Augustine

• theodicy - an attempt to justify the goodness of god given the fact of evil.
• Heresy - an opinion/practice at variance with established teaching. Eg of a religion or church.
• St Augustine: was a super influential christian thinker. Was not always christian, was 'manichaen'. Participated in WOF (also regarded as a 'perversion of plato'). Believed physical matter was evil and spiritual things were good. They had different origins and gods.
• Manichaean: the task of the believer was to liberate good spirit from wicked matter, led to lots of suicide. In practice it meant the denial of all things material.
• Manichaean was a sub part of Gnosticism: belief that physical matter is evil, and that the creator of it is inferior to the true god. Salvation comes from escaping physical to go to spiritual.
• Gnosticism: if god is god he cannot have created matter. Jesus if the son of god could not have a human body. But if god is not evil we need another explanation for evil - dualism. COUNTER - surely if god is evil rather than 2 beings, ockhams razor.
• Augustine had 3 theodicies: original perfection; the fall and free will.
• Original Perfection: after his conversion to christianity, augustine said that the universe was made good. (genesis). God makes things good in their own way. A stone is good but only in the ways a stone can be good Eg building. Goodness of a human is not the same as the goodness of a stone. Only god is truly good in all ways.
• Original perfection: if god makes all things good, there is a scale of good. Some things will be better than others based on their capabilities. Augustine concludes that evil must be the going wrong of something made good.
• Original perfection: evil is the going wrong of something good. A sinful person is more good than a puppet, as they are more human. The possesion of being human is more good than not having them.
• Original Perfection Criticism: if god is omnipotent why does the good go wrong. - even if we have free will why is evil a concept in the first place.
• The fall - there are two 'falls': the fall of angels and the fall of man
• The fall of angels: angels, led by lucifer, chose to reject god. They introduced the evil of denying god, and fell into hell. (NOTE: angels in islam have no free will, in christianity they do)
• Fall of man: adam and eve chose to reject gods command by eating the forbidden fruit. They were punished with expulsion from the garden of eden.
• The falls lead to a 'soul deciding theodicy' - we have the choice to obey god. Evil is either the result of sin/punishment for sin. We are punished because of an ancient idea that the whole of human kind were present in the loins of adam. 'homonculi'
• The falls and soul deciding theodicy: natural evil is the result of the disorder brought by the falls, god does not stop loving us, despite our wickedness and offers redemption through the work of Jesus.
• Free Will: augustines said we can know good and not do it (voluntas); free choice is essential to being truly good. Genuine love for god must be freely given.
• Free Will: augustine thinks a world with evils that follow from free will is better than one without free will.
• "Privation" - evil is not a thing by a lack of goodness. God cannot be blamed for evilas he cannot create a lack of something.
• Augustine suggests that as god is not responsible for evil, it would be just if he punished us in hell but god is all loving so he gave us jesus.
• Augustine is soul deciding (those who choose to believe go heaven etc)