Jehovah Witnesses And Abortion Analysis

St. Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will elaborates on the relationship between God, free will, and evil. During the very beginning of Book One, he asks the question, “isn’t God the cause of evil” (Cahn 357). From this question, it can be ascertained that he searches for a connection between God and evil (sins), which inferred in the writing to be connected though free will. He believes that God does not create evil, but rather that evil is simply the lack of good, since God is completely good and, therefore, cannot create evil. God not being the source of evil is then further elaborated through his explanation of a crime and how it is caused by inordinate desires and human abuse of good things (Cahn 360). By explaining

Descartian dualism is one of the most long lasting legacies of Rene Descartes’ philosophy. He argues that the mind and body operate as separate entities able to exist without one another. That is, the mind is a thinking, non-extended entity and the body is non-thinking and extended. His belief elicited a debate over the nature of the mind and body that has spanned centuries, a debate that is still vociferously argued today. In this essay, I will try and tackle Descartes claim and come to some conclusion as to whether Descartes is correct to say that the mind and body are distinct.

humans and angels to enjoy the world the way that he created it to be.

René Descartes believed that the mind and body are separate; that the senses could not always be trusted, but that because we as humans are able to think about our existence, we possess some sort of entity separate than our fleshly body. I believe this separate entity to be a soul”an immaterial and

Pro-abortion activists and stakeholder groups, such as Children by Choice, argue that Queensland’s current abortion laws are impractical and ambiguous. This view is supported by the fact that there has never been a conviction for an illegal abortion performed by doctors in Queensland, despite the fact that abortion is only legal in the instance where the pregnancy is likely to affect the health of the mother. Abortion law in Queensland is defined in the Criminal Code Act in s 224 and 225, but has been interpreted through and adapted by common law over the years. The current abortion law should be reformed by creating a specific statute law, as exists in Western Australia, so as to remove the ambiguity that currently exists. The main reason for this is that no solid conviction has ever been made in the instances of

He argues that the root of all sin is the desire for independence from God, to be one's own God. This misuse of free will leads to a corrupted will, and humans become slaves to their own desires and passions. Augustine compares this to a chain, where each link represents a bad decision, and each subsequent link becomes harder to break. Thus, the misuse of free will leads to a downward spiral of sin and separation from God. Despite the consequences of misusing free will, Augustine maintains that humans still have the ability to choose good.

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.

Subsequently, I will attempt to counter possible criticisms with a profounder understanding of Descartes' meaning in the “Meditations on the First Philosophy.” Finally, I will offer a concluding argument that I think correctly reflects and encapsulates my aversion towards Descartes' declaration, “I think, therefore I am.”

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

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is among the most influential thinkers in Christianity. He contributed a great number of ideas and notions to Christian theology that would have lasting effect on belief systems in Christian churches. One of his most notable contributions is the notion of “original sin” and his concept of “evil.” These notions evolved over the years. Augustine traces their evolution in his Confessions, a thirteen-volume autobiography he wrote when he was in his forties.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes states “I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing”. [1] The concept that the mind is an intangible, thinking entity while the body is a tangible entity not capable of thought is known as Cartesian Dualism. The purpose of this essay is to examine how Descartes tries to prove that the mind or soul is, in its essential nature, entirely distinct from the

In order to understand Augustine’s research, one must first understand where does evil come from. Evil is the lack of goodness or choosing to not do things God’s way. Evil was not created by God, but evil is the result of man’s free will through sin. Augustine states that, “For it is obvious that corruption in no way injures our God, by no inclination, by no necessity, by

In examining religious opinions on abortion, one must find common ground on which to form a foundation of comparison. With most of the religions to date, that common ground lies on the argument of whether or not a fetus is an actual person. Some religions protest by saying a fetus isn't a conscious being -- therefore there is no loss in doing away with it. But for those religions that do believe there is a life -- or any spiritual being -- in a fetus, it is clearly a crime to have an abortion.

St. Augustine’s view on natural evil was through looking at the choice that Adam and Eve made to disobey God. He claims that if it was not for free will, then Adam and Eve would not have caused “The Fall,” which is believed to be the change that brought upon pain and suffering into our world. This belief stems from the fact that if it wasn't for Adam and Eve’s free will then The Fall would not have occurred and therefore no human suffering or natural disasters would be brought along. So, therefore claiming that all evil whether moral or natural comes from human free

In Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes, we are presented with the idea of mind-body dualism where our mind is separate from our body. Following the release of the Meditations, various critics came forth with problems in Descartes’ idea of dualism. Using Princess Elizabeth’s objections to Descartes’ dualism and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy we can see how the mind and body work together and that Descartes’ theory of mind-body dualism is not supported.