Belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent Being brings with it a number of problems, one of which is the problem of evil. Given the undeniable occurrence of evil and suffering in the world, how might we reconcile this with a belief in God? While Augustine carefully considers this problem in On Free Choice of the Will, Aquinas uses the Natural Law to lead us out of evil and toward the good. Do their doctrines prove satisfactory or does the problem of evil still give us pause?
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the reading brings up an interesting point when it covers the topic of whether God does good only or good and evil. Augustine says God does evil to those to do wrong, so therefore no one is punished unjustly. There were many "what if's" brought up and in the end it was clear to see that God justly causes suffering but does not DO evil himself. people do not learn to do evil because those who learn are doing good. however, those who do not wish to learn are not necessarily doing evil, but they are failing to learn and therefore turning their heads away form that which is good. evil also can not be taught because anyone who teaches is doing good, and those who understand and learn, are accepting the good.
Augustine has a unique view on the ideas of good and evil. He does not deny the fact that God is aware of evil in the world, he says that God knows evil exists and can not stop it from happening. For it is not his/her fault that sin and evil is committed for that is our fault. We commit sin and evil deeds by use of free will, now one could argue why would God give us free will if he knew we would use it for evil? Augustine answers this by saying that God had all the best intentions when bestowing free will upon us, it was something given to us to use for good. God gave us a chance to better ourselves instead, in usual human fashion, we took this good and turned it into something evil. This is the conclusion that Augustine reached, that evil doesn't just exist out of nothing but instead evil is the absence of good. Essentially evil exists because we use free will to damage good thus creating evil.
For me, these readings have been a complete 180 to what I am used to doing when it comes to philosophy. I tend to have to compartmentalize my beliefs from what I am reading. When doing this, I find I try overlook my own religious views and objectively examine what it is I am being presented with. I had a much harder time reading Augustine and Aquinas than I would usually expect, because it is someone actually discussing faith. I enjoy having the opportunity to contrast philosophy and religion, and thought of them as interconnected, but also find it challenging for me to put myself back into mixing the two. Much like evil not being caused directly by God according to Augustine; the indirect connection is unique and my own choice. Nonetheless, I have a hard time agreeing with the notion that people are failing to learn rather than doing evil things. For example, I think Hitler was an evil man and not simply not choosing wisely and learning from his decisions. What about people like Saddam too? He killed thousands of his own people to protect himself. How does Augustine address people like this? You cannot tell me they are just "not learning".
I've always kind of wondered how people could make the argument that evil exists because humans have the gift of free will. If God was really omnipotent and omniscient, it would logically follow that he knows the future. I think this raises a contradiction, because wouldn't he already have known that evil would follow from free will? Augustine answers this question by saying that free will was gifted with intentions of good; that God wanted to give humans a chance to do good and renounce evil. It's a compelling argument, but I think there's still an element of contradiction within our descriptions of God and the various reconciliations of good and evil.
What struck me immediately in Augustine and Aquinas’s writing was the ways in which they treat God. In our past readings the authors have been somewhat ambivalent to the existence of God, and reduce any idea of “God” to a very theoretical subject with little or no involvement in the actual world. This, I suppose comes from the religious atmosphere they were writing in. The Greek and Roman gods were more like immortal people with special powers to manipulate nature and humans for their own ends. In reality, anyone who looked objectively at the myths handed down by the poets would find that they were far from believable or even feasible. The contrast then to Augustine and Aquinas is the way they accept that God in a fully Christina sense does exist. Their writing seems to work with this assumption in mind, so they have a conclusion which has already been reached and they prove and philosophize with this end in mind. For example, Augustine begins Free Choice of the Will by discussing learning and education. He does so with the assumption that Good exists, so his writing enters a kind of spiritual realm. So, rather than discuss what education is, he focuses on whether good and evil can inherently be taught, using good and evil in the Christian sense of the terms. As a Christian, I find this writing interesting and applicable to my life, but I wonder about the relevance of it because it operates with in these Christian ideas. I suppose both were writing in a time when Christianity was quickly becoming the dominant religion in the sort of “Known world,” but there still must have been many who would not agree with them in spiritual terms.
I thought the road where Aquinas branched off in his beliefs from Aristotle was a very interesting topic. Aristotle was a believer that happiness was attainable in this life, and a lot of people tend to believe that. People go home and believe they are happy every day. This begs the question though, are we truly happy? Aquinas disagrees, enough to say that the happiness Aristotle postulated was not even perfect happiness at all. He tells us that true happiness is attainable only in the life after death, and this happiness is the vision of God. Does that mean that in this life, there really cannot be happiness? I tend to believe most people do not want to believe this, because then there is no point in living if you can never experience true happiness, just a façade of happiness and all of the times of unhappiness and despair mixed in. This being said, I cannot believe God would create a world where happiness is truly unattainable. Even though a condition of being human and living in this world is to see evil and to know unhappiness, we can and do find happiness, even if the moment is brief, and this is how we reconcile the belief of evil with God, that evil and despair cannot be everlasting, and we must deal with them in order to find happiness, and perhaps someday the true happiness that Aquinas speaks of.
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