by A. d. Rowe

Excerpt from “The Free Choice of the Will”

The Topic: Whether God is not the cause of evil

Question 1: what is evil?
i. Evil we suffer from = God’s punishment (blame Adam and Eve if you like…because they literally existed…in a garden…with all the furry animals…until it was ok to eat animals and wear their skins to hide our…shame:)
ii. Evil we commit = proceed to question 2

Question 2: what does it mean to choose evil?
i. Blameworthy desire is the cause of evil
*illustration - the desire to live free from fear: “the good man desires it by turning their love from whatever cannot be possessed without fear and loss, while evil men, bent upon enjoying things securely, try to remove whatever hindrances stand in their way.” page 124
ii. The contest between passion and the mind = proceed to question 3

Question 3: does the passion have power over the mind? Ch. 10
i. No. It is only right and just that the mind has power over the passions
• the soul is stronger than the body
• virtue will overcome vice

*I mean, come on! Is there anything more excellent than a mind endowed with reason and wisdom? (page 126) Learning is good because it awakens knowledge; everyone who learns, understands and everyone who understands is doing good. To do evil is to stray from the path of learning. For if he is evil his is not a teacher and if he is a teacher, he (and sometimes she) is awesome. Amen.

ii. So what makes the mind a companion of evil desire? = proceed to question 4

Question 4: Do we have a good will? Ch. 12
i. Ya just gotta will it!
-But what about those people who want to be happy but aren’t?
ii. Uhhh, yeaaahhh. Ok, “not only do good men will their lives to be happy, but they wish to live upright lives which bad men are unwilling to do.” Page 129.
*good will + upright life = good person
iii. why not just make us all live upright lives? = proceed to question 5

Question 5: Why free will? Book II
i. Justice: we need free will in order to be both rewarded and punished. When we use the will for what it was meant to be used, we get a candy. If we don’t, we get smacked upside the head.
ii. One might think, “Hey, maybe God didn’t give free will to us in the correct way?” If you’ve seriously thought this, you’ve probably been struck down by lightening already. Page 133 (if you’re still alive, proceed to question 6.)

Question 6: Does God exist?
i. Yes. Sola Scriptura! (if you want to put it Dutchly)
-that’s not enough of a reason is it?
ii. Fine (exasperated sigh!). Proceed to a long list of questions below

Question 7, 8: Do all good things come from God?
Should free will be numbered among the good?
Let’s be annoying and answer questions with questions
i. Do I exist?
-whom should I say is asking the question?
ii. Right. Then am I living?
unless we’re watching Weekend at Bernies (a classic), you are living.
iii. Do I understand?
-you sure do but your dog sure doesn’t
iv. How do I understand?
-the senses perceive the physical world.
-reason allows you to grasp what is proper and know what is meant by what is perceived by the senses.
-the senses are judged by inner sense
-the senses judge the body
-these things are changeable
-if there is something above reason it must be unchangeable and this must be God
v. Is there a common experience that is unchangeable? Ch 8
-numbers.
What if I don’t like math?
-too bad, numbers can’t be ignored as useless like Barbour’s Process Theology can. Just like the body has many parts yet is one body, so too can we see the Truth in many things yet it is one. (Ch. 12)
-we judge the soul according to the rules of truth and no one judges that this ought to be so, but that it is so. (unless you’re Nietzsche)

*Soooooo, if you want to be happy, find joy in the firm, changeless and most excellent truth since truth is the highest good and the source of happiness, and is therefore, God. Ch 13
*He sets everything so to achieve their perfection. Ch 17
*Free will is good because it is impossible to live rightly without it. If we abuse it and turn away towards things changeable, that’s our fault, not His.

Random Thoughts and Illustrative Examples

i. An apologetic approach to the question of free will and evil:
Ravi Zacharias: 3 tests - Logical consistency, Empirical adequacy, Existential relevance
Statement: “there cannot be a god with the existence of so much evil”
Answer:
Logical consistency: When you say there is such a thing as evil you are assuming there is such a thing as good? Does this then imply a moral law on which to decide the difference between good and evil? Does there then have to be a moral law giver? Logically, the question only intensifies the dilemma.
Empirical adequacy: The best of all possible worlds: 1. Would it not have been better for God to have not created this world? 2. Would it not have been better for God to have created an amoral world? 3. Would it not have been better to create a robotic world where we could not choose evil? Love is recognized as the supreme ethic. The existence of love precludes the existence of “not-love” which could be said to be evil.
Existential relevance: We would agree that it would be wrong for me to take a life since I cannot restore it? The only one who can take life is the one who has the power to restore it and that would be God.

ii. Chapter 17 “…all things are rules by Providence…Through it all changing realities subsist so as to perform their perfection in movements by the numerical principles belonging to their forms. If this form did not exist, these would have no being.”

William Lane Craig
-scientists have discovered over the past few years how complex the universal constants are and how fine tuned the universe is. If there were even the slightest changes to these constants, the universe would not exist. Fred Hoyle, “a common sense approach to this is that some higher power monkeyed with physics.”

iii. Does God exists?
• E. Stanley Jones “People in the West wonder if there is a God, people in the East question which god to believe in.”

• Dallas Willard: Three Stages
1. However concrete reality is sectioned, the result will be a state of affairs will owes its being to something other than itself. Something has to precede
2. An argument to design. Evolution cannot be a theory of ultimate origins. The structure of evolution did not come through evolution.
3. The course of human events: historical, social and individual.

iv. Augustine and Friendship

v. Augustine and Just War

Elshtain - Just War Theory
Chapter 1 - “Just War According to St. Augustine” by Paul Ramsey
Ramsey’s main contention is that Augustine believed that people are primarily bound together more by agreement of will and purpose than by agreement in their general conceptions of justice. He counters Ernest Barkley’s interpretation of Augustine that elevates justice to righteousness and makes the discussion primarily religious in nature. Ramsey argues that Augustine grounds his argument in political theory where he focuses on the loves of mankind that bind them together in a state. If man’s desires do not include a desire for God, then their loves are deprived of morality. However, if the City of God intersects with the community of mankind, a closer notion of the true virtues is reached.

The tradition
-Augustine’s City of God, book XIX is the first place where we get a formulation of the theory of justified war or justum bellum.
-the notion that no war can meet the standards of justum bellum is radically un-Augustinian. (p 8)

The virtues
-the four virtues (prudence, justice, courage and temperance) come from man’s loves. We desire their actualization but they are temporal and therefore corrupted by human pride. They therefore become vices if not directed in the right way, ie towards God.
-Augustine attacks the notion of Roman morality because of this (p 10)
-the heart of the matter is the intention of the heart

Barker’s misinterpretation
-he believes there is a relative distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ righteousness (p 10)
-The City of God has absolute justice; the city of man, relative justice. The absolute goes further but does not impinge the justice of states
*Augustine counters- there can be no justice unless God is given is due (p 10)
-one’s citizenship in the City of God shows the city of man as radically deprived of the ethical substance formerly attributed to it before that which is new had come (p 11)
Barker has confused the essence of righteousness as a religious ideal. There therefore can be no attack upon the will that governs, directs and determines the innermost nature of the systems of justice among nations (p 12)
-righteous removed from the state leaves a band of brigands
-he Christianizes classic politics whereas Augustine robs the Graeco-Roman ethical idealism from them and points to the Christian world.
Augustine
-you cannot remove justice from brigands
-the divine city uses an unjust order as well as an unjust peace in its pilgrimage (p13)
*it seeks ever ‘agreement of human wills in matters pertaining to the moral nature of man.
jus and justice: where there is no true justice, there can be no true right
-he is making a judgment in political analysis itself, a judgment upon such seeming justice (p 14)
-there can therefore be no state without a common sense of justice. Thus, he demoralizes res publica because it is only an assemblage of reasonable beings, bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love; ie. and activity of will

-it is a lively sense of man’s common plight in wrongdoing and of the judgment of God that overarches the justified war…and not a clarity of our ethical standards (p 16)
-both sides do wrongdoing
*page 17: outline of the logic of the Christian endeavor to strengthen the combination of men’s wills to attain things that are helpful in this life

A better peace as a criterion for just war
-could lead to compulsion of others to live under the pax-ordo
-all men’s loves, for any other good than the bonum summum et commune, is of its nature fratricidal.
-two sides of mankind, the fratricidal love and brotherly love, reside. They desire not only come good, or even a good higher than all others, but also the permanent enjoyment of it. (p 19)

Analysis: Ramsey uses Barker’s interpretation of Augustine’s City of God as a counterpoint to what he says Augustine really meant by the terms jus and justicia. Where Barker says Augustine meant to raise justice to a religious level and call it righteousness, Ramsey maintains that Augustine takes issue with the morally deprived politics of the Romans. Essentially what Ramsey says is that Augustine believed societies were held together based on what their collective wills desired and above all, they desired justice. However, the Roman desire was self-serving since it did not “give God His due,” and therefore was not a pure desire for justice. For the Christian, the journey in the earthly city was aided by the City of God and fulfillment of our earthly desires could only be filled in God. As to its relation to just war, if a society is collectively help together by justice, then they will only go to war to restore this justice. The key issue here is that faith in God is of utmost importance when dealing in matters of justice, otherwise, the wills of men will corrupt the divine virtues. Mankind will not be able to discriminate with certainty whether one side is just or unjust based on universal principles. The Christian leader only have enough ethical knowledge to know more clearly the moral limits pertaining to war because they have access to the City of God. By these standards, the Christian should be able to understand the measure of their actions.

Aaron Rowe

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