Religious responses- Augustinian theodicy Flashcards
Nygren, Hick, Russell, Augustine
What is a theodicy?
Religious believers response to the problem of evil.
A theodicy is an attempt to justify God in spite of the existence of evil and suffering.
Anders Nygren
Wrong for religious believers to attempt a theodicy because it is irreligious to imagine that fallible human minds can understand God.
John Hick
Christians have to try to understand evil, because it is central to other aspects of faith (sin, redemption, Christ as saviour).
Theodicy only presents a problem for people who believe God to be both loving and omnipotent.
Bertrand Russell
Universe needs no explanation- it is just the way it is, including evil and suffering- which just happen.
Augustine of Hippo- context
- Born in North Africa in 345 CE.
- Christian education but rebelled against its core ideals.
- Turned to Greek philosophy- particularly manichaeism.
- 387 CE- renounced other beliefs and was baptised.
- 396 CE - became Bishop of Hippo.
Manichaeism (extra context for St Augustine)
Manichaeism held that the world was a fusion of spirit and matter, the original principles of good and evil, and that the fallen soul was trapped in the evil, material world and could reach the transcendent world only by way of the spirit. Zealous missionaries spread its doctrine through the Roman empire and the East.
Augustian influences
- Heavily influenced by Plato (Plato’s cave)
- Plato believed everything in existence has it’s own ideal, or perfect concept, and things we see in this world are imperfect copies of these concepts.
- Plato saw imperfection as a feature of the physical world- Augustine took up this idea and expanded on ti in a Christian context.
Augustine’s development from Plato.
Christian context- believed word of the Bible to be literally true.
Genesis 1.31 meant when God created the world, it truly was ‘good’.
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (without moral or natural evil). It did not exist before the sins of angels and humans, as these have the capacity to turn away from God. Free will brings about evil, and the reason for this is beyond our understanding. Humans as ultimately responsible.
Saw God as a loving Father who is both;
1) Loving - through Jesus’ death, redemption and eternal life is available.
2) Fair and just - doesn’t intervene to prevent evil.
Ex nihilo
God’s creation was originally free from sin, as it was created ex nihilo, but through corruption and decay things will return to what they once were- nothingness.
Privation
Meaning absence or loss of something that is normally present.
Evil as a privation
Augustine argues evil was NOT a part of God’s created order, evil indicates a privation of God’s created order.
Every good thing has the potential to be corrupted, having this potential is not evil; this only occurs when the potential is realised and corruption happened.
The fact that things do corrupt shows their original nature of good, evil is when they lose some of this goodness.
eg. darkness is a privation of evil.
Original sin
- Humans are descended from Adam- shares Adams sin and guilt as well as God’s punishment.
- Suffer through moral evil- humankind’s fault through actions performed on basis of free will.
- Augustine believed that God allowed free will and the potential for evil as it is better to bring good out of evil than to never permit evil to exist. (Felix culpa)
Felix culpa
- No original sin = God would have had no need to send Jesus into the world to save us from sin.
- Augustinian theodicy = soul deciding theodicy - Those who choose to accept Jesus as their saviour will be redeemed and after this life will be reunited with God in heaven.
Therefore, life is a chance for humanity to seek redemption through Christ. Augustine argues that this demonstrate’s God’s mercy and underlines his justice.
CRITICISM: Schleiermacher
(1768-1834)
- argued there is logical contradiction in holding that a perfectly created world has gone wrong.
- this would mean that evil has created itself out of nothing, which is logically impossible.
- Even if evil is a privation, it is still feature of the world, as is the suffering it produces. Evil has to be attributed to God. Either the world was not perfect to begin with or God enabled it to go wrong.
CRITICISM: Schleiermacher 2
- also argued it was difficult to understand how, in a perfect world where there was no knowledge of good and evil, there could possibly be freedom to obey or disobey God.
- the fact that God’s creatures chose to disobey Him suggests there was already suggests there was already knowledge of good and evil, which could only have come from God.
(Links to Aquinas; ex nihilo, and nihil fit; nothing can come from nothing. Evil as a feature of the world, must have come from somewhere)
