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“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). It therefore appears evident that God must be the root of all evil, as He created all things. However, Augustine delves deeper in search for a true answer. This paper will follow ... ... middle of paper ... ... divine law and letting reason govern one’s actions, they can achieve complete happiness. One must not totally disregard temporal goods, but their actions should be based on their goods of the will, not temporal goods. God is the source of evil. He created natural evil, and gave humans the ability to do moral evil by giving them a free will. However, had he not given people free will, then their actions would not be good or evil; nor could God reward or punish man for his actions since they had no choice in what to do. Therefore, by giving humans choice and free will, God allowed humanity to decide whether to reward themselves with temporary physical goods, and suffer in the long run from unhappiness, or forsake bodily pleasures for eternal happiness. Works Cited St.Augustine, Thomas Williams. On Free Choice Of The Will. Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. print.
In our reading on Discourse of Free Will, we get a good idea of the opinions both Erasmus and Luther had on the topic of free will and the how it correlates with God’s grace. Once we look beyond the back and forth debate of this text, we will begin to look at their theological opinions on free will separately to find a better understanding and formulate our own opinions on this commonly debated topic.
There is much debate over the issue of whether we have complete freedom of the will or if our will caused by something other than our own choosing. There are three positions adopted by philosophers regarding this dispute: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Determinists believe that freedom of the will does not exist. Since actions are events that have some predetermined cause, no actions can be chosen and thus there is no will to choose. The compatibilist argues that you can have both freedom of the will and determinism. If the causes which led to our actions were different, then we could have acted in another way which is compatible with freedom of the will. Libertarians believe that freedom of the will does exist.
138) Augustine employs these questions to provoke strong emotions in his readers. If Augustine had not utilized this literary tool, it may have been unfeasible for him to convey his ideas as admirably as he does with them. Writers use rhetorical questions for eloquence and readers cannot easily quantify the impact rendered by a rhetorical question. The idea becomes all the more robust, and the reader’s interest is piqued and therefore the reader continues to read and take pleasure in the technical and aesthetic beauty that a rhetorical question produces. Moreover, it is rather essential in compelling texts, such as when Augustine is attempting to seek comfort solely in God, instead of lust and love in God’s creations, which can all develop into evil. Augustine implies that evil is not the creation of God, but it has existed since the inception of creation as a
“He has finally learned to love big brother” was how George Orwell in his novel 1984 described Winston, conversion to the party are represented by big brother at the end of the novel. It is easy to believe that at this instance, after torturous reeducation that Winston has endured, he has lost free will and no longer be able to freely choose to love big brother but was forced to, against hiss will. Therefore Winston was never free to love big brother, and in fact not free at all after his “reeducation.” But if we are to accept a definition of free will that stipulates that we are able to produce and act on our own volitions we must accept that Winston has retained and has chosen to love big brother out of his own free will.
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)
We hear about the murders, assaults, robberies, natural disasters and all other evil or natural destructive events in the world, we have to ask the question, how could God let such bad things happen to good people or to let these disastrous events happen at all. Now think about the world and its population if evil or natural disasters did not exist; the world population would be unimaginable. Natural disasters are beyond human control, but murders, assaults, robberies and all other evil or bad deeds committed by human beings is a matter of exercising bad choice or misuse of free will.
Mann, William E. "Augustine on evil and original sin." The Cambridge Companion to Augustine. Eds. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. 18 April 2011 DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.004
St. Augustine is a man with a rational mind. As a philosopher, scholar, and teacher of rhetoric, he is trained in and practices the art of logical thought and coherent reasoning. The pursuits of his life guide him to seek concrete answers to specific questions. Religion, the practice of which relies primarily on faith—occasionally blind faith—presents itself as unable to be penetrated by any sort of scientific study or inquiry. Yet, like a true scientist and philosopher, one of the first questions St. Augustine poses in his Confessions is: “What, then, is the God I worship” (23)? For a long time, Augustine searches for knowledge about God as a physical body, a particular entity—almost as if the Lord were merely a human being, given the divine right to become the active figurehead of the Christian religion.
Philosophers have pondered over the subject of free will for decades and there still hasn’t been a definite answer to the question of free will. What does free will truly mean? Is it just a figure of our imagination? Or is it something that has been around since the creation of men? These are only a small fraction of questions the topic of free will arises. Free will can be broken down into smaller and fewer overcomplicated categories. A normal person like you has free will if our universe revolves around the fact of determinism, if you believe this theory, then you’d be considered a compatibilist. Compatibilism allows us to hold people responsible for their actions. You believe that the reason why
Both Augustine and Boethius agree that evil could not, by definition, come from God. Augustine abolishes this problem by declaring evil nonexistent while Boethius agrees and expands the idea so that the ability to sin is a weakness. Humans remain responsible amidst God's Providence due to the free will bestowed on Adam in the beginning. Although a difficulty to early Christian thinkers, the problem of sin does have answers consistent with Christianity's fundamental belief in a sovereign, perfect, and lovingly-good God.
Initially, Saint Augustine encountered the questions about evil and God’s power and goodness, but his solution was to resort to Manichaeism. The Manicheans preached that there is a God of light and a God of darkness. This, theoretically, makes perfect sense to Augustine as it rationalizes that the God of darkness creates evil, and the God of light has power over the domain of good. When introduced to Platonism he truly begins to understand the true reason for evil without dismissing the perfect good and power of God.
Free will and moral responsibility has always been one of the most basic and fundamental elements of philosophy. It is undeniable that there is a connection between free will and moral responsibility. Different philosophers throughout the ages have viewed this connection in both similar and differing ways. The first connection between free will and moral responsibility can be seen by Aristotle and Epictetus through their views of the voluntary and involuntary. It can then be seen in a differing view by Frankfurt in which a person is only free if they are free to have the will they want.
In the beginning, God created the world. He created the earth, air, stars, trees and mortal animals, heaven above, the angels, every spiritual being. God looked at these things and said that they were good. However, if all that God created was good, from where does un-good come? How did evil creep into the universal picture? In Book VII of his Confessions, St. Augustine reflects on the existence of evil and the theological problem it poses. For evil to exist, the Creator God must have granted it existence. This fundamentally contradicts the Christian confession that God is Good. Logically, this leads one to conclude evil does not exist in a created sense. Augustine arrives at the conclusion that evil itself is not a formal thing, but the result of corruption away from the Supreme Good. (Augustine, Confessions 7.12.1.) This shift in understanding offers a solution to the problem of evil, but is not fully defended within Augustine’s text. This essay will illustrate how Augustine’s solution might stand up to other arguments within the context of Christian theology.
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)?
In this explanation, Augustine synopsizes the idea that the mind is not subject to the inordinate desire if it has virtue and is in control. However, if a mind does not have control, then free will becomes attracted to our selfish desires. Reason enables man with the ability to decipher between what is wrong and right. Being that God created man as rational, autonomous beings, they are able to have control over worldly desires. However, God knew that by providing us with free will, we might not always find God’s law appealing and obey him. At times, man will reason to obey God willingly. At other times, man will lose control over their mind and their free will becomes subject to the appeal of one’s selfish nature. Given these two situations, in neither case is Satan or God the cause of our immorality, but our own free will.