Augustine begins his theodicy with the concept that God is perfect. The world he has created is one that reflects perfection. He then also continues to say that in this perfect world, for it to be perfect, humans were born with free will and this was harmonious. After sin and death entered the world through not only Adam and Eve’s disobedience but also the fall of the Archangel Lucifer, disharmony was brought about in both humanity and the Creation. Subsequently, Aquinas believes that the whole of humanity experiences this disharmony because we are descended from Adam’s ‘loins’. Augustine claimed that: ‘All evil is either sin or the punishment for sin’. Natural and moral evil are therefore consequences of this disharmony within the Creation created by the falls. God is justified in not intervening because the suffering is a consequence of our human action, and God must accept this it is an action we performed through our free will which he placed upon us himself.
Central to Augustine’s theory is that of deprivation i.e. evil is not a substance; it is the absence of something. Augustine uses the analogy of blindness to explain this. Blindness is not an entity but the absence of sight, much in the same way that evil is not an entity but an absence of good. For Augustine, this means that evil came about as a direct result of the misuse of free will. He includes that both natural and moral evil are consequences of this abuse. Natural evil has come about through an imbalance in nature brought about by this misuse of free will and moral evil through the imbalance in the human creation and a punishment for the sin which Adam and Eve committed. In the Bible, there is evidence to support this theodicy that the world is suffering through the act of God making reconciliation possible through the coming of Jesus of Nazareth: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17)
A modern addition to Augustine’s theory can be found in Plantinga’s God, Freedom and Evil in which he claims that for God to have created a being that could perform good actions and act morally rightly would be logically impossible.
‘Reasoned arguments cannot account for all the evil in the world.’ Discuss.
Reasoned arguments are never going to account for any evil in any world of any type. Reasoning will only help us to understand what it is that accounted for this evil, but will never account for the evil itself. Theodicies such as those of Augustine and Irenaeaus were not accounting for evil; they were simply trying to explain how evil and God can coexist.
Augustine’s theodicy claims that all evil roots from the Fall of Adam and Eve. This is a hefty weight to be laid on to mankind by people who can easily be falsified and could be seen as metaphor. Evolution has proved that mankind has evolved for millions of years from particles of matter. This means that Adam and Eve and the Fall can only realistically be taken metaphorically. Judging so much on metaphor seems not very accountable. The Irenaeaun theory of God making us imperfectly in his likeness to progress seems more realistic, as the metaphor is gone and instead we are presented with a moral test. However both reasoned theodicies leave God as the main producer of evil and reason for suffering.
However, these reason arguments, whilst not accounting for the evil themselves, do gives us options to establish a true answers. Simply because one is not fool-proof does not mean that there is no way for accounting for evil in the world. The only problem is that reasoned arguments all come from human thought processes, and human thought processes, if our understanding of evil and suffering is correct, are contaminated by this dissonant harmony which we have within our world. Therefore, any reasoned arguments we come up with to explain evil and suffering in the world will simply be falsified by the very substance we are trying to explain.
Human beings have only way of universally proving the existence of divinity or suffering, and that is reason arguments. There may be a reason that we have never truly understood completely the nature of divinity and that is because we cannot. Our logic has been contaminated by evil and the only way we can account for evil is to have faith in God and accept that there are some things that can only be account for under a divine creator which have no way of expressing.
