Augustinian Strengths and Weaknesses

Augustine
|Strengths |Weaknesses |
|Brian Davies supports the claim that evil is a deprivation and not a substance. If it is not a substance|It is logically incorrect to claim that a perfect world could ever go wrong according to Schleiermacher. |
|then God could not have created it and cannot be held responsible for it. |Even is evil is a deprivation it is a very real feature of the world and cannot have created itself from |
|Evil as the result of free-will and not divine will can be supported. Freedom necessarily entails the |nothing. Either the world was not a perfect creation or God enabled it to go wrong. |
|potential for evil. We have to have a real choice. |Augustine claims that we have free-will, but in a world without knowledge of good or evil it is not |
|Plantinga argues that humans who had been designed to always choose good would not have been free. |possible to have free-will (note that Adam and Eve freely chose to eat of the tree of knowledge of good |
|Augustine accounts for both types of evil. We also need natural evil for genuine freedom. |and evil). |
|Evil is justified by free-will – that is to say that it is worth it. |If we chose to disobey God we must have had knowledge of evil which can only have come from God. |
|Augustine’s theory complies with scripture. |Augustine’s seminally present argument is scientifically inaccurate. |
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