Augustine and The Problem of Evil Essay

As this man was inspired to learn the truth, he read a book called Hortensius and soon after joined the Manicheans. These people had elements of Christianity and elements of Buddhism but believed that all creations including flesh were evil. They believed all sex; even marriage including the birth of children was evil and sinful. Manicheans felt that the world was evil material full of darkness trying to find the spiritual world of light, as some would say, the power between good and evil. While being associated with the Manicheans, Augustine had the conception that evil was capable of being touched, like a material substance. But as he spoke with others and further looked into what evil means to exist, he abandoned the notion that evil is something tangible. He realized that evil does not exist in the physical world and therefore moved away from the Manichean religion.

In the course of this essay I will argue that evil is not compatible with the existence of god. This means that evil and God cannot coexist because if god were present, the existence of evil would contradict all that god is believed to be. Abrahamic religions insist that God both created the world and that he preserves and maintains it. Christianity claims that God is all knowing and is boundless in his abilities. Religions claim that God is benevolent, and only wants the best for humanity and the universe, as his creations. If all of the above statements be true, then it is hard to understand why god would allow evil to thrive right from the beginning of time.

One of the oldest dilemmas in philosophy is also one of the greatest threats to Christian theology. The problem of evil simultaneously perplexes the world’s greatest minds and yet remains palpably close to the hearts of the most common people. If God is good, then why is there evil? The following essay describes the problem of evil in relation to God, examines Christian responses to the problem, and concludes the existence of God and the existence of evil are fully compatible.

An omnibenevolent God created a man with the capacity to sin; as Augustine has addressed, the evil in man resides from his will. Augustine, however, does not address how evil stems also from the human nature of temptation that was a consequence of the original fall from Eden. Augustine touches on this theme when accounting for the origins of his sin, but he never fully declares it. “I loved to excuse my soul,” Augustine begins, “and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself” (62). Here, Augustine admits to denying his own human nature to sin, and blames it on something beyond his will, such as a result of creation. Bonner,

This is a significant problem to the revealed religions because they believe in a wholly good and omnipotent God. Why then, would this God allow evil? In this paper, I will provide, explain, and evaluate St. Augustine of Hippo’s

“Where then is evil, and what is its source, and how has it crept into the creation? What is its root, what is its seed?”1 These are the first of the many inquiries that Augustine makes in his work entitled the Confessions. In fact, the question of 'what is evil' is the main concern of Augustine, eventually leading the theologian from Manicheanism, a heresy that Augustine spent nine years of his life practicing, back into the arms of the Church. The Manichees are not willing to say that God created evil, and so therefore evil must have existed from the very beginning, possessing its own being. At this time, Augustine has a very Platonist view of things and begins to question this view of the Manichees. As a Platonist, Augustine asserts that all being is fundamentally good because all being comes from a supreme Good, which is God. As it says in

John Hick discusses in his essay The Problem of Evil, the objections to the belief in the existence of God is the presence of evil in the world. He begins by posing the traditional challenge to theism in the form of the dilemma: That if God was perfectly loving, he must wish to abolish evil, and being all powerful, is able to perfectly do so as he will its. He then proceeds to present some views regarding this issue, giving insights from three point of views, that of contemporary Christian Science, the Boston Personalist school, and the theologian Augustine. The first opinion takes evil as an illusion, as a construct of the human mind. The second confers upon God finity, God as a struggling ruler,

     Augustine on his own view stole the fruit for the mere enjoyment of the sin and theft that the stealing involved. He says in (II,4)

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

Over the course of time, things that seem important now are bound to change. For example, before Augustine’s time, Christianity was just becoming legally recognized. Today, Christianity is one of the world’s most widely known religions. Augustine shows us that while most things do change, human nature is not one of them. Throughout his piece, Confessions, he describes to the reader how humans are born evil, and cannot change until they have the capacity to do so. Through reading this autobiography and Hsün Tzu’s piece, Man’s Nature Is Evil, as well as Mencius’s piece, Man’s Nature Is Good, it seems that Augustine agrees more with Hsün Tzu than Mencius. They both agreed on the ideas that all humans are born evil, they remain evil through

This paper examines St. Augustine’s view on evil. St. Augustine believed that God made a perfect world, but that God's creatures turned away from God of their own free will and that is how evil originated in the world. Augustine assumes that evil cannot be properly said to exist at all, he argues that the evil, together with that suffering which is created as punishment for sin, originates in the free nature of the will of all creatures. According to Augustine, God has allowed evil to exist in the world because it does not conflict with his righteousness. He did not create evil but is also not a victim of it. He simply allows it to exist.

How does a being so powerful and good, let evil engulf the world, which could be clearly seen throughout the world? This question is by far the most argued question between people of and not of faith. What is not considered most of the time is the product of good. Contrary to evil being allowed into the earth, we forget the good that has been produced throughout the world and tend to notice only evil then blame all of it on God. St. Augustine comments on the problem of evil by saying, without God, how can there be any good? Aquinas responds with five ways, not to be mistaken for actual proofs. The five “proofs” are structured all the same through the cosmological argument. The proofs essentially argue the existence of God through the first

God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, which makes us wonder what kind of morally sufficient reason justifies God to allow evil. We know that evil exists in our world, but so does God, so would God be the source of evil as well as good? We have established that God is the omnipotent and benevolent free creator of the world, but suffering and evil exist. Is God unable to prevent evil? If so, he would not be omnipotent. Is He able to prevent the evil in our world but unwilling? If this were then case then he wouldn’t be benevolent. A Persian thinker, Mani, suggested that the answer to this question was a kind of duality between the good and evil. This pluralistic view of the good and evil in our world would suggest that God is

In this essay I will be discussing how St. Augustine ultimately solves the problem of evil, in a way that at times does go hand in hand with his religious views, however, at times contradicts what he is saying. In “ Confessions” Augustine who although does not in any way question the existence of God questions why God, someone who is all powerful, and all good still allowing people to suffer the way in which they are.

The phrase is God ultimately responsible for evildoing because evildoing is due to the God giving us free will I believe to be false. I don’t think that God is ultimately responsible for evildoing. I will be arguing that God is not ultimately responsible for evildoing and here is some reason that I believe this. The first reason that I belive this is I believe that like Augustine that there is no single cause of evil and that each one of us is responsible for the evil we voluntarily commit. I believe that after God puts us on this earth he lets us make our own decisions so in turn we are voluntarily responsible for our own actions. To also go off of Augustine If God is all good then there is no way that an evil action could go back to him. If he is supposed to be this all powerful and all good he cannot be all powerful and all good but be responsible for evildoing as well. So, in this argumentative essay I will talk about how god ultimately responsible for evildoing I will be discussing these points mainly agreeing with Augustine’s argument on the situation. Anything cited will be from chapter 3 of the fifty readings plus book. In Augustine’s argument he is talking to Evodius about what I will be arguing about. I think that Augustine’s points are very well done and he has a nice argument so I will be branching off of his as well as putting my own spin on the argument because although I believe that Augustine’s points are good I don’t want to completely copy him and I would