Augustine and the Problem of Evil

I decided to kill two birds with one stone and post some selections from a Philosophy of Religion essay that I just turned in this afternoon. Considering the fact that it was it was finished around 3 a.m. on Sunday night, I didn't think it turned out that bad. But then again, I'll have to wait and see my professor has to say about that.

For many people, the idea of the existence of God, at least in Judaic-Christian sense, seems altogether impossible and perhaps even unfavorable. While this is true for a multitude of reasons, there is one that seems to eclipse all the rest. That reason is the existence of evil. For those who would bring this objection, the idea that a God who is both all-good and all-powerful would allow evil to come into the world that he supposedly created is totally unthinkable...

These are powerful objections. They cannot simply be brushed aside by those who do believe in a loving God as begrudging protests by those who simply refuse to see the plain truth. On the contrary, these questions must be taken seriously even by those who whole-heartedly believe in God. Even those of this position can and are often times troubled by the seriousness and difficulty of such objections. It was for this very reason that St. Augustine, the most influential and ingenious philosopher theologian in the history of the Church, did not neglect this issue, but faced it head on, putting forth the classic Christian understanding of evil...

"What, after all, is anything we call evil except the privation of good?" (Augustine 19). In other words, evil is not to be understood as a separate entity from good. Evil and good are not two separate powers that somehow balance each other out. Instead, evil can only be said to exist in so far as good exists. Goodness is required for existence...

When a person is sick and then recovers, or is restored to health, it is not to be said that the sickness has left their body and gone somewhere else. The sickness does not exist in and of itself somewhere apart from the body. Instead, the body, which was at the time of sickness deprived of its wholeness or rightness, is restored to its former good disposition. However, it is important to note that while evil cannot exist apart from something that is good, good can exist all on its own. Augustine forged this idea in the attempt to defend against concepts of good and evil that would pit the two against each other equal powers...

While, again, the concept [evil as depreciationon] provides an excellent basis for understanding how evil can exist in the first place, most people would want to assert that there is a very strong aspect of reality about evil that Augustine fails to account for. This thought is expressed by William Edgar in his book, The Face of Truth. As he put it, "this view was an advance over the popular idea at the time of evil as a powerful force, nearly equal to God. It relativized evil, making it something negative, without substance, which notion has a grain of truth in it. But Augustine borrowed too heavily from Plato and his theory of ideas and shadows" (Edgar 105). Augustine certainly cannot be accused of ignoring this concern altogether, but his attempts to make evil understood in a more concrete sense do seem to come up lacking...