Evil And The Confessions Of St. Augustine

947 words - 4 pages

Brett WalterHUM 205Paper # 9Evil and theConfessions of St. Augustine:Aurelius Augustine lived from 354 -430 A.D. During his life, Augustine introduced some extremely important philosophical ideas with regards to these concepts of evil. These concepts were introduced in a direct defense of the Christian faith.Prior to St. Augustine's time, many philosophers questioned the picture of evilpainted by the Christians. This picture portrayed evil as a being generated in a world which was created by a perfectly good God. It is understandable that many philosophers had reservations regarding this belief as it seemed contradictory in nature. While the overall outlook of evil is a complicated iss ...view middle of the document...

Another problem with this theory is, if there were no evil in the world, human beings would have no reason to ever doubt the existence of God. If we as human beings had no reason to doubt the presence of God, we probably wouldn't strive to understand and communicate with Him or feel His presence through the experience of life. In short, there would be no need for free will or to have faith in a higher power. All that being said, I can't see why there would be any reason for our existence.Augustine's absence theory and ignorance of good theory were a little more reasonable than his first two ideas. The concept behind the absence theory was that absence of something good such as water or sight, or the presence of drought and blindness respectively, can be described as "physical" evils which make evil slightly more obvious. Augustine then shares his point of view on moral evils, or the evil actions of man. One of his thoughts is that people do not intentionally do wrong, which I personally would have to disagree with, since I can recall instances in my life where I have knowingly chosen to act wrong, I think it's a fair assumption that I'm not the only person to have ever acted this way.Ignorance of good was another concept of Augustine's, but in the case of evil, I think that it's oftentimes difficult to distinguish between intentional behavior and ignorance. St. Augustine also assumed t...

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Evil And The Confessions Of St. Augustine

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