Explain the challenges to Augustine's theodicy (20)
A theodicy means justification of God' and reconciles God of the Classical Theism with
existence of evil.According to Augustine, evil is the responsibility of humanity who are evidently
sinful, not of God. God can be omnibenevolent and omnipotent as evil is a Privatio boni, Evil is
not a substance but the absence of Good, such as blindness is the absence of sight. God
cannot create an absence of good, but can create substance of good. God didn't create evil,
therefore the God of Classical Theism exists. This essay will explain the challenges to
Augustine's theodicy which are logical, moral and scientific.
Consequently, Augustine presents the view that evil is solely the responsibility of humanity and
not because of God who is omnibenevolent. However, there are moral contradictions, as
Augustine allows what humans would view as immoral, allowed from God. An omnibenevolent
God cannot save some and damn others to hell, and the fact that hell exists and was created by
God, contradicts His all loving nature.This shows that God seemed to have predetermined and
planned, for some to go to hell and others to go heaven through limited atonement, where Jesus
saved only the elects. If God anticipated the fall, it was immoral of Him to allow the descent into
evil to still continue. An example is, God condemns unbaptised infants as evil sinners, since no
one is innocent, due to the original sin carried out by Adam and Eve during creation. This
means that God may not be omnipotent or omnibenevolent since He was not able to prevent the
problem of evil and knows some people such as unbaptised infants will go to hell.
Augustine would argue that the problem of evil exists due to original sin, where God created
Adam and Eve to be perfect, in doing so he gave them the gift of free will so they were able to
decide how to act, but they were told to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
but were tempted by a serpent and ate from it. This means all humans are "seminally present in
the loins of Adam '' which implies that Adam's sin is passed on through sexual intercourse, a
sign of our concupiscence. However, the issue is that modern science would reject this as it is
not physically possible for the entirety of humanity to have been seminally present within Adam
at Eden. It is biologically impossible for all of humanity to be descended from a single pair of
humans. This is shown by the fact that sin is not a genetically inherited trait, therefore,
Augustine's theodicy is not a valid explanation for the problem of evil as there are scientific
errors.
Augustine refers to Genesis in various accounts, such as God created Adam and Eve perfectly
and all of His creation was 'good' in the Creation story. This can be criticised as there are logical
problems in Augustine's theodicy. For example, the evolutionary theory and geological evidence
states that the world never began perfectly and then deteriorated, meaning that the world began
chaotically and order came gradually in the process. Schleiermacher, questioned how could a
perfect world go wrong, that is illogical as logically a perfect creation is unchanging. Evil has to
be possible if Adam had free will to disobey God's commands. This indicated that Adam and
Eve were not created perfectly, as sin exists, and God i to be blamed for evil and suffering in the
world.
