¶ … philosophy of St. Augustine on "Free will as the cause of all evil." The paper will analyze this philosophy as compared to the thinking of other philosophers.
Augustine's "Free Will as the Cause of Evil"
Augustine believed that evil is not something positive and God is not the cause of evil, because evil is not a thing. His whole answer on the problem of evil is related to God. He believed that God did not will moral evil in any sense but only permitted it for the greater good that could not be obtained by preventing it. That is why he made man free. He also believes God did not will physical evil for its own sake.
Free Will the Cause of Evil"
The problem of evil can be phrased in several ways. One approach addresses the origin of evil, prompting the syllogism i.e. A series of statements that form a reasoned argument: 1) God created all things; 2) evil is a thing; 3) therefore, God created evil. If the first two premises are true, the conclusion is inescapable. This formulation, if sustained, is devastating. God would not be good if He knowingly created evil.
Augustine realized that the solution was tied to the question: What is evil? The argument above depends on the idea that evil is a thing. But what if evil is not a thing in that sense? Then evil did not need creating. If so, our search for the source of evil will take us in another direction
Augustine approached...
Initially St. Augustine favoured the dualistic view that evil was external and separate from the world and mankind that in evident from the Manichean worldview. However, he was later to reject this strict dualism and taker another view of the nature of evil. This was more Platonic and was based on the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. This refers to the view that evil is a measure and result of
Augustine, The City of God Which one do you think that he is living in? In The City of God, Saint Augustine of Hippo references two cities. These cities are Rome which he references as the new Babylon and Jerusalem which he calls the city of Heaven because it symbolizes the Christian community. Based upon the way in which he references the two cities, it is likely that St. Augustine lives in
Free will vs. Determinism To define his evolving notions of Original Sin in Christian theology, Augustine solidified in the doctrine Christianity a notion of the radical freedom of the human will -- what made human beings wonderfully distinct from animals, he argued, was the human ability to freely choose good or evil in action. Augustine's approach to the "free choice of the will" assumed that "humans had a will" and a
Origin of Evil The origin of evil has been a controversial issue not only in the contemporary Christian circles but also among the ancient Greek Christians. The point of contention in the discussion about the origin of evil is why a good God would have created evil. The Judeo-Christians struggled to understand how a good, powerful, and all-knowing God could allow evil to exist. The logical conclusions were that either God
And reason is achieved when we are able to find the balance between two things, which are often the extreme ends of the spectrum. We can infer that good is something created by men. It is the product of reason. If Aristotle places that much responsibility to the faculty of reason, St. Augustine place that weight in God's hands as he maintained that the only way for men to
In Chapter 5, the great churchman informs us that Water is in fact an apt designation for the Divinity, better than any of the other elements. Water possess the unique properties of being more moveable than earth (though less movable than air) while at the same time being essential to the creation and sustaining of life, as in the way water must be added to the soil in order for
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