The Problem of Evil

1691 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The strengths and weaknesses of augustine’s theodicy essay

The presence of evil has been a conflicting view amidst various philosophers dating back thousands of years. With the belief in God across the world, an essential question arises: Since God is claimed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving, then how can there be evil in the world? Augustine of Hippo, a preeminent philosopher who was born in Algeria, North Africa in 354, had attempted to expound this significant contradiction. In 360, Augustine followed the religion of Manichaeism, which was founded by a Persian man named Mani. They believed that humankind, being a byproduct of the devil, was inherently evil and, therefore, not culpable for evil in the world. With the belief that humans were capable of free will, Augustine ultimately broke ties with the Manichaeans. Human beings as one entity of body and soul were made good by the almighty God and with their free will were able to cause evil phenomenons to occur, which rules out the idea that God is the cause of evil. Peter Kreeft was one that agreed with the ideals of Augustine and offered an answer to why God created the possibility of evil.
According to Augustine, there is no such thing as evil. It is simply the privation of good. In Augustine’s book, On Free Choice of the Will, he talks through Evodius, who presents God as one with absolute goodness. Everything that He created is good; therefore, humanity as body and soul combined is good (Augustine). Evodius holds the position: “The existence of a good, all knowing (omniscient), and all-powerful (omnipotent) God is contradicted by our experience of evil in the world. It makes sense to conclude that God does not exist.” (Bwanali). As a response, Augustine asserts that the evil that we experience is just a lack of goodn...

... middle of paper ...

... good and is not the reason for evil are the ones that will live happy, faithful lives.
All in all, the problem of evil has been debated for thousands of years. Some believe that evil is caused by Satan and not humanity, such as the Manichaeanists and Bogomilists, and some believe that humans are the cause of evil, rather than God, such as Augustine, Peter Kreefe, and myself. While God is aware that a lack of goodness could occur, he is not the cause of it. He is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving and creates human beings with absolute goodness; however, with that that absolute goodness comes free will. With free will, humans have the ability to choose wrongly and therefore experience evil or a lack of goodness. God has given us that right because it is the only way to become happy. God cannot make one happy. The individual is the cause for their own happiness.

Show More
Related

  • Conflict Between God And Evil Essay

    2051 Words  | 5 Pages

    It is perhaps the most difficult intellectual challenge to a Christian how God and evil can both exist. Many of the greatest minds of the Christian church and intellects such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas spent their entire lives trying to solve this problem, and were unsuccessful (Erickson, 2009, p.439). However, this dilemma is not only an intellectual challenge, but it is emotional. Man feels it, lives it. Failing to identify the religious form of the problem of evil will appear insensitive; failure to address the theological form will seem intellectually insulting. This conundrum will never be completely met during our earthly life, but there are many biblical and philosophical resources that help mitigate it.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Questions Of Augustine

    1325 Words  | 3 Pages

    Augustine is fixated upon the idea of evil and its origins in Christian theology. He struggles to come to terms with the doctrine of sin. A popular counterargument to the belief in God is that a good, kind, and loving divine power would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. According to Christian belief, God created everything, and everything He created is good because He Himself is righteous. Augustine claims that God pervades the entirety of the universe and all it contains. So, how can things outside of God, such as evil, even exist? He asks this in various forms of rhetorical questions, such as, “Where then is evil? What is its origin? How did it steal into the world?...Where then does evil come from, if God made all things

    Read More

  • The Possibility Of Evil Analysis

    508 Words  | 2 Pages

    Karma comes in two ways, good karma or bad karma. However Miss Strangeworth got the worst kind ever, revenge karma. In the short story, The Possibility of Evil by Shirley Jackson, it is clear that judging others can result to bad karma, because she judges her town, and consequences return the favor. She is shallow and has too much power, however it starts with judgement. The Possibility of Evil takes us through a journey of a selfish woman and her consequences.

    Read More

  • Good vs Evil in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game

    1037 Words  | 3 Pages

    The lines that define good and evil are not written in black and white; these lines tend to blur allowing good and evil to intermingle with each another in a single human being.

    Read More

  • Origin of Evil in The Confessions by Augustine

    783 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the Confessions, Augustine wrote about his struggle with understanding how evil exists in a world created by God. He questioned how it was possible and why God allows evil in his creations because God is supremely good. After delving into finding a solution, Augustine concluded that evil does not exist, and the things deemed as evil are caused by free will. This paper will argue that Augustine has successfully proven that evil does not exist by explaining his earlier explanation of the origin of evil taught by the Manicheans, explaining Augustine’s teachings, and finally, using the textual descriptions of Augustine’s unwillingness to convert as support for his conclusion.

    Read More

  • The Theodicies of Augustine and Boethius

    771 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Augustine's Confessions, the early church father puts forth a complex theodicy in which he declares evil to be nonexistent. Such a leap may seem to be illogical, but this idea stems from the understanding of what is substance and what is not. According to Augustine, the duality of good and evil is false, because anything that is good is substance and what humans think of as evil is simply the absence of the good (Confessions, 126). Vices for example, are just the display of the absence of the good. Pride is the absence of humility, unrighteous anger the absence of temperance, and so on. This idea is evident as he writes that the ability to be corrupted is what makes something good, not i...

    Read More

  • On Free Choice of the Will

    1445 Words  | 3 Pages

    “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).

    Read More

  • Mccloskey Problem Of Evil

    359 Words  | 1 Pages

    The problem of evil develops an argument against the free will concept. McCloskey uses the problem of evil to create evidence against God as he says “No being who was perfect could have created a world in which there was unavoidable suffering or in which His creations would engage in morally evil acts. The traditional answer is that moral freedom is a greater good that outweighs the possibility of evil that it existence requires. God created man to be the ruler of the world and to watch over His creations. He gave man the ability to think and reason. Without doing so, humans could not be responsible agents or capable of freely doing good. It is not necessarily important to know why God allows evil. It is sufficient to know that there

    Read More

  • The Relationship Between God and Evil

    2975 Words  | 6 Pages

    Evil exists. This bizarre conundrum has perplexed philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and remains in hot debate today because of the theological implications inherent in the statement. To many on this planet, the source of life is an all-loving, all-powerful, omniscient god who created the universe – and all the laws therein – in seven days, as described in the Bible. And yet still, evil exists. How can these two premises be simultaneously true? Surely, an all-loving god would want to do something about this problem, and an all-powerful god could absolutely remedy a situation if it so desired. It seems as though the common perception of the Bible’s god is inaccurate. However, it could be argued that the Bible’s god is accurate, and that said perception is somewhat skewed, considering that on numerous occasions, God claims responsibility for evil. “I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7). The Greek philosopher Epicurus put the Good God’s Evil puzzle in a very clear logical progression:

    Read More

  • What is Evil

    651 Words  | 2 Pages

    To understand evil we must first understand the concept that good and evil are term or words referring to what one given individuals believes to be the right and wrong thing to do. Good, many times symbolized as god or light, is usually associated with an action that many individual see as helping one or many people. This definitions is again very hard to define due to it bias and opinionated nature. But many and most people will agree that good, is what helps not only the common people become a stronger as a community but also become stronger as in...

    Read More

  • Problem Of Evil Essay

    1753 Words  | 4 Pages

    This essay provides a conclusive look at the problems and contradictions underlying a belief in God and the observable traits of the world, specifically the Problem of Evil. The analysis will address the nature of God and the existence of evil in the world, as well as objections such as the "sorting" into heaven and hell objection, God's "mysterious ways" objection, the inscrutability of God objection, values presupposing pain objection, inherent contradictions in "God's freewill," and non-human objections. omnipotent. 2) Evil exists. 3)

    Read More

  • Relationship Between Good And Evil In Paradise Lost

    1620 Words  | 4 Pages

    Even though Adam and Eve did not encounter evil until the fall, they still had the potential for evil intrinsically within themselves. Likewise, although Lucifer was not wholly evil at the time of his formation, his pride and thus capacity to sin was part of his identity. If all of these characters developed the evil within them even though they were made good, one could question whether God is the creator of evil and is thus partly evil himself. Milton himself says that God “created evil, for evil only good / Where all life dies, death lives” (2.623-624). This seems in conflict with the earlier claim that God is omnibenevolent and free of

    Read More

  • Augustine and The Problem of Evil

    899 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • St. Augustine: Thoughts on Good and Evil

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    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)?

    Read More

  • Good And Evil In John Milton's Paradise Lost

    1306 Words  | 3 Pages

    more than evil is capable of what seems to be good. More often in the story, God

    Read More

More about The Problem of Evil

Open Document