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Augustine: on evil Many people will tell you that evil is a necessary part of the world. Just ask and you can get many people to agree to a claim such as; "There cannot be good without bad." This is a metaphysical idea about the structure of reality. Part of that idea is that everything in existence must co-exist in a sort of balance or symmetry. Even though this is a popular metaphysical view, few people know how they came to hold it. It is a very old view. Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine belonged to the The Manichean religion, a pagan cult that depicted the world as a battle ground between perfectly good creator and the perfectly evil destroyer. As he investigated the ideas of the relatively new Christian philosophy, Augustine realized that an explanation for the existence of evil must be given, or else one must accept either that god created evil and so is partly evil as well as good. There is much more at stake in this issue than the promotion of certain religious beliefs. The question of evil raises the most fundamental of metaphysical questions; namely, what is existence? Early greek philosophers grappled with this problem by observing that nothingness (non-being) is not a self-independent state. The phrase "non-being exists" seem self-contradictory. If this is so, then there must be something in reality that necessarily exists. In other words, it is inconceivable that everything in existence would cease to be or that there was any time in the past at which there was nothing in existence at all. Something cannot come from nothing, so there must be something that exists always. This area of philosophy continues to present and is currently known as Ontology (the study of being). Think now about the general concept of God as creator and sustainer of reality. God fits the above ontological concerns by providing the idea of a source of being that is eternal and necessary to existence. Whatever one's religious beliefs, it is hard to dispose of this basic insight. Even modern physics has this idea built into the Laws of Thermodynamics: matter cannot be created or destroyed. Ontologically this states that there is a necessary structure to the universe such that some aspect of it is necessary to existence itself. The existence of evil poses a problem for this picture of reality as based on necessary being. Evil is typically associated with destruction and nothingness. If we allow that the evil of the world on the same level as the good of the world, then we buy into the dual-nature idea that being and non-being (existence and nothingness) coexist. Augustine sought to explain the idea of one ideal God (being) without evil. The result is a strikingly original and powerful conception of reality. Understanding his solution to the problem of evil can affect many aspects of your thought. read one of Augustine's approaches to this problem now, and follow up with some commentary in a little while.
The above is a compact and sophisticated philosophical analysis and argument. It will benefit you to read it more than once and to take notes on the major claims and moves of the argument. For instance, note when Augustine says; "Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity." The point is that evil and good are related, but that the relationship is not symmetrical. Evil (nothingness) is dependent upon good (existence), but good does not depend uon evil. So it is correct, by Augustine's reasoning, to say "There can be no evil without good" whereas it is mistaken to say "There can be no good without evil."
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Aquinas
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| 2002 |