Objections to Augustine's Solution to the Problem of Evil

There are generally considered to be three main necessary characteristics of God, especially in a traditional Christian conception. The first is omnipotence: the idea that God is all-powerful and can do anything that is logically possible. The second is omniscience: the idea that God is all-knowing and aware of everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. The third is omnibenevolence: the idea that God is all good and possesses a perfectly moral nature. Taken together, these three attributes form the foundation of classical theism. However, the existence of evil in the world poses a significant challenge to the coherence of these three attributes held simultaneously. This challenge is known as the Problem of Evil.

The Problem of Evil can be stated as a logical argument. If God is omnipotent, He has the power to prevent evil. If God is omniscient, He knows about every instance of evil. If God is omnibenevolent, He would want to prevent evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore, it seems that at least one of these three attributes must be false, or God does not exist. The formal premises are as follows:

1. If God exists, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
2. If God is omnipotent, God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is omnibenevolent, God desires to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then there must be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil.
7. Therefore, either there is a morally sufficient reason for evil, or God (as traditionally defined) does not exist.

Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential Christian theologians in history, offered what he considered to be that morally sufficient reason. His solution to the Problem of Evil rests on two key claims. First, Augustine argued that evil is not a substance or a thing in itself but rather a privation or absence of good. Just as darkness is the absence of light and silence is the absence of sound, evil is the absence of the goodness that ought to be present. God, according to Augustine, created everything good, and evil entered the world not as something God made but as a corruption or falling away from the goodness of creation.

Second, and more centrally, Augustine argued that this falling away from goodness is the result of free will. God created human beings (and angels) with the capacity for free choice because genuine love and genuine goodness require the possibility of choosing otherwise. Adam and Eve, in the narrative of the Fall, freely chose to disobey God, and it is through this original act of disobedience that evil and suffering entered the world. For Augustine, evil is therefore not God's fault but humanity's. God permitted the possibility of evil because a world with free creatures capable of genuine love is better than a world of automatons who are forced to obey. The evil we observe is a consequence of the misuse of freedom, not a deficiency in God's nature or power.

While Augustine's solution is elegant and has been enormously influential, it faces several serious objections. The first objection concerns the origin of the desire to sin. If God created Adam and Eve as perfectly good beings, and if their environment in the Garden of Eden was perfectly good, then where did the desire to disobey God come from? A perfectly good being, in a perfectly good environment, with full knowledge of God's goodness, would seem to have no reason and no inclination to choose evil. To say that they simply "chose" to sin does not explain why they would make that choice. If the desire to sin was already present in their nature, then God created beings with a flawed nature, which undermines the claim that God created everything perfectly good. If the desire came from an external source, such as the serpent, then the question merely shifts: where did the serpent's evil come from? Augustine's account seems to require an uncaused cause of evil, which sits uncomfortably alongside the claim that God is the creator of all things.

The second objection concerns the proportionality of suffering. Even if we grant that free will explains the existence of moral evil — that is, the evil that human beings inflict on one another through their choices — it does not adequately explain the existence of natural evil. Earthquakes, tsunamis, childhood cancers, parasitic diseases, and the suffering of animals long before humans existed cannot be attributed to the misuse of human free will. Augustine attempted to account for natural evil by linking it to the Fall as well, arguing that the corruption of nature was a consequence of original sin. However, this explanation is difficult to sustain in light of what we now know about the natural world. Geological and biological evidence makes clear that natural disasters and animal suffering existed for billions of years before any humans were present to sin. The suffering embedded in the natural order appears to be a feature of creation itself, not a consequence of human action.

The third objection concerns the adequacy of free will as a justification. Even if free will is a great good, one can ask whether God, being omnipotent, could have created beings with free will who nonetheless always freely chose the good. This is not a logical contradiction. It is possible to imagine a world in which every free agent happens to make the right choice every time — not because they are forced to, but because their character and circumstances are such that they are inclined to choose well. If God is truly omniscient, He would have known in advance which possible beings would freely choose good and which would freely choose evil. He could have chosen to create only those beings who would use their freedom well. The fact that He did not — that He created beings He knew would choose evil and cause immense suffering — requires an explanation that the free will defense does not fully provide.

The fourth objection challenges Augustine's privation theory directly. While it may be philosophically coherent to describe evil as an absence of good, this characterization seems to minimize the reality of suffering. To tell a parent whose child has died of a painful disease that their child's suffering was merely a "privation of good" is not just cold; it seems to misdescribe the situation. Suffering is experienced as something real and positive in its own right, not merely as the absence of something else. Pain is not simply the lack of pleasure; it is a distinct and overwhelming experience. Augustine's metaphysical framework may account for evil in the abstract, but it struggles to capture the phenomenological reality of suffering as it is actually experienced by those who endure it.

A fifth objection, raised most forcefully by J.L. Mackie, argues that the free will defense fails because an omnipotent God could have created a world in which people possess free will but are simply constituted in such a way that they always choose good. Mackie's point is that free will and the consistent choice of good are not logically incompatible. If they were, then the saints in heaven, who are traditionally said to be free but incapable of sinning, would be a contradiction. The theist cannot have it both ways: either free will is compatible with always choosing good (in which case God could have made such a world from the start), or it is not (in which case the heavenly state is incoherent).

Taken together, these objections suggest that Augustine's solution, while historically important and philosophically sophisticated, does not fully resolve the Problem of Evil. The free will defense accounts for some moral evil but leaves natural evil largely unexplained. The privation theory offers a metaphysical framework but fails to capture the lived reality of suffering. And the logical challenges raised by thinkers like Mackie suggest that a world with both free will and no evil is at least conceivable, which means God's failure to create such a world still requires justification. It is therefore more reasonable to assume that, given what we have observed about the universe, God is either unable to stop evil, oblivious to it, or unwilling to stop it.