and how human beings are capable of freewill. The theory of determinism rules out the claim that human beings have free will. If fate did have something to do with certain coincidences and does exist, then does this mean we have free will? Or are our actions controlled by the theory of Fatalism?
Although our natures are determined by factors that are described in family, environment, and society, there are examples, that we have free will because we have the freedom of spontaneity. The choices we decide by our nature and circumstances; the options we take is decided by freewill. The state of confusion of the incompatibility extract the confusion of what is meant to be free. According to Augustine, freedom is referred to being able to what one chooses to do. Here freedom means the freedom to act, but when the act is caused by external forces that isn’t free, but when it’s caused by choice, it is free.
According to Augustine, “Human beings are endowed with a power that he calls the will.” He emphasizes the will to being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. So for whatever we may choose to do, we become solely responsible for our actions which are caused by external factors instead of internal ones.
In Augustine’s theology, evil exists in the free will of human beings. " And I strained to perceive what I now heard, that free-will was the cause of our doing ill". Augustine, Confessions VII: [III] 5. In other words, Augustine saying that evil could not exist without us having free