God and the world

7 The problem of evil

Essential terminology

The Fall

Free will

Omnipotent

Omniscient

Original sin

Perfection

Privation

Theodicy

Key scholars

Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE)

Irenaeus (130–200)

Augustine (354–430)

John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981)

John Hick (1922–2012)

Anthony Flew (1923–2010)

Richard Swinburne (1934–)

Richard Dawkins (1941–)

What you will learn about in this chapter

The problem of evil and suffering:

logical and evidential aspects
the theodicies of Augustine, Irenaeus and Hick’s use of original perfection and the Fall.

The OCR checklist

The problem of evil

the problem of evil and suffering:
- different presentations
  - including its logical (the inconsistency between divine attributes and the presence of evil) and evidential (the evidence of so much terrible evil in the world) aspects
- theodicies that propose some justification or reason for divine action or inaction in the face of evil
  - Augustine’s use of original perfection and the Fall
  - Hick’s reworking of the Irenaean theodicy which gives some purpose to natural evil in enabling human beings to reach divine likeness.

Learners should have the opportunity to discuss issues related to the problem of evil, including:

whether Augustine’s view of the origins of moral and natural evils is enough to spare God from blame for evils in the world
whether the need to create a ‘vale of soul-making’ can justify the existence or extent of evils
which of the logical or evidential aspects of the problem of evil pose the greater challenge to belief
whether it is possible to successfully defend monotheism in the face of evil.

For many people, acts of wickedness and evil in the world and the suffering caused by natural disasters are the strongest arguments against belief in God. Discuss with others what the problem of evil is for a religious believer like a Jew, Christian or Muslim.

1 Write up your answer as a set of questions.
2 Can you think of any answers or solutions to the questions you have thought of?

Some clues:

1 Think about what the traditional qualities of God are.
2 Study the pictures on this page. Use the pictures to help you work out what the problem of evil is.

One major problem faced by most of the world’s most well-known religions is the question of how the particular God that they worship can allow the amount of evil that is in the world and whether that God should take responsibility for it. This has gradually become known as the problem of evil, and is often presented as an argument against the existence of God, although it is more properly an argument concerning the nature of God.

The problem of evil says that God, being all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient) and also all-places (omnipresent), has the ability to end evil. God should want to put an end to evil and suffering as he is also all-god – omnibenevolent. Thus God has the motive and the ability to ensure that there is no suffering or evil taking place under His ever watchful eye. But evil still exists.

Theodicy

A philosophical attempt to solve the problem of evil.

A definition of the problem of evil

A definition of the problem of evil was put forward by the Greek philosopher Epicurus over 2,000 years ago and again by David Hume:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is God able to prevent evil, but not willing to? Then he is malevolent (evil).
Is God able to prevent evil and willing to? Then why is there evil?

Mackie called this the inconsistent triad, which shows that it appears impossible to marry both the existence of evil with the existence of God, bearing in mind his characteristics.

The same problem still challenges human beings today.

The problem, as set out by Epicurus, highlights the difficulties that the problem of evil raises for the religious believer. It questions God’s omnipotence, God’s goodness and God’s omniscience.

There are possible solutions to this problem, but they also cause problems:

weakening the status of God makes the existence of evil easier to account for, but also makes it harder to ascribe the name ‘God’.
God exists only in the language of believers. Talk of God is a way of affirming religious belief. God is not therefore an external reality, so God cannot take responsibility for evil.
Rather than change God’s goalposts, move evil’s. Christian Scientists claim that evil is an illusion of the mind – the problem of evil is only an apparent problem.

Evil can be categorised as follows:

Natural or physical evil, such as natural disasters and cruelty in the natural world. Most philosophers today would argue that natural evils are caused by the way the natural world works.
Moral evil is the evil that comes from the actions of humans. People are free agents, responsible for their actions and the consequent results.

Thought point

Are the terms ‘natural evil’ and ‘moral evil’ easy to apply?

Study the list ahead and decide which ones are natural evils and which ones are moral evils. Make a bullet point list of the causes of each event referred to.

1 A hurricane flooding a town, leading to hundreds of people drowning
2 An earthquake destroying a city
3 A man robbing a bank
4 A paranoid schizophrenic stabbing a woman
5 Becoming infected with HIV after receiving a tainted blood transfusion
6 Killing a person when he or she steps out in front of your car. It was impossible to foresee the accident happening
7 A person dying of hunger because he or she has no money
8 and no one gave them food or help
9 Suffering from hepatitis caught from injecting yourself with heroin using a dirty needle.

Omnipotent

Literally means ‘all-powerful’. It is used as a characteristic of God.

Omniscient

Literally means ‘all-knowing’. Like omnipotent, it is used as a characteristic of God.

Why the existence of evil challenges belief in God

The whole ‘problem of evil’ is based on some basic religious assumptions:

that the world can be understood rationally
that there is an overall meaning and purpose to everything that happens
that there is a single underlying reality – a good or loving God
that God has a direct and absolute control over individual events.

Now, the problem only really applies to theism – the belief in one God who is the creator of the world, infinite, perfect, omnipotent and omniscient.

For many people evil and suffering in the world are the greatest challenges to belief in the existence of this God. This argument has been proposed by many philosophers, including J.L. Mackie and Anthony Flew.

If God is all-powerful why does God not prevent evil?

This challenge to the existence of God is sometimes called the ‘logical problem’. J.L. Mackie said it was a logical problem because theists have to show that their beliefs make sense and are logical. Mackie said that if God is actually omnipotent then God has power over ‘causal laws’ (Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God) – by this he means the physical laws of the universe. Why then does God not stop evil if he has the power to do so?

The amount of evil in the world appears to challenge the goodness of creation

Richard Dawkins pointed out that there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the natural world, and even religious believers find it difficult to defend that the natural world is good in the face of the existence of evil and suffering. Nature is neither good nor evil – it simply exists to pass on genes to the next generation and is used to support ideas of creation being good and having been made by God.

Humans also inflict great evil and suffering on one another – for example war, rape, torture and other forms of abuse.

How can an omnipotent God allow such actions? These challenges are put forward by Dostoevsky in his book The Brothers Karamazov. One of the characters, Ivan, rebels against God because of the suffering of innocent young children, which he says cannot be justified. He says,

Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future?

(Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

For Ivan it is never right to allow evil so that good may come, so he is saying that nothing can justify God allowing evil, nor is it possible to believe in a good God who allows evil and the suffering of the innocent. He concludes that it would be better if the world did not exist at all than have a world which included the suffering of children.

It could be argued that children learn by making mistakes and sometimes this causes suffering, such as learning not to touch hot things because they burn you, but this does not mean we need all the range of suffering that occurs in the world.

Free will

The ability to make one’s own decisions and choose freely between different possible courses of action.

Thought point

The Brothers Karamazov

If you have the time, read The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. Alternatively, an good discussion of the passages of the book which concern the problem of evil may be found in The Puzzle of Evil by Peter Vardy.

Mackie argues that evil committed by humans is the price of having free will. However, he then suggests that if God is omnipotent, he could have made humans who always freely choose what is good (Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God). However, Mackie’s view means that free will is limited if people cannot choose what is bad.

An additional problem is that evil and suffering seem to affect both good people and bad people. This again does not support the belief in a just and good God.

Thought point

Is suffering of any benefit?

A rare genetic condition causes children to be born with an inability to feel pain. What are the possible advantages and disadvantages of such a condition?

Thought point

Nature: good, bad or indifferent

Read the passages ahead and then answer the questions which follow.

Text 1

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good …

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them …

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

(Genesis 1:24, 25, 27, 31a)

Text 2

As we shall see, nature is not cruel, only pitiley indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

(Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)

Questions

Which text presents a more accurate picture of the world?
Make a list of any evidence that supports the claims of each text.
Which text appeals more to you?
Would you teach the ideas presented in these texts to your children (if you had any)?
In your opinion:
- Did God make the earth?
- Is nature pitiley indifferent?

Theodicy

Theodicy is the word used by religious believers for their explanations of how belief in a good, omnipotent God can be maintained in the face of all the evil and suffering present in the world. The word ‘theodicy’ comes from two Greek words: theos (meaning ‘God’) and dikaios (meaning ‘justification’). So a theodicy is about justifying belief in God, even though evil and suffering exist.

Augustine the man (CE 354–430)

As a young man Augustine turned against the Christian faith of his mother and investigated a number of different schools of philosophical thought. However, he ended up becoming a committed Christian and monk, inspired by the preaching of Ambrose of Milan. He wrote a large number of books about Christian doctrine and beliefs, the most famous of which are probably The City of God and Confessions in Thirteen Books. Later he was chosen by the people of Thagaste in north Africa (now part of Libya) to be their bishop.

Evil: a problem to be endured or solved?

The problem of evil as expressed by Epicurus, Hume and the Inconsistent Triad is often explained as follows:

1 Evil is caused by people’s free will.
2 Evil is a means by which people develop moral qualities, such as compassion.
3 Evil can be explained if we have a different understanding of the nature of God.

Attempting to justify a good God in the face of evil is known as a theodicy, and the approaches that are studied in this chapter focus on the first two foregoing explanations. The third solution is not studied in this chapter but can be found in the further reading section.

Theodicies are intellectual and rational explanations of how evil exists and God remains good, but these responses are very different from actually facing and coping with evil and suffering.

Augustine’s theodicy

The creation stories in Genesis 1–3 influenced Augustine’s theodicy. It is often claimed that Augustine interpreted the creation stories literally, but in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine argued that the first two chapters of Genesis were written to suit the understanding of the people at that time. In order to communicate in a way that all people could understand, the creation story was told in a simpler, allegorical fashion. Augustine was influenced by the Platonists and believed that God created everything in an instant, but also that this creation was not static; the world has the capacity to develop, a view that is harmonious with biological evolution. Augustine understood the stories as mythological, communicating values and meaning.

McGrath sums up Augustine’s Creation thoughts thus:

First, Augustine does not limit God’s creative action to the primordial act of origination. God is, he insists, still working within the world, directing its continuing development and unfolding its potential. There are two ‘moments’ in the Creation: a primary act of origination, and a continuing process of providential guidance. Creation is thus not a completed past event. God is working even now, in the present, Augustine writes, sustaining and directing the unfolding of the ‘generations that he laid up in creation when it was first established.’

(McGrath 2011a, p. 219)

Much of Augustine’s writing was a rejection of Manichaeism, which had fascinated him in his youth. Manichaeism had no problem with the existence of evil as it saw the whole of matter as evil and the purpose of salvation was to redeem humans from this evil matter and transfer to a spiritual realm. Augustine could not accept this approach and saw both creation and redemption as actions of God, and so it was not possible to blame creation for the existence of evil as God created a good world. Evil, according to Augustine, was a consequence of the misuse of human free will.

Free will

Augustine’s explanation of the problem of evil centres on free will and attempts to account for the suffering brought about by natural disasters and diseases as well as the evil that humans choose to do. According to Augustine the story of the Fall in Genesis when Adam and Eve chose to turn against God and sinned had two key consequences:

It meant that human nature became corrupted so that every generation would inherit their sin. This is the doctrine of original sin.
It also corrupted God’s creation. Natural evil, such as disease and natural disasters, did not exist before the Fall and so they are also a result of the misuse of free will.

Augustine believed literally that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, which meant that human beings are not just physical creatures but also spiritual. Christians usually interpret this as meaning that human beings are capable of rational thought (unlike animals), and this is a God-like quality. However, all suffering is a result of human sin and God could have prevented this only by denying free will. Augustine considered that it is better to have free will despite the consequences, but God also offers humans redemption and release from the suffering they have caused. Jesus’ death atones for the misuse of free will. Christ freely chose ultimate goodness to redress the balance after humans chose evil. God experiences suffering through Jesus Christ to identify with humans and to suffer in our place. At the end of time, we will be judged. Good will be rewarded and evil punished, both in an afterlife. The good will experience eternal happiness, and the evil will receive their just punishment.

However, the question remains as to how humans could have chosen evil if God had not made it possible for humans to choose it. Augustine attempts to solve this dilemma by saying that it all originated from Satan – a fallen angel who was originally created good but chose to rebel against God. Augustine did not explain the original fall of this good angel. Additionally, if Augustine considered the biblical creation stories to be mythical, so that Adam and Eve never existed and the Fall never literally happened, then they cannot be used to explain the suffering caused by natural diseases and disasters.

Sharing in Adam’s sin

Augustine argued that all human beings were present in Adam’s sin. This idea comes from Paul, who wrote that ‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned’ (Romans 5:12). What Augustine meant is that all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve and all share in the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin. In Christian theology all people are said to share in Adam’s sin because they were ‘seminally present’ in Adam; thus everyone is born into this disharmonious world.

The theodicy of Augustine: key ideas

1 God: God the Creator is omnipotent and good.
2 Good creation: Creation is good and reflects the perfection of God.
3 Hierarchy of beings: Angels, humans, animals.
4 Privation: Evil is a privation or lack of goodness in something.
5 The Fall: Angels and human beings fall through their own free choice. Adam and Eve are tempted and as a result sin and death enter the world.
6 Moral and natural evil: Adam and Eve’s disobedience brought about ‘disharmony’ in both humanity and Creation.
7 Original sin: The whole of humanity experiences this disharmony because we were all ‘seminally present’ in the loins of Adam.
8 Free will: Free will is valuable so God sustains a world within which moral and natural evil occurs. God is justified in not intervening because the suffering is a consequence of human action.
9 Aesthetic value: The existence of evil highlights the goodness of creation because of the contrast between good and evil.

Privation and evil

Augustine solves the problem of saying God is responsible for evil in the world by defining evil as a ‘privation’. Augustine did not want to say that God was the cause of evil. Neither did he wish to say that evil was not some kind of a reality. He knew very well from his own experience that evil was a real factor in his own life as well as in the lives of others. Disharmony is introduced into creation by the choice to rebel. This introduces evil. Augustine believed that since everything in Creation was created by God, evil could not be a substance. If evil were a substance, God would have had to create it, and this would not be logical. For Augustine, evil was therefore ‘privation’, or a lack of something – evil comes about when a part of creation leaves its proper path and ceases do what it was created to do. For example the eye is created to be perfectly good and blindness is a malfunction of the eye. Blindness is therefore not a ‘thing’ but a state or a condition. Free will, good in itself, has been corrupted by choosing evil.

Augustine’s idea of evil as a privation also applies to human beings: if you say that a human being is evil, or that his or her actions are evil, you are saying that the way he or she behaves does not match expectations about how a human being should behave. For example if someone racially abuses, robs or tortures people, he is not living up to the standards expected of humans. It is falling short of what a human should be that is wrong.

By this solution Augustine affirmed that God was the creator of good while at the same time affirming that evil is a kind of reality. It is not a full reality or being; rather it is a privation whose cause is the will of man.

Thus, Augustine said that ‘evil comes from God’ because God causes to exist and keeps in existence human beings who have free will and, of course, human beings can become evil through their free choices.

Augustine stated that nobody can be completely evil because to be evil you have to lack goodness, which means you had goodness to start with. Even the devil has some good in him. Talking about all God had created, Augustine said, ‘It was obvious to me that things which are liable to corruption are good … If there were no good in them there would be nothing capable of being corrupted’ (Augustine Confessions).

Augustine’s theodicy

Augustine did not write a book that he called a ‘theodicy’. Instead, many of his writings include comments relevant to this topic. So although people refer to the Augustinian theodicy, what they are really referring to is a collection of ideas linked to the writings of Augustine.

Privation

Means something is lacking a particular thing that it should have. Augustine gave the example of ‘blindness’. He called this a privation, because if you are blind it means that you are unable to see – in other words you lack the attribute of sight.

Thought point

Evil and privation

Is evil a ‘privation’ or ‘lack’ of something? What do you think?

Thought point

What does the word ‘inhuman’ mean?

Describing someone as inhuman, or his or her behaviour as inhuman, comes from the idea of evil being a privation. Consider what the link is.

Thought point

Is God to blame for evil?

Augustine made the following comment about evil:

‘I thought it better to believe that you had created no evil … rather than to believe that the nature of evil, as I understood it, came from you’ (Augustine, Confessions).

Discuss:

1 What Augustine believed at first (in italics in the foregoing quote)
2 What he believed later (underlined in the foregoing quote)
3 Why do you think he changed his mind?

Harmony

Refers to objects existing in an ordered way together or living creatures existing in a state of peace and happiness with each other.

The Fall

Refers to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and their disobeying of God. It can be read in Genesis 2:4 to 3:1 of the Bible.

Original sin

A reference to the first sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden and its effects, according to traditional Christian beliefs.

Thought point

The Genesis stories

Read the two creation stories in Genesis, chapters 1–3, and make a comparison of them.

Thought point

Experiment

Buy a packet of sweets and eat one of them. Try to describe the sweets to people without giving them a sweet. Then give them a sweet. How accurate was your description?

Why create creatures with free will?

Augustine believed that free will matters so much that he argued that allowing evil to happen is a price worth paying for human freedom. This means that God allows evil and suffering.

Additionally, if there was no free will it would remove not only the bad choices that people make but also their good choices.

Augustine also argued that when the creation (universe) is viewed as a whole, the contrast between what is good and what is bad highlights the beauty of goodness. This is called the aesthetic principle by some philosophers.

To complete his ideas on the existence of evil, Augustine’s writings also suggest that evil is evil only from a human perspective. In God’s sight everything is good. Augustine said the universe is like a work of art – some might not look too good when seen in isolation, but they are a necessary part of the whole work and contribute to its beauty. Thus, what humans see as evil is necessary for the beauty of the whole world as God sees it.

Criticisms of Augustine’s theodicy

How can something perfect go wrong? Why should creatures living in a perfect world choose to rebel? There is also the problem of the existence of angels, for whom there is no convincing evidence. In his book Evil and the God of Love, John Hick suggests that Augustine’s theodicy is implausible for modern people.
Augustine explained that what went wrong was less than perfect. But creating a universe with imperfections makes evil God’s fault, and humans are therefore being punished for what is God’s fault.
Modern theories of creation, such as the theory of evolution, seem to disprove Augustine. There is no room for the development of a moral sense. Natural disasters shaped the planet long before there were humans to punish. By the same token, the stories of the Garden of Eden and the fall of the archangel Lucifer appear to have no place in a modern view of the world.
Augustine’s belief in a perfect world that is then spoilt by evil cannot be accepted as true in any literal sense. Is Augustine speaking in mythological terms? This does not make his theodicy untrue: a myth seeks to give understanding to a spiritual truth. The apparent lack of historical truth in the story of Adam and Eve does not mean that the principle is not true. There is room for evolution in the myth of Adam and Eve.

Augustine claimed that everyone shares in the effects of the Fall because they were ‘seminally present’ in the loins of Adam. Modern science indicates that each person is a unique individual who inherits half of his or her DNA from his or her mother and half from his or her father. Augustine’s ideas rely on an ancient understanding of biology according to which people existed before conception. Given today’s understanding, it would appear unjust if God then punishes later human beings for the first human being’s sin as they could not have been ‘seminally present’ in Adam.

Over the centuries, philosophers such as Schleiermacher (1768–1834) have questioned why a perfect world would go wrong. If angels were created to live in the presence of God, why would one turn against him?
Also there seems to be something illogical in the account – if God is all-knowing, he surely knew that Adam and Eve would ‘fall’. It is therefore hard to accept the role of an all-loving God in a brutal universe given this point.
The classic response to this argument is to say that God wishes to enter in a ‘loving relationship’ with people and this is possible only in a situation of total freedom – there can be no compulsion. A world populated by people compelled to love God would be a world of robots – a non-moral world.

However, if everything depends on God for its existence, then God must be causally involved in free human actions. Do we really have free will?

Augustine argued for a world in which God is responsible for everything and that suffering is a punishment for the sin of Adam, but Christians believe in a merciful and kind God. Augustine’s response was that God was merciful because he sent Jesus to save people. Mackie responded that God could have made people who freely chose the good. Or he could have created a world with less suffering.
Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom and Evil, 1974) argued that it is logically impossible for God to create another being that always freely performs only good actions. If God to caused them to do good they would not be free. Others have argued along different lines, pointing out that even if it is logically possible, not everything logically possible is equally achievable. Love cannot be programmed. The fact that heaven is pictured as containing people who will never sin suggests that perhaps God could have created such beings on earth. However, people have chosen to be in heaven, which may mean some restrictions on free will as a result.

Augustine’s view of evil as a privation can also be challenged. It is not sufficient to say that it is a lack or absence of good. Many would argue that it is a real entity.

The Irenaean theodicy

Irenaeus was a bishop during the earliest stages of the development of Christian theology, and one of the most important Greek fathers of the early Church. He is one of the first Christians to attempt to explain Christian beliefs in an organised way. His greatest work is called On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-called Gnosis – ‘Against the Heresies’, which explains Christian beliefs. Like Augustine, Irenaeus was keen to refute what he saw as heretical ideas. The Gnostics believed that matter was inherently evil and so it would be impossible for a good God to create it. Additionally, Jesus could not have had a physical body as this also would be inherently evil. Irenaeus intended to show that everything came from God and, therefore, he had to explain the existence of evil in the role and even give evil a purpose. Like Augustine, Irenaeus argued that evil is the consequence of human free will and disobedience. However, unlike Augustine, Irenaeus believed that God was partly responsible for evil and suffering.

In general terms, the Augustinian theodicy is a soul-deciding theodicy. In contrast, the Irenaean theodicy is soul-making. In the writings of Irenaeus (130–202), there appears the idea that humans were not created perfect but are developing towards perfection.

He uses Genesis 1:26 – ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’ – to show that the purpose of humans is to develop their own soul. Creation is not yet finished. We have been made in the image of God with the potential to be like God. Irenaeus said that God had given human beings free will. This free will entailed the potential for evil. He understands Adam and Eve as almost like children who do wrong because they have not yet developed the wisdom to choose what is right. Irenaeus believed in the story of the Fall. He saw Genesis 3 as literally true and believed it showed that humans were not ready to accept God’s grace or goodness as we were spiritually and morally immature. However, Irenaeus did not consider this to be original sin in the same way that Augustine did; people were simply led astray by the devil, because they were distant from God spiritually. People are like Adam and Eve in that they go astray morally because they have not yet gained the wisdom to do what is right. This is how Irenaeus approaches the problem of moral evil:

Natural evil has the divine purpose to develop qualities such as compassion through the soul-making process.
Moral evil is derived from human free will and disobedience.

Perfection

Another traditional characteristic or quality of God. It means that God is lacking nothing and can be no different or better.

The Irenaean theodicy: key ideas

1 God: God the Creator is omnipotent and all-good.
2 Creation develops: The universe and earth develop over time.
3 Human beings are created immature: Human beings grow from the ‘image’ of God into the likeness of God.
4 Soul-making world: The world is an environment where people grow and develop into the likeness of God. Hence, natural evil is present in it.
5 Epistemic distance: There is an epistemic distance between God and people so that human beings can choose freely to grow into relationship with God.
6 Eschatological aspect: All will come to be in the likeness of God eventually, but this will not be in physical life.
7 Free will: Free will is important, so God sustains a world within which moral evil and natural evil occur.

Irenaeus the man (c. CE 130–200)

Irenaeus originated from Smyrna in Asia Minor. He was a Christian preacher and later became the bishop of Lyon, France. He died in the year 200.

Growing into the likeness of God

Irenaeus said that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are created in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God, which meant that they had free will (making them in the image of God) and are spiritual as well as physical beings (making them in the likeness of God). However, Irenaeus claimed that human beings were separate from God because they are mortal. He believed that God’s gift of free will was better than receiving ready-made goodness. To back up this point he uses the example of a mother not being able to give a child ‘substantial nourishment’ as a baby requires milk and not solid food because he or she is immature, and in the same way humans could not be given complete goodness as they were spiritually immature and so are given free will to develop their own goodness. Humans are made in the image of God (with the potential for good) and moving towards the likeness of God (becoming good). Irenaeus believed that the gift of moral perfection would not have meant anything to human beings if they did not learn to value it for themselves. People become like God or move towards the likeness of God by freely choosing the good, but when people choose to do evil and sin then they are creating evil in the world. According to Irenaeus moral evil is caused by humans’ misuse of free will. God allowed us to have this free will as it was seen as more beneficial than making ready-made perfection. The fall of humanity is seen as an inevitable part of growing up and maturing. The presence of evil helps people to grow and develop. Thus the emphasis in this theodicy is soul-making.

Irenaeus argues that

For, while promising that they [human beings] should be as gods, which was in no way possible for him [Adam] to be, he wrought death in them; wherefore he [the serpent] who had led man captive, was justly captured in turn by God; but man who had been captured, was loosed from the bonds of condemnation.

(Against the Heresies, Book 3; 23)

The role of suffering and evil

According to Irenaeus Adam and Eve go astray but it is not a rebellion as Augustine thought, where Adam and Eve deliberately turn away from God. Irenaeus said that God did not curse Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, but cursed the ground and the serpent. Instead Adam and Eve must suffer by working the ground and Eve will have pain in childbirth. Punishment was necessary so that Adam and Eve would not ‘despise’ God. Irenaeus saw punishment as educative.

Irenaeus thought that throughout their lives people changed from being human animals to ‘children of God’. This is a choice made after struggle and experience as people choose God rather than their baser instincts. There are no angels or external forces at work here. God brings in suffering for the benefit of humanity, and from it humans learn positive values. Suffering and evil are:

useful as a means of knowledge – hunger leads to pain and causes a desire to eat and to feed others. Knowledge of pain prompts humans to seek to help others in pain.
character building – evil offers the opportunity to grow morally. If people were programmed to ‘do what is good’ there would be no moral value to their actions.
the result of a predictable environment – the world runs according to a series of natural laws. These laws are independent of human needs and operate regardless of anything. Natural evil is when these laws come into conflict with humans’ perceived needs. There is no moral dimension to this. However, we can be sure of things in a predictable world.

According to Irenaeus all history is overseen by God and the world has to be a hard place in which people experience suffering, so that humans can come to know God. The Old Testament prophets pointed out the right path to God, and the incarnation of God in Jesus unites humans with God once again. Irenaeus argued that Jesus is the Saviour and the new Adam who obeys God and dies on the cross (the tree), and thus he undoes the fault of Adam, who took the forbidden fruit from the tree. As the words of the Easter Proclamation (the Exultet) say, ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!’

Recapitulation

According to Irenaeus it is clear that humans cannot get to God by their own means, but need assistance. He used the example of a potter and clay to explain this and suggested in Against Heresies (Book 4:39–42) that humans should enable God to mould them through the existence of natural evil. It is the experience and contact with natural evil that mould people into the image of God from the likeness. Natural evil, he claims, enables people to develop good moral qualities or virtues and so grow into the ‘likeness’ of God.

It is therefore necessary for God to help humans achieve moral and spiritual perfection. The term ‘recapitulation’ is often used to describe this theodicy. It means to bring something back to the beginning – in other words people are being brought back into a relationship with God. For Irenaeus Jesus is the second Adam who makes this recapitulation possible. Jesus allows us to create a relationship with God that we were not ready to enter into at the beginning of creation; through his death on the cross Jesus links God and humans as he is both divine and human.

God, therefore, is justified in allowing moral and natural evil because natural evil is seen as an instrument for God’s purpose in enabling humans to move into the likeness of God. However, while Irenaeus did seem to suggest that salvation is open to all, he did believe that only those who accepted God would be saved and the others would be damned. He did believe some form of soul-making would continue in the next life so that souls could complete their transformation into the likeness of God, but not for the damned who rejected God and followed the devil, who will be punished:

It is therefore one and the same God the Father who has prepared good things with Himself for those who desire His fellowship, and who remain in subjection to Him; and who has the eternal fire for the ringleader of the apostasy, the devil, and those who revolted with him, into which [fire] the Lord has declared those men shall be sent who have been set apart by themselves on His left hand. And this is what has been spoken by the prophet, ‘I am a jealous God, making peace, and creating evil things’; thus making peace and friendship with those who repent and turn to Him, and bringing [them to] unity, but preparing for the impenitent, those who shun the light, eternal fire and outer darkness, which are evils indeed to those persons who fall into them.

(Against the Heresies, Book 4, 60)

The idea of universal salvation is a more modern interpretation of Irenaeus and not part of his original thought.

Recapitulation

The word ‘recapitulation’ is often applied to the ideas of Irenaeus concerning the problem of evil. Recapitulation literally means to ‘bring something back to the head or beginning’; it also means to ‘summarise or sum something up’. Irenaeus’ theodicy is about bringing people back into relationship with God; hence it is called a theory of recapitulation.

Thought point

Irenaeus’ own words

‘[U]nless God had freely given salvation, we would not now possess it securely. And unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility. For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and men, by his relationship to both, to bring both to friendship and accord, and present man to God, while he revealed God to man’ (Irenaeus, ‘The Ante-Nicene Christian Library’).

1 What do you think Irenaeus means by the word ‘mediator’?
2 Does salvation come only from God? What did Irenaeus think? What do you think?

Thought point

Criminal tendencies

1 Do people assume that children’s attitudes and behaviour reflect those of their parents? Is it right to assume this link and then act on this basis?
2 Does an assumption such as this affect the way people relate to the children of:
- Doctors
- Cleaners
- Lawyers
- Teachers
- Criminals
- Prostitutes?

Criticisms of Irenaeus’ theodicy

It is not orthodox Christianity as it denies the Fall.
Do natural disasters actually provide opportunities to do good in practice?
Why do some people get more than would seem to be their fair share of suffering?
Hume is critical: ‘Could not our world be a little more hospitable and still teach us what we need to know? Could we not learn through pleasure as well as pain?’
Swinburne argues that our suffering is limited, by our own capacity to feel pain and by our lifespan.

Modern Irenaean theodicies

The Irenaean theodicy as set out by modern philosophers, such as John Hick, starts from a belief that God exists and attempts to explain why there is evil in the world.

Augustine’s theodicy claimed that the world was perfect and good until evil came into it through people’s choices. Augustine’s theodicy presents a free will defence.

Irenaean theodicies reject these ideas and the work of modern defenders of the free will defence, such as Alvin Plantinga.

According to John Hick, Augustinian theodicies are unconvincing to scientifically educated people because:

The story of Adam, Eve and the Fall is a myth, and so is not literally true.
The idea that fallen angels cause natural disasters, such as earthquakes, is rejected as simply unbelievable.

John Hick’s Irenaean theodicy

The problem to be solved

In his book Evil and the God of Love Hick wrote that the role of mythology is to examine some of the great problems of human life, such as evil. According to Hick, however, although the imagery used in a myth, such as that of the Garden of Eden, might be memorable, it is not the most important part of the myth. It is what the imagery tries to examine that matters, such as the problem of the existence of evil.

Human beings

Hick, like Irenaeus, thought that human beings were not created perfect as in Augustine’s theodicy, but develop in two stages.

Stage 1: ‘Image’

According to Hick, humans are created in the image of God, which means they evolve into rational, ‘intelligent and religious animals’ (Hick, ‘Encountering Evil’ in Live Options in Theodicy). He stressed the fact that humans are one of many life forms on earth and are not unique, nor did they evolve from the Garden of Eden, but from a struggle for survival.

Humans, therefore, are not perfect but spiritually immature. And they evolve into spiritually mature beings through their struggle for survival. ‘A world without problems, difficulties, perils and hardships would be morally static, for moral and spiritual growth comes through responses to challenges; and in a paradise there would be no challenges’ (Hick, Evil and the God of Love, p. 372).

Stage 2: ‘Likeness’

Hick said that when humans have achieved ‘likeness’ with God, they will, sometime in the future, grow into a relationship with God.

The Fall

The Fall for Irenaeus is not as important as it is for Augustine, as he saw it as simply a mistake made by immature humans who are only in the ‘image of God’. Hick thought that the Fall symbolised the distance between God and humans.

Humans, according to Hick, were not created in the presence of God, as he thought that if humans were in God’s presence, all their free will would be removed. The all-powerfulness of God would mean that humans could not make any choices; thus he considered that there is an epistemic distance between God and human beings.

This is not a spatial ‘distance’, for God is omnipresent. It must be an epistemic distance: a distance of knowledge – in other words if God interfered or became too close, humans would be unable to make a free choice and thus would not benefit from the developmental process. This epistemic distance or knowledge gap between humans and God maintains their identity but allows humans to seek knowledge of God and have a choice as to whether to believe in him. Suffering is a necessary condition of being finite.

Peter Vardy gave a modern example to explain this idea: a king falling in love with a peasant girl. And rather than forcing her to marry him, he tries to win her heart. Thus, for Hick, the idea of an epistemic distance makes belief in an all-loving and all-powerful God completely rational and God is not obviously present in the world in order to protect human free will. He argued that the world is religiously ambiguous – it can be seen as the creative work of God or as completely secular as God’s presence is not evident. This leaves people free to either accept God or reject him. Hick argued that this freedom is vital if humans are to develop into the ‘likeness’ of God.

God, according to Hick, uses evil and suffering to bring about the greatest good – which means that evil and suffering are positive, not negative.

Epistemic distance

The phrase used by John Hick and other philosophers to express the idea that God’s existence is not obvious and thus human begins are not overwhelmed by God’s presence into believing in God.

Thought point

Free choice?

Think about your time in school. Have you ever misbehaved? If you have, would you have behaved in the same way if your mother or father had been sitting next to you in class?

In some schools teachers ask the parents to come into class with their child if the child misbehaves. Can you think of any disadvantages of this system of discipline?

Thought point

Evil actions

Can anything good come from evil actions?

Soul-making

According to Hick this world is one of soul-making – in other words it is a world in which people can make choices about how to behave and these choices enable them to develop virtuous characters and good habits. For example virtues, such as compassion and charity, can be developed only in a world where there is suffering, which in turn enables people to become more moral.

Thus it is people’s choices that are important, not the abilities and personality they were born with. Humans can become like God but sometimes it is easier simply to respond to their own instincts and desires.

Why are there natural disasters?

Hick claimed that the ‘challenging environment’ caused by natural disasters stimulates human intellectual and imaginative development. He wrote,

In a world devoid both of dangers to be avoided and rewards to be won we may assume that there would have been virtually no moral development of the human intellect and imagination, and hence of either the sciences or the arts, and hence of human civilisation or culture.

(Hick, ‘Encountering Evil’ in Live Options in Theodicy)

People need to face real dangers and real suffering in order for us to develop into the likeness of God. Natural evil is not, as Augustine thought, the result of human moral evil but part of the creative work of God.

In response to challenges from people such as Dostoevsky about the sheer amount and depth of evil in the world, Hick suggests that the only answer may be that in heaven all will be well. This is called an ‘eschatological answer’. He sees that from the point of view of the person suffering this is not always a helpful response, but says that people simply have to trust God that evil and suffering are necessary to create an environment in which all can develop. This also explains the random nature of evil: why it is that good people seem to suffer and evil people do not, as if only evil people suffered, we would not live in an environment in which we could develop.

Universal salvation

In the Irenaean theodicy humans become like God after death. An essential part of this theodicy is that this process is worthwhile because of the eventual outcome. If the process is not completed in this life, then Hick argued that there is another life in another realm to which we go, until the process is complete. However, unlike Irenaeus, Hick maintains that everyone will eventually be saved and go to heaven: all humans are on a journey towards God and eventually this journey will be completed and people will, after death, develop for the image of God into his likeness.

Hick believes in universal salvation – God saves everyone after death; for Hick there is no hell. The fact that everyone will eventually achieve salvation justifies the amount of evil and suffering in the world.

Eschatological

This is a word used by Christians to refer to what will happen at the end of time or in the last days of the universe. Traditionally it is linked with the idea of an afterlife.

Purgatory

Purgatory is a state of existence post-death in which people are purified by punishment after death. This is a different state from hell and the nature of punishment is purification, unlike hell. Belief in purgatory is most commonly associated with Roman Catholic Christianity, though some other Christians also share this belief.

Thought point

Daylight robbery

Would you steal what you liked if you knew that in the end you would go to heaven anyway?

Thought point

If you will be saved – whatever

Would you behave differently if you knew that eventually you would go to paradise with God despite whatever you did?

Criticisms of Hick’s theodicy

Hick rejected Augustine’s theodicy as implausible in a scientific age, but his own theodicy can also be considered implausible, particularly its eschatological aspect. However, Hick was a Christian, and he asks that his argument be viewed as a reasonable interpretation.
Traditionally, Christianity taught that humans are responsible for their own actions and God will judge them. Justice is understood as treating people as they deserve, so many Christians believe that universal salvation is unjust, as whatever you do in life will not matter in the end.
According to Hick, God is responsible for creating a world in which there are natural disasters and, therefore, is responsible for the resulting suffering. This seems plainly to contradict the belief in a good and loving God.
Is it necessary for there to be so much evil and suffering in the world? What about the suffering of children and the innocent?
Do the ends justify the means? Can it be possible to justify evil so that people can grow into the likeness of God? Many Christians would deny any idea of God creating evil for the greater good.
The epistemic distance may simply be a way of hiding the fact that God does not exist – why is God not more visible?
How do we know that the purpose of existence is to grow into loving and compassionate people in the likeness of God?

Conclusion

The Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies do attempt to address the problems presented by the existence of evil and the amount in the world. Both theodicies stress the importance of free will as an explanation of much evil in the world.

Additionally, people do learn from their mistakes: the idea of soul-making does support this.

There are criticisms of both theodicies, but whether this means that the problem of evil is an argument against the existence of God is another matter. There are many challenges to the theodicies, but maybe this means that, in our complex world, it can be said only that evil is a mystery that humans cannot solve, and that it is not simply an academic problem but that people need to choose to stand up against it.

Swinburne’s theodicy

Swinburne (Existence of God, 1979) also addressed the problem of the sheer quantity of evil in the world. Swinburne argued that some evil is necessary in order for us to achieve higher-order goods. He pointed out that a genuinely free person must be allowed to harm himself and others. God could intervene to stop it, or let the person learn from the consequences of his or her actions. He argued that it was better to live in a world where evil and suffering existed than in a ‘toy world’ where the consequences of human actions did not matter and humans would not need to make moral decisions.

He thought that the exercise of moral freedom was important even if these free choices bring about death. Swinburne argued that death is good in that it brings an end to suffering. It would surely be immoral for God to allow human beings to have unlimited power to do harm. Also actions matter more when there is a limited life. Death makes possible the ultimate sacrifice and it makes possible fortitude in the face of absolute disaster. When it comes to the Holocaust he says, ‘the less God allows men to bring about large scale horrors, the less the freedom and responsibility he gives them.’ In other words, we can make real choices.

For Swinburne, natural evil is necessary so that humans have a knowledge of how to bring about evil. Rational choices can be made only in the light of knowledge of the consequences of alternative actions. He cites the example of earthquakes. A choice of building on earthquake belts, and so risking destruction of whole populations, is available only if earthquakes have already happened due to unpredicted causes (Existence of God, p. 208). However, if the purpose of evil is to teach, what about those who never learn?

Swinburne thought that God created a ‘half-finished’ universe, which gives humans the possibility to choose to make it better. This idea depends on humans having free will.

The free will defence

The theodicies of Augustine and Irenaeus depend on human free will. For Augustine the misuse of free will led to evil – humans are responsible for evil, not God. For Irenaeus, Hick and Swinburne free will is necessary in order for humans to improve both themselves and the world. Both approaches see evil as the result of human free will; however, free will is necessary so that humans can have a free, loving relationship with God.

Criticisms of the free will defence

Anthony Flew asked what free will actually meant. Flew claimed that freely chosen actions cannot have external causes; they have to be internal to the person in order to be really freely chosen. Flew said that God could have created a world in which humans could always freely choose to do the right thing – they would be naturally good, but still make free choices according to Flew’s definition of free choice.

This approach, however, means that God manipulates his creation in order to bring about certain results, whereas the free will defence depends on humans being free to love and worship God and free to reject him.

J.L. Mackie adds to this argument, claiming that God could have created a world in which humans were really free but would never have chosen to do evil. Mackie’s argument is logical: if it is possible for a person who is free to do the right thing on one occasion, then it is possible for a person to do the right thing on every occasion, so God could have created a world in which everyone is genuinely free, and yet chooses always to do the right thing. Mackie concluded that as God failed to do this he cannot be omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

Additionally, it could be argued that humans have no free will as everything that they do is determined by events in the past, by sociological and psychological factors. Thus, choices which appear to be free may be determined by factors of which the individual is completely unaware. Logically, this means that there is no point in talking about good and evil actions, as if these actions are determined, there is no difference between good and evil.

Process theodicy

Evil is a problem only if one maintains the traditional God of classical theism. Process theodicy, developed by Alfred North Whitehead and David Griffin, states that God is not omnipotent and is not separate from his creation. God is part of creation and can, therefore, influence what happens in the world but cannot determine it.

Everything is in process. Every actual event is a momentary event, charged with creativity. God continually offers each event the best possible outcome, but every event is free to conform (or not) to God’s will. Evil comes from events that fall short of God’s purpose. God can try to influence humans to do what is good, but humans can ignore this and God cannot stop them. However, when evil is committed God suffers with those who suffer as he is part of the world and consequently is affected by it. This is similar to the ideas of Jürgen Moltmann, who wrote in The Crucified God (1973) that any Christian response to the problem of evil and suffering should be rooted in the death of Christ. Through the Crucifixion people are offered the promise that God is not detached from suffering because he died on the Cross. God is suffering alongside the world.

Process theodicy limits the power of God – he cannot stop evil, which is not explained but simply seen as simply part of the natural processes of the world. According to Griffin, there is more good than evil in the universe and so it is better to have this universe than no universe: ‘Should God, for the sake of avoiding the possibility of Hitler, and horrors such as Auschwitz, have precluded the possibility of Jesus, Gautama, Socrates, Confucius, Moses?’ (David Griffin, 2004, God, Power and Evil, a Process Theology). Is this limited God actually worthy of worship? Is the suffering God any help to someone who is really suffering and faced with the most appalling evil?

Thought point

The problem of evil – final task

1 How does the following quotation relate to the problem of evil?
2 Is the quotation a satisfactory conclusion to the problem of evil? Give reasons to explain your answer.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements – surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it? (Job 38:4–5)

Summary

1 The problem

Epicurus: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent. Is God able to prevent evil, but not willing to? Then he is malevolent (evil). Is God able to prevent evil and willing to? Then why is there evil?
Inconsistent triad

2 Why the existence of evil challenges belief in God

If God is all-powerful why does God not prevent evil?
The sheer amount of evil in the world challenges the goodness of creation.
Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Huge amount of suffering in nature (J.S. Mill, Richard Dawkins)

3 Theodicy

‘Theodicy’ comes from theos (meaning ‘God’) and dikaios (meaning ‘justification’).

4 Types of evil

Moral evil – caused by humans
Natural evil – suffering caused by natural disasters, disease and so forth

5 Possible solutions

Evil is caused by humans using their free will.
Evil is necessary as a means for humans to develop moral qualities, such as compassion.
The nature of God needs to be understood differently.

6 The theodicy of Augustine

Key ideas

God the Creator is omnipotent and all-good.
Creation is good and harmonious.
Hierarchy of beings: angels, humans, animals.
Evil is a privation – a lack of goodness.
Angels and human beings fall through their own free choices.
Natural evil is a result of the Fall.
Free will is important so God allows moral and natural evil to occur.
Soul-deciding world.

Criticisms of Augustine’s theodicy

The earth evolved very slowly over billions of years. Life has developed through evolution by natural selection. There was no instantaneous creation.
How could a perfect world go wrong?
If the world was perfect and there was no knowledge of good and evil, how could Adam and Eve have the freedom to disobey God if goodness and evil were as yet unknown?
Augustine’s view that every human in seminally present in the loins. Adam is biologically inaccurate and the question can be raised, is God really justified in allowing punishment of one human being for the sin of another human being? How could the perfect world go wrong?
God’s responsibility for natural evils

7 Theodicy of Irenaeus

Key ideas

God the Creator is omnipotent and all-good.
The universe and the Earth develop over time.
Human beings are created in an imperfect state, evolving from ‘image’ into ‘likeness’ of God.
Soul-making world
Value of free will

8 Criticisms of the theodicy of Irenaeus

It denies the Fall.
Do natural disasters actually provide opportunities to do good in practice?
Why do some people get more than would seem to be their fair share of suffering?

9 Hick’s theodicy

Key ideas

God the Creator is omnipotent and all-good.
The universe and the Earth develop over time.
Human beings are created in an imperfect state, evolving from ‘image’ into ‘likeness’ of God.
Soul-making world
Epistemic distance
Universal salvation
Value of free will

10 Criticisms of Hick’s theodicy

Is suffering a price worth paying?
Is so much suffering necessary?
Do the ends justify the means?
The epistemic distance
Why is God not more clearly visible?

Review questions

Look back over the chapter and check that you can answer the following questions:

1 List the positive and negative features of Augustine’ and Irenaeus’s theodicies. Do you think either theodicy is adequate? Justify your answer with reasons.
2 Aristotle famously stated that ‘we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts’ (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics). How could this support the ideas of Christian theodicies?
3 Would you say that ‘the existence of evil’ is a mystery? If it is a mystery, can ‘the existence of evil’ be used as an argument against the existence of God?
4 Desmond Tutu wrote in 1977 about South Africa under the apartheid system of discrimination against black people:

[T]he burning question is not ‘Why is there suffering and evil in the universe of a good God?’ but the more immediately pressing one of ‘Why do we suffer so?’ ‘Why does suffering seem to single out us blacks to be the victims of a racism gone mad?’ (Tutu, African Theology en Route: Papers from the Pan-African Conference of Third World Theologians; emphasis added)
1. (a) Do you agree with Desmond Tutu about what the key question is (italics)?
2. (b) Do the ideas of the Irenaean and Augustinian theodicies answer Desmond Tutu’s question?

Terminology

Do you know your terminology?

Try to explain the following ideas without looking at your books and notes:

Theodicy
The Fall
Epistemic distance
Privation.

Examination questions practice

Sample exam-style question

‘Reasoned arguments cannot account for the amount of evil in the world.’ Discuss.

AO1 (15 marks)

• You might begin by explaining the problem of evil, possibly using the version put forward by Epicurus.
• You would need to explain the important points of the theodicies – of Augustine, Irenaeus and Hick – and be able to explain points which focus on the question.
• You could explain the different approaches to humanity.
• You could explain the role God as creator, of free will and soul-deciding versus soul-making.

AO2 (15 marks)

• There are many ways to approach this question. You need to put forward an argument that either supports or disagrees with the statement in the question.
• You could discuss whether theodicies provide a rational defence of belief in God even though evil exists.
• You could discuss the logical problem with believing in a good, omnipotent, omniscient God in the light of all the evil in the world. For example you could discuss the particular problem of God being all-knowing: would that mean that God always knows what humans will choose to do? If so why does he not prevent it? You need to consider whether either Augustinian or Irenaean theodicies can answer such questions and justify the amount of evil in the world.
• You could assess whether the sheer amount of evil in the world means that human freedom is too high a price to pay. You could discuss the criticisms from The Brothers Karamazov.
• You could also argue that there is so much evil in our world that no benevolent God could possibly exist. Views expressed by thinkers such as Richard Swinburne, J.L. Mackie, John Hick or Richard Dawkins could be used in your argument.
• You would need to evaluate whether any or none of the theodicies provide a satisfactory answer.

Further possible questions

• ‘There is too much evil in the world for there to be a God.’ Discuss.
• Critically assess the theodicy of Augustine.
• ‘There is no justification for evil.’ Discuss.
• ‘Moral evil may be humanity’s fault but natural evil is God’s fault.’ Discuss.