An Objection to Augustine’s Response to the Problem of Evil in On the Free Choice of the Will
A contemporary Catholic apologist sums up the problem of evil nicely: “If God is so good, why is his world so bad?” (Kreeft 54). In this paper, Augustine’s response to the problem of evil will be analyzed and found to be lacking as an adequate resolution to the problem. The paper that follows is a reflection based on the readings from From Plato to Derrida, paying special attention to Augustine’s texts on evil. Augustine tries to attack what we mean when we say “evil,” but his argument insufficiently glosses over the larger issue of human suffering, and what we are to make meaning of suffering today. I argue that although we can assume the existence of natural evil (or sometimes called an ontic evil), even if God does not exist. The atheist, who does not have to commit to the existence of evil, I argue, still has to contend with the meaning of human suffering. Augustine does not sufficiently deal with the problem of natural evil, and instead focuses on moral evil instead in his arguments. Augustine's focus on free will and his conception of human psychology do not address the problem of natural evil. I think this is a problem for the theist as well as for the atheist. Let us first give some background to the problem. I want to address why it matters to even think about evil as a problem and what it has to do with whether or not a person ought to commit themselves to the idea that God exists or not. In the history of philosophy, the problem of evil is used as a catch-all phrase for arguments that try to unsettle arguments for the existence of God. The main attack of the problem of evil approach is an attempt to show that the idea of an all-loving God and the reality of evil are not compatible. If they are not compatible, then there must be something wrong with either God, our notion of God or God does not exist. Still, even if God does not exist, it would still be necessary to confront the problem of evil.
The Problem of Evil begins by making three statements of belief about God. First that God must be all good. God is all-powerful. God is all-knowing. If evil exists, then, we have to think about how can God be good if bad things happen in the world? Bad things happen to people all the time, and people often suffer because of bad things happening. So, the argument goes, God must not be all-good. Or, God does not care. But if God does not care, indifference would not be compatible with being all-good. The next step in the argument is to worry about how can God allow bad things to happen. Bad things often happen.Yet God does not prevent bad things from happening.
A giant tsunami crippled Japan in 2011. On the news, a reports details the story: a man murdered an innocent woman. If God does not prevent bad things from happening, then God must not be all-powerful, or God cannot do anything to stop bad things from happening. If God knows people suffer, then why does he allow suffering to keep on happening? In the world, people suffer, and they feel the effects of evil. So, therefore, God must know since he is all-knowing, that people suffer. However, if people suffer and God does not know, then that contradicts the statement that God is all-knowing. Here is the argument put in standard form (Tooley):
- If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
- If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
- If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
- If God is morally perfect, then God has a desire to eliminate all evil.
- Evil exists.
- If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil.
Conclusion: Therefore, God doesn't exist.
In other words, the argument shows that having your cake and eating it too -- both the existence of evil and the existence of God presents some problems for the theist. Augustine, being a theist, tries to confront this problem. Of course, since it is a philosophical problem, there will be no easy solution. Augustine, being a man of faith, understands the problem is difficult, but he does get us to think about our conception of God. Even though Augustine is a man of faith, and he does rely on his faith to try to answer the problem, the problem of evil is primarily a philosophical problem (Masson 43).
Since the idea is to criticize the argument, and not the faith of Augustine, it is important to look away from times Augustine uses faith as a way to prove his point. However, don’t think that just choosing an atheistic view will allow one to not consider the problem. Of course, the argument of evil could spur us to abandon our belief in God, but as I already mentioned, the problem of evil is still a problem for the atheist. If I deny God’s existence, I am still left with how to deal with evil. If I deliberately deny the existence of evil, then I am still left to deal with the reality of human suffering.
Mackie put it simply: “God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists” (305). The sticking point is: What exactly is evil? Augustine obviously has issues with premise five of the argument: evil exists. Moreover, he attacks this premise to make his case. Augustine is interested in this question. Being a Christian, Augustine took the view that evil does not its substance. Evil is not something. In Confessions, Augustine calls evil a deprivation of the good (Augustine Confessions 153). Augustine things the “the good” has a substantial reality. The good is something. Evil is something. The logic of Augustine is that God can only create something and that something originates from the good. Evil is nothing. So, then, it has no part in the good. Augustine neatly puts evil into a “no-space.” The good is all that exists, and it is the purview of God, but in places where there is no good, evil is in an empty place. Augustine equates the good with being and evil with non-being. Evil is constituent with the being of God, and in fact, evil is only apparent in the non-space where the good is not. As Evan points out, Augustine is not the first one to make this observation (2). Augustine is influenced by Plotinus, a Platonist thinker who made a similar observation.
Augustine has Evodius, his interlocutor who puts pressure on the theist, ask “Who is the author of evil, Evodius asks?” (3). Augustine wants to make great pains to show that a good God would not author evil. Evil has no authorship. But he also does not want to go the route of thinking that there then must be an evil God. Also, in another corollary point, Augustine wants to get away from the metaphysical problem that God created evil, for if God created evil, then how could he have also created the good? It will bring up a powerful dualism that if there is a Good (God) then there must be an Evil (God). This type of balance argument does not work because if God is all-good and powerful then he would be able to destroy any semblance of evil, and Augustine wants to maintain monotheism in his account of why there is evil, so he is loath to submit to the notion that there is a good God and an evil God who are duking it out in the heavens. Augustine tries to avoid the problem of two Gods duking it out by later stating that the Devil is just as free to act wrongly as an evil person (125). In other words, the Devil exists, but he also acts out of free will, and he could conform to God’s will if he so desired.
Augustine initially bases his conclusion on arguing that evil is non-being. And he puts the pressure on humans to act according to the good. Augustine hinges his argument on the idea that human beings are free. Augustine’s focus, then, is on why do people pursue evil in the first place (30). In fact, the entire first section of On Free Choice of the Will is concerned with this issue. In other words, Augustine is interested in the psychology of evil. It is a question of human nature. Augustine’s view of human nature is that there is something corrupt inside of human beings that come out of a desire to seek that which is not good for us. In fact, Augustine writes that a well-ordered society with a “responsible, and a watchful guardian of the common welfare” who is entrusted to watch out the interests of the people is still liable to corruption because we cannot fully ascertain how the guardian will act in public and in private when “free will enters the picture” (11). I think you want to skip straight from "why bad things happen" to the point that even if human beings were free, they could always act in ways that are morally good, which is, I think, the point you are trying to highlight in this paragraph.
If we assume with Augustine that human beings are truly free, it still does not account for why bad things happen. Could not it be otherwise that if human beings were actually completely free to act in any way they chose without restriction, they would heap on the world acts of good?
Augustine relies on sin to deal with this issue, but as was already shown, sin is not a good way to deal with the philosophical issue of free will. For Augustine, sin is a disgrace, and it is a penalty for wrongdoing (92). In Augustine’s conception of God, mankind is free to as he chooses, and the only way God can communicate with man is through grace. However, I wonder why does God create a being that is so difficult to reach? It is like buying a device and encrypting it and not keeping the passcode handy.
Why does God choose to remain so hidden? It is a form of the mysterious ways argument, in such a way when people talk about evil and God they will say “God does not want evil things to happen, but we cannot understand God’s ways.” Augustine actually brings this issue up at the beginning when he brings up the question of how did man learn how to sin (3). He further makes the point that “if sins come from the souls that god created, and those souls come from god, how is it that sins are not almost immediately traced back to god?” Again, the answer is the same. Augustine argues that sin is the basis of a misdeed.
But what about evil that humans have not chosen? How can it be possible that God punishes the innocent? For example, in a natural disaster like a tsunami, people suffer. Is it the sins of the people that cause the tsunami? The problem of an ontic evil Janssens defines it is “a lack of perfection that impedes the fulfillment of a human subject (qtd. in Keenan 156). Again, there is this idea of lack that Augustine uses to connote absence or privation. Ontic evil, even if it is a lack, presupposes an imperfection in nature, and the existence of an ontic evil does not sufficiently explain why innocents suffer. If it is as Augustine claims, the retribution of a just God will be analogous to telling the son that he has to suffer for the sins of his parent.
Instinctively we would view that as not fair. It is easy to see where justice works where it is easily ascertainable that someone has done something wrong. But where does the chain of wrongdoing end? Why, as Augustine suggests, should we worry about the wrongdoing of our earliest ancestors? Justice has to be directed toward the wrongdoer, and Augustine does not adequately deal with the whole issue of sins of the father. In fact, he resorts to the theology of original sin to make his case -- that since Adam and Evil freely chose to do evil and disobey God’s commands, the rest of humanity must suffer. Augustine writes, “We believe that human beings were so perfectly created by God and established in a happy life that it was only by their own will that they fell from this condition to the afflictions of mortal life” (On the Free Choice of the Will 20). As Evans writes, Adam’s sin flawed the nature of man (122). In other words, Augustine wants to say that God does intervene into the dealings of mankind, but because we are so rotten, we do not pay attention to God. But Augustine makes the claim that “good people deserve a happy life and evil people an unhappy one” (13). But for Augustine happiness is connected with ordering one’s life according to the will of God. But don’t so-called evil people live happy lives? What about those who follow the precepts of the law, who never do anything wrong, and who abide by God’s commandments, but they are still unhappy? It is easy to take Augustine’s side when life is doing well for the person, but it is not so easy when the tides are turned and who is the evildoer and who is the good deed doer is not so easily ascertained. Augustine tries to show that there are levels of doing good, and not all good deeds are the same. But, this certainly cannot be easily measured (72). But Augustine thinks that the greater goods are those done in public, which is why he champions the publicity of the law to secure the good, and those goods done to gain private ends are not as good.
However, the astute reader will notice that Augustine very rarely deals with the issue outside of people’s dealings with one another in society. For we can think of many examples where bad stuff happens that has nothing to do with choice, free will, or a person’s sinfulness. Philosophers have traditionally called evil that is the result of a person’s actions as moral, while those evil that happen because of no fault of our own as ontic (Janssens 112).
Augustine elides the problem of ontic evil, and he tries to argue that God does not do evil, but only rewards the just. Augustine provides a form of the merit argument that God rewards the just and punishes evildoers. God is not the author of evil, however, since evil has no author except the will of a corrupt individual who chooses to follow the path of their own desires (3). So God is the author of punishment of wrong, but he is not the author of evil. Augustine argues that evil people are the author of evil, and that an evil act -- he gives the example of adultery -- is wrong and the moral law forbids it because it is evil (Augustine On the Free Choice of the Will 6). Augustine imagines evil to be a non-thing that also affects us, even though we cannot really name it or even accept that it is there in a metaphysical sense.
What Augustine does instead is to put the onus of evil onto human will, and he suggests that humans are free to go toward the good, or they are free to follow the path of evil (Augustine On the Free Choice of the Will 21). Augustine argues that the world is good, but if a good person wills something in a good world, then it is good, but since people who are deprived of the good by their own volition choose to desire evil, then evil exists (28). Since God cannot create evil things, the world itself is not evil, but only how people use it (29). Hands are used for murder, but it is not the hand that is evil, or feet can be used to kick someone off a tall building , but feet are not evil in of themselves (67). Augustine equates justice with God’s retribution on the wicked, and argues that those who are virtuous do not follow evil ways for evildoing is not a virtue (68).
Virtues cannot be used to do evil acts. God gifts humanity with goodness. The good is to be used for good. Since God does not commandeer people to act in a certain way, we are free to act otherwise. Augustine argues that human beings are endowed with reason, then it must follow that humans can follow the good, and act virtuously, or they can follow the bad, and act according to evil. However, people can choose to do good and still cause suffering. For example, a good person can give money to a homeless person, but then she needlessly suffers when she realizes she gave away her bus ticket money. Alternatively, good deeds can be acted on to help those who suffer but the deeds do nothing to help. Augustine tries to make an issue of evil too neatly a bifurcated issue of good deed doers and good deed doers, and he assumes that most people err towards evil acts (Vaught 80-82). Augustine’s argument only deals with one side of the issue, and that is moral evil. Augustine’s argument is also neatly tied to the supposition that God has a plan for humankind, even though we are free to do as we choose. However, how would I tell the father who left his child in the backseat of a car on a hot sweltering day that it was only God’s plan? Augustine argues in Confessions; it is a moral evil that corrupts (qtd. in Paffenroth 118).
Augustine is obviously inspired by the words of Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans when he writes, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do (7:15). If I do the things that I hate, what does this say about human nature? What about those who do the things that bring them pleasure. Augustin, and by extension Paul, rely too heavily on a negative picture of human psychology. In Augustine’s view if a wallet is found on a bus, most people will have a propensity to steal it, but what evidence is there that this is the case. In fact, a recent study suggested that people, in fact, will do the opposite. They will try to find its owner. By only sticking to the psychology of human nature that stipulates we are all prone to do evil, Augustine does a disservice to the problem of evil by making it all the burden of humankind. But what about the man who accidentally leaves his baby in the back seat of a car? Did he intend to do evil, or was he just forgetful? Is he only being punished for his sins, but then why does the child suffer?
In conclusion, we can say that Augustine relies on Moral Evil as the solution to his problem, but he does not sufficiently deal with the problem of natural evil. It is enticing to agree with Augustine that when people do wrong to others, it is because of free will. That is because it is easier to see the cause and effect relationship. Someone hurts another person. They suffer. It is easy to see that the cause of the suffering was the person. But real life is not always so simple. Augustine does not think of examples when people who are virtuous suffer, or even when those who do not suffer suffering because of any empirical evidence that leads to an evildoer. The best example is disease.
Are we to say that someone catches a cold because of sin and that the cold is retribution for a sin committed that may never be fully understood? In sum, Augustine’s thoughts on evil and free will do make sense only in a limited sense. However, in a larger worldview, his view does not completely account for all instances of human suffering. Augustine’s view of God is limited by his use of grace by our obfuscation. It is as if Augustine is saying, if people only knew how to behave properly and obey the law, then they would understand how Good God is and how corrupt human nature is. If only it were that simple.
Works Cited
Augustine, , and Henry Chadwick. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.
Augustine, , and Peter King. On the Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and
Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.
Baird, Forrest E. From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011. Print.
Evans, G R. Augustine on Evil. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Print.
Freeland.”The Role of Cosmology in Plato’s Philosophy,” in A Companion to Plato. Edited by
Hugh H. Benson. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub, 2006. Internet resource.
Janssens, Louis. "Ontic evil and moral evil." (2000).
Keenan, James F. A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From
Confessing Sins to Liberating Consciences. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Kreeft, Peter. “The Problem of Evil.” Chapter 7 in Fundamentals of the Faith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 54-58.
Mackie, John L. "Evil and omnipotence."Mind (1955): 200-212.
Masson, Pierre. “Augustine and the Problem of the Evil,” in The Problem of Evil: An
Intercultural Exploration. Edited by Sandra A. Wawrytko, Amsterdam [u.a.: Rodopi,
2000. Print.
Paffenroth, Kim, and Robert P. Kennedy. A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions.
Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Print.
Tooley, Michael, "The Problem of Evil", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer
2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/evil/>.
Vaught, Carl G. The Journey Toward God in Augustine's Confessions. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2003. Print.
