Augustinian theodicy
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The Augustinian theodicy, named for the 4th- and 5th-century theologian and philosopher
Augustine of Hippo was the first to develop the theodicy. He rejected the idea that evil exists in itself, instead regarding it as a corruption of goodness, caused by humanity's abuse of free will. Augustine believed in the existence of a physical
The theodicy was criticised by Augustine's contemporary Fortunatus, a
General forms
The Augustinian theodicy was first distinguished as a form of theodicy by John Hick in Evil and the God of Love, written in 1966, in which he classified Augustine's theodicy and its subsequent developments as "Augustinian". Hick distinguished between the Augustinian theodicy, which attempts to clear God of all responsibility for evil, based on human free will, and the Irenaean theodicy, which casts God as responsible for evil but justified because of its benefits for human development.[1]
The Augustinian theodicy is a response to the
The Augustinian theodicy supports the notion of original sin. All versions of this theodicy accept the theological implications of the Genesis creation narrative, including the belief that God created human beings without sin or suffering. Evil is believed to be a just punishment for the fall of man: when Adam and Eve first disobeyed God and were exiled from the Garden of Eden.[6] The free will of humans is offered by the Augustinian theodicy as the continued reason for moral evil: people commit immoral acts when their will is evil.[7] The evil nature of human will is attributed to original sin; Augustinian theologians argue that the sin of Adam and Eve corrupted the will of human beings,[8] maintaining that God is blameless and good, and not himself responsible for evil.[9]
Development
Augustine
Augustine proposed that evil could not exist within God, nor be created by God, and is instead a by-product of God's creativity.[13] He rejected the notion that evil exists in itself, proposing instead that it is a privation of (or falling away from) good, and a corruption of nature.[5] He wrote that "evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'"[14] Both moral and natural evil occurs, Augustine argued, owing to an evil use of free will,[4] which could be traced back to Adam and Eve's original sin,[7] which to him was inexplicable given the understanding that Adam and Eve were "created with perfect natures".[15] He believed that this evil will, present in the human soul, was a corruption of the will given to humans by God, making suffering a just punishment for the sin of humans.[16] Because Augustine believed that all of humanity was "seminally present in the loins of Adam", he argued that all of humanity inherited Adam's sin and his just punishment.[17] However, in spite of his belief that free will can be turned to evil, Augustine maintained that it is vital for humans to have free will, because they could not live well without it. He argued that evil could come from humans because, although humans contained no evil, they were also not perfectly good and hence could be corrupted.[18]
Augustine believed that a physical
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century scholastic philosopher and theologian heavily influenced by Augustine,[21] proposed a form of the Augustinian theodicy in his Summa Theologica. Aquinas began by attempting to establish the existence of God,[22] through his Five Ways, and then attested that God is good and must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil to exist.[23] Aquinas proposed that all goodness in the world must exist perfectly in God, and that, existing perfectly, God must be perfectly good. He concluded that God is goodness, and that there is no evil in God.[9]
Aquinas supported Augustine's view that evil is a privation of goodness, maintaining that evil has existence as a privation intrinsically found in good.[24] The existence of this evil, Aquinas believed, can be completely explained by free will. Faced with the assertion that humans would have been better off without free will, he argued that the possibility of sin is necessary for a perfect world, and so individuals are responsible for their sin.[7] Good is the cause of evil, but only owing to fault on the part of the agent. In his theodicy, to say something is evil is to say that it lacks goodness which means that it could not be part of God's creation, because God's creation lacked nothing. Aquinas noted that, although goodness makes evil possible, it does not necessitate evil. This means that God (who is good) is not cast as the cause of evil, because evil arises out of a defect in an agent, and God is seen to be without defect.[25] The philosopher Eleonore Stump, considering Aquinas' commentary on the Book of Job, argues that Aquinas has a positive view of suffering: it is necessary to contrast Earth with heaven and remind humans that they still have the propensity to commit evil.[22] Aquinas believed that evil is acceptable because of the good that comes from it, and that evil can only be justified when it is required in order for good to occur.[26] Attempting to relieve God of responsibility for the occurrence of evil, Aquinas insisted that God merely permits evil to happen, rather than willing it.[27] He recognised the occurrence of what seems to be evil, but did not attribute to it the same level of existence that he attributed to spirituality. Like Augustine, Aquinas asserted that humans bear responsibility for evil owing to their abuse of freedom of the will.[28]
John Calvin
Peter van Inwagen
The philosopher
In response, van Inwagen argues that there is no non-arbitrary amount of evil necessary for God to fulfil his plan, and he does this by employing a formulation of the Sorites paradox. He argues that there is no smallest amount of evil necessary for God's plan to be fulfilled, and thus that God chose an arbitrary amount of evil for this world that would fulfil his purposes, such as showing the world that there are great amounts of evil and that these cannot be prevented. However, van Inwagen notes that even if readers disagree with him and do believe that there is a minimum amount necessary, his response can be easily reformulated to accommodate for them: theists can simply say that God did choose the minimum amount, and thus that there is no gratuitous evil, as every evil has a purpose in God's plan for the world. He notes that this response would be especially open to Molinists – indeed, many Molinists, such as William Lane Craig, have chosen to answer in this way as a result.[33][34]
Criticism
Fortunatus
Augustine's Acts or Disputation Against Fortunatus the Manichaean, which partly touches on the problem of evil, records a public debate between Augustine and the Manichaean teacher Fortunatus. Fortunatus criticised Augustine's theodicy by proposing that if God gave free will to the human soul, then he must be implicated in human sin (a problem that Augustine had himself considered four years earlier, in Free Will). Quoting the
Buddhism
The scholars of religion Paul Ingram and
Francesco Antonio Zaccaria
The Italian theologian Francesco Antonio Zaccaria criticised Augustine's concept of evil in the eighteenth century. He noted a distinction between using the term evil to imply blame (sin) and to imply lament (suffering) and argued that Augustine posited sin to have occurred before suffering. This was problematic for Zaccaria, who believed that it made Augustine seem offhand and uninterested in human suffering. For Zaccaria, Augustine's perception of evil as a privation did not satisfactorily answer the questions of modern society as to why suffering exists.[40]
John Hick
John Hick criticised the Augustinian theodicy when he developed his own theodicy in 1966. Hick supported the views of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, which he classified as Irenaean, who argued that the world is perfectly suited for the moral development of humans and that this justifies the existence of evil. He insisted that, while the Augustinian theodicy attempted to justify historical occurrences of evil, the Irenaean theodicy seeks to justify God eternally. Hick saw Augustine's view that a perfect world went wrong as incoherent and contradictory, and argued that, if humans were made perfectly good, then it should have been impossible for them to have made an immoral choice. He questioned the success of the theodicy with the charge that it does not remove the blame for evil from God: Augustine presented a theology of predestination; Hick argued that, if God knew the choices that his creation would make, he must be responsible for them.[41] Hick's theodicy rejected the idea of the inheritance of sinfulness, and he believed that an eternal hell would render "a Christian theodicy impossible".[42] The Irenaean theodicy does not, as the Augustinian theodicy does, attempt to protect God from being responsible for evil; rather, it argues that God is responsible but justified for it because of the benefits it has for human development. Both theodicies stress the perfection of God's creation, but differ in why the world is seen as perfect. Augustine also believed, as Hick did, that bringing good out of evil is preferable to the evil not occurring in the first place.[43]
Process theology
In God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy, published in 1976, David Ray Griffin criticised Augustine's reliance on free will and argued that it is incompatible with divine omniscience and omnipotence. Griffin argued in later works that humans cannot have free will if God is omniscient. He contended that, if God is truly omniscient, then he will know infallibly what people will do, meaning that they cannot be free. Griffin argued that the human will could not oppose God's will, if God is omnipotent. He proposed that original sin as Augustine conceived it must itself be caused by God, rendering any punishment he wills unjust.[44]
Process theology argues that God is not omnipotent: rather than coercion, he has the power of divine persuasion, but he cannot force his will. Griffin, a prominent process theologian, argues that God feels the pain of the world (both physically and emotionally) and does everything within his power to achieve good, but he can neither force beings to be good nor prevent evil because he does not play a coercive role in the world.[45] Process theology teaches that, rather than creating the world ex nihilo (as Augustine proposed), God created it out of a pre-existent chaos.[46]
Alvin Plantinga
In the 1970s,
Plantinga's version of the defence embraces Augustine's view of free will, but not his natural theology.[52] Rather than attempt to show the existence of God as likely in the face of evil, as a theodicy does, Plantinga's free will defence attempts to show that belief in God is still logically possible, despite the existence of evil.[53] The theologian Alister McGrath has noted that, because Plantinga only argued that the coexistence of God and evil are logically possible, he did not present a theodicy, but a defence. Plantinga did not attempt to demonstrate that his proposition is true or plausible, just that it is logically possible.[49]
Compatibility with evolution
John Hick criticised Augustine's theory for being implausible in light of scientific insights on evolution, as it would make Augustine's idea of a fall from perfection inaccurate;[54] this is reiterated by Nancey Murphy and George F. R. Ellis, who also contend that Augustine's idea of transmitting original sin from Adam to the rest of humanity requires biological explanation.[55] The comparative religionist Arvind Sharma has argued that natural evil cannot be the result of moral evil in the way Augustine suggested: scientific consensus is that natural disasters and disease existed before humans and hence cannot be the result of human sin.[56]
The twentieth-century philosopher
See also
Notes
- ^ Steve Duncan used the example of a rational man who is offered five dollars for a Rembrandt. Assuming that he understands the meaning of the transaction and has no other reason to accept the offer, it can be predicted that he will reject the offer. Duncan holds that God could not create a world where the man freely accepts the offer (without changing the situation), illustrating Plantinga's point.[50]
References
Footnotes
- ^ Hall 2003, p. 132
- ^ a b Svendsen & Pierce 2010, pp. 48–49
- ^ Tooley, Michael (21 August 2009) [16 September 2002]. "The Problem of Evil". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 8 February 2012.
- ^ a b Bennett, Peters, Hewlett & Russell 2008, p. 126
- ^ a b Menn 2002, p. 170
- ^ Corey 2000, pp. 177–178
- ^ a b c Svendsen & Pierce 2010, p. 49
- ^ Green 2011, p. 779
- ^ a b Geivett 1995, p. 19
- ^ Mendelson, Michael (12 November 2010) [24 March 2000]. "Saint Augustine". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
- ^ Korsmeyer 1995, p. 47
- ^ Mendelson, Michael (12 November 2010) [24 March 2000]. "Saint Augustine". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
- ^ Menn 2002, p. 168
- ^ The City of God, Augustine of Hippo, Book XI, Chapter 9
- ^ Loke, Andrew Ter Ern (2022). Evil, Sin and Christian Theism. London: Routledge. p. 63.
- ^ Menn 2002, p. 174
- ^ Bennett, Peters, Hewlett & Russell 2008, p. 127
- ^ Menn 2002, p. 176
- ^ Cavadini 1999, p. 422
- ^ a b Cavadini 1999, p. 423
- ^ "Saint Thomas Aquinas". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 30 September 2009 [12 July 1999]. Retrieved 10 April 2012.
- ^ a b Little 2005, p. 44
- ^ Geivett 1995, p. 18
- ^ Geivett 1995, pp. 19–20
- ^ Little 2005, pp. 42–43
- ^ Howard-Snyder 1996, p. 51
- ^ Korsmeyer 1995, p. 45
- ^ Wawrykow 2005, p. 53
- ^ Cavadini 1999, pp. 116–118
- ^ Case-Winters 1990, p. 70
- ^ McKim 2004, p. 93
- ^ Steele & Thomas 1963, pp. 15–17
- ^ van Inwagen, Peter (2003). The Problem of Evil (1st ed.).
- ^ "#157 Molinism vs. Calvinism".
- ^ Fredriksen 2010, p. 146
- ^ Acts or Disputation Against Fortunatus the Manichaean, Augustine of Hippo, Ch. XXII
- ^ Fredriksen 2010, pp. 146–147
- ^ Fredriksen 2010, p. 147
- ^ a b Ingram & Streng 1986, p. 148
- ^ Zaccaria 2009, p. 104
- ^ Cheetham 2003, pp. 40–42
- ^ Hick 2010, p. 237
- ^ Barber & Neville 2005, p. 141
- ^ Griffin 1976, pp. 60–66
- ^ Melse 1993, pp. 13–24
- ^ Cobb & Griffin 1976, p. 65
- ^ Plantinga & Sennett 1998, pp. 22–23
- ^ Plantinga & Sennett 1998, p. 23
- ^ a b McGrath 1995, p. 193
- ^ Duncan 2007, p. 105
- ^ Duncan 2007, pp. 105–106
- ^ Geivett 1995, p. 59
- ^ Geivett 1995, pp. 60–61
- ^ Davis 2001, p. 54
- ^ Ellis & Murphy 1996, p. 244
- ^ Sharma 2006, pp. 85–86
- ^ Bennett, Peters, Hewlett & Russell 2008, p. 128
- ^ Bennett, Peters, Hewlett & Russell 2008, p. 129
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