Philosophy › Hellenistic, Roman & Han thought › Augustine of Hippo
The problem of evil
AD 388–395 (Augustine); posed earlier· Idea or argument· Reality, mind & God
Mostly agreedGood evidence; some details uncertain.
If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does evil exist? Often called the strongest classic argument against traditional belief in God.
See it on the Philosophy map →The idea
Idea: an all-good God would want to stop evil and an all-powerful one could, yet evil exists. The dilemma is credited, doubtfully, to Epicurus. Augustine's answer (On Free Choice of the Will, 388–395): evil is not a thing but a lack of good, and it comes from creatures misusing free will, which is itself good to have. Later answers stress soul-making or a 'best possible world' (Leibniz). Main objection: earthquakes and childhood diseases are nobody's choice.
Why it matters
It is the most discussed argument against God's existence and drives every theodicy, a defense of God's justice, from the Book of Job to modern philosophy of religion.
Where it comes from
Lactantius (c. 313) attributes the four-part dilemma to Epicurus; the Book of Job and Augustine's surviving writings are the classic early sources.
Still debated
Whether free will can explain natural evil, and whether Plantinga's free-will defense (1974) settled the strict logical version, remain live questions.
Connections (3)
▸Epicurus and Epicureanism is credited with posing The problem of evilDebated
The connection
The classic dilemma is credited to Epicurus: either God wants to stop evil but cannot, or can but will not, so God is weak or not good. Epicureans used reasoning like this to show the gods do not run the world, not that gods do not exist.
When and how
Reported by the Christian writer Lactantius in On the Anger of God, c. AD 313, some 600 years after Epicurus.
How sure are we?
Only Lactantius attributes it to Epicurus; no surviving Epicurean text states it, though Sextus Empiricus gives a similar Skeptic version.
Debates and open questions
Many scholars think the attribution is loose or wrong, and that the argument came from Skeptic or Academic critics instead.
▸Augustine of Hippo answered The problem of evilWell documented
The connection
Augustine gave the answer that dominated Christian thought: evil is not a created thing but a privation, a lack of good, as blindness is a lack of sight. Moral evil comes from the free choices of angels and humans, and God permits it because a world with free will is better.
When and how
Rome and Hippo, 388–395, in On Free Choice of the Will; developed later in the Confessions and The City of God.
How we know
The answer is set out explicitly in his surviving works, which later theologians, including Aquinas, quote at length.
Debates and open questions
Critics ask whether calling evil a privation does justice to real suffering, and whether his free-will defense fits his later belief in predestination.
▸Hannah Arendt added "the banality of evil" to The problem of evilWell documented
The connection
Covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief organizer of Holocaust deportations, Arendt saw not a monster but a careerist who had stopped thinking. Her phrase 'the banality of evil' shifted attention from why God permits evil to how ordinary people come to commit it.
When and how
Jerusalem, 1961 trial; Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in The New Yorker and as a book in 1963.
How we know
The book and her later lectures (The Life of the Mind) set out the idea; it provoked a fierce public controversy.
Debates and open questions
Historians using documents unavailable to her argue Eichmann was a committed antisemite, not merely thoughtless, so her portrait is disputed.