How Did Plato Have Free Will

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Great human minds have pondered whether free will exists for millenniums. Augustine and Plato, groundbreaking philosophers of their time, had similar ideologies in regard to man’s freewill, which encompassed that knowledge can be achieved from eternal and absolute things. The paper will discuss Plato and Augustine’s ideologies about man’s free will and how they coincide with one another.
Plato believed in the concept of metaphysical freedom, and that the soul aligned itself with the idea of the Good through reason. Plato work’s both emphasize determinism and libertarianism elements. Some of Plato’s writings focus that human beings do not have free will and that the world is governed by strict laws of nature. Whereas, other works center around …show more content…

Augustine believed that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Yet, if God encompassed all these characteristics, then evil would not exist in the world. If God is all-powerful, he would be able to stop evil. If God is omniscient, he would know about evil. If God is perfectly good, he would want to stop evil. Therefore, the existence of evil demonstrates that God does not exist. However, Augustine asserts that evil is the privation of goodness and that it is not God’s fault that evil exists, but it is the consequence of man’s free will (Peterson). God who is perfectly-good, gave man free will because “it is better to have a universe with free will than without” (Lacewing). Free will was intended for man to choose the good, yet man is morally-imperfect and sometime chooses to bring about evil (Lacewing). Augustine who studied the teachings of Neo-Platonist Plotinus learned that “God, the ultimate Good, is the source of being from which all else receives its being” (Peterson 2). Augustine believed that the original sin; Adam and Eve’s sin, was “humanity’s fall from grace” (vision.org). Adam and Eve were consequently punished for their sin by God. As a result, by the sin of Adam of Eve, all of mankind was corrupted because it was human nature to sin. However, through the Grace of God, the human soul can achieve salvation. According to Augustine, the Grace of God entails that God can act without reason and that it is beyond human understanding. With the Grace of God, the human soul will be guided to understand what the good is, and thus, will do good. However, without God’s Grace, man by nature will sin. Augustine believed that one’s life is predestined; that a human being’s life is predetermined by God. The philosopher believed that some people are predetermined to use their free will to accept God’s grace, thus, achieve salvation. However,

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