christianity

‘Critically discuss the theodicy presented by John Hick” [40]

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John Hick presented his “Theodicy for Today” through “Evil and the God of Love” (1966).  Here, Hick explored the history of the so-called Irenaean Theodicy in the work of Origen and Schleiermacher as well as Irenaeus, then crafting a new version of this theodicy which he felt more suited as a response to the logical problem of evil and suffering than the traditional Augustinian Theodicy given the atrocities of the mid 20th Century.  While Hick’s theodicy is persuasive, it does not provide a complete defence of God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence. 

Firstly, Hick adapted Origen’s idea that human beings were created in God’s image but with the potential to grow into His likeness through a life that is a “schoolroom for the soul”.  While he rejected the “exegetically dubious” distinction between image and likeness in the Hebrew – as this is more probably designed for emphasis in the original poetry than intended to make two separate points – he argued that there is truth in the claim that human beings exist on two levels, as BIOS – sophisticated animals – and as ZOE – morally and spiritually unique beings.  Hick took Keats’ phrase to argue that our lives are a “vale of soul-making”, through suffering we grow and develop from BIOS towards ZOE, meaning that suffering (and Hick includes others’ suffering as well as our own) has a purpose and is spiritually good for us, so plausibly part of the Best Possible World that an Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God would have created.  Later, Richard Swinburne agreed with Hick, presenting his own Irenaean Theodicy which also contended that we learn from suffering, becoming better people and more able to use the freedom that God has given us.  Swinburne likened God to a parent, allowing his children to suffer in order that they might learn to make decisions independently.  This aspect of Hick’s Irenaean Theodicy seems persuasive, because there is no doubt that people do become stronger and more spiritual as a result of the suffering which is an inescapable part of life, however Hick fails to account for the extent of suffering, which most people would agree is gratuitous.  For example, William Rowe identified suffering which could and should have been eliminated by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, suggesting that innocent child suffering (such as in Rowe’s example of Sue) disproves the existence of such a God.  Ivan Karamazov would surely have agreed that the degree to which young children suffer is far beyond anything that could be proportionate to the ends of helping us develop spiritually.  While Hick appealed to the “epistemic distance” between God and human beings and while Swinburne agreed that we are in no position to know that God could have prevented such suffering without causing or permitting something worse, retreating into mystery at the first sign of difficulty is not an adequate philosophical response.  Because of this, Hick’s theodicy fails to defend God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence in the light of his allowing gratuitous, innocent, child suffering.

Secondly, Hick reasoned that God might be justified in allowing some people to suffer more than others – even if some people were broken and afflicted and so unable to develop spiritually as a result – if he provided eternal recompense for unjust suffering after death.  For example, God could be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, even if some children die embittered and afflicted after suffering years of bone cancer if God made up for it in heaven.  Nevertheless, this is unconvincing because there is no adequate theory of what heaven could be like in order to justify God in this way.  In “Death and the Afterlife” 1978 Hick recognised the problems with standard Christian doctrine in that it relies on future physical resurrection, which is neither scientifically plausible nor fair to those whose bodies are either extremely young, extremely old or dispersed/destroyed.  Instead, Hick chose to focus on St Paul’s teaching, which suggests that resurrection is spiritual before the soul is re-clothed in a spiritual body, which is then rewarded or punished appropriately.  St Paul wrote that “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable… it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” 1 Corinthians 15:42, 44 Nevertheless, as Hick later realised, this account of life after death is problematic because it relies on the soul being separable from the body, albeit temporarily, when there is almost no evidence supporting substance dualism.  It also relies on all our human identity residing in an immaterial “soul”, so that “I” could be re-created into a new body and what happened to that body would still serve as just reward and punishment, incentive and disincentive.  Hick developed his famous Replica Theory to defend the possibility that a person could still be a person despite a break in the spatio-temporal-continuity that philosophers like Derek Parfit rely on to determine identity. Yet so much of human identity relates to our body that even if we accept that a replica could still be me (and ignore the possibilities of multiple replicas etc) this is difficult to accept.  Would our spiritual body be male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, old or young, Black or Asian?  If no, then how can a reward applied to some idealised and unrecognisable form really recompense for my unjust suffering… but if yes, then the spiritual body theory has few advantages over physical resurrection theory because inequalities and injustices would persist after death and heaven would not be an eternal or perfect reward but rather an endurance test which would do little but prolong the memories of suffering in this life in another location.  In the end, Hick abandoned replica theory and belief in spiritual bodies and came to believe in a form of reincarnation, showing that he didn’t believe that this aspect of his own theodicy was convincing.  It follows that because Hick’s theodicy fails to explain how an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God could make up for unjust suffering after death, it fails to provide a complete defence against the logical problem of evil.

On the other hand, Hick’s theodicy is more persuasive than the classical Augustinian Theodicy.  It does not rely on a literal interpretation of Genesis 2-3, avoids focusing on Original Sin and allows for evil to be real and not only “privation boni”, all of which make Hick’s approach more palatable in the 20th Century.  Further, Hick draws on modern science in his account of how we develop from BIOS into ZOE and in his beliefs about life after death and the impossibility of standard physical resurrection, which makes his theodicy more acceptable to a broader audience than standard Christian doctrine.  Nevertheless, a big weakness of Hick’s approach is that it fails to account for the suffering of animals.  As Rowe pointed out, the suffering of animals like the fawn he used in his example is endemic in nature.  The whole evolutionary process, which Hick accepts as characterising creation, depends upon the intense and gratuitous suffering of life-forms who have no possibility of growing or developing spiritually as a result, or of experiencing a heavenly recompense.  Hick seems to ignore and then sidestepped this question completely.  While Swinburne confronted the issue of animal suffering and included it in his version of the Irenaean Theodicy, he did no more than to speculate that animals might suffer less intensely and/or learn something from suffering, showing the inadequacy of this type of theodicy with respect to animal suffering.  Another weakness of Hick’s approach is that it defends a very limited version of omnipotence in God if he had to use suffering – and such intense suffering – as the means for human beings to grow from BIOS into ZOE.  As JL Mackie had already pointed out in “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) theodicies which suggest that we learn from suffering assume that God could not have designed a better and more efficient way for humans to learn or created human beings with no need to learn in the first place. A God with such limitations would not reasonably be described as omnipotent.  While Hick is far from being alone in limiting God’s omnipotence to being able to do what is logically possible, Mackie’s objection to his theodicy is reasonable. 

In conclusion, Hick’s theodicy is more persuasive than many older theodicies, but does not provide such a complete defence of God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence as even St Augustine did.  Hick’s God may be benevolent, but He is extremely limited in power.  Further, while Hick’s theodicy gains strength from avoiding Biblical literalism, in moving away from the Bible and Christian doctrine in some respects, it is also weakened by not being acceptable to the mainstream Church.  Also, Hick fails to explain the extent and unfair distribution of suffering or provide an account of the afterlife that would serve as “eschatological justification”, making up for unfairness in this life, both of which leave this theodicy open to criticism. 

Gaunilo successfully defeats Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Discuss. [40]

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St Anselm presented his ontological argument in Proslogion books 2 and 3.  He began with a quotation from Psalm 14:1 “the fool says in his heart there is no God”, reasoning that existence is part of the definition of God, so that anybody who denies God’s existence is asserting a contradiction and so a fool.  Gaunilo, a contemporary of St Anselm, responded in his wittily titled “on behalf of the fool”, rejecting Anselm’s reasoning systematically and concluding that atheists are not necessarily fools.  Although St Anselm and Gaunilo were operating within different worldviews and with difference concepts of what existence entails, on balance and because Gaunilo’s more modern worldview dominates today, Gaunilo successfully defeats St Anselm’s ontological argument. 

Firstly, Gaunilo is successful in pointing out that the atheist can recognise the word “God” without necessarily holding the entire concept of God in intellectu. He wrote “this being is said to be in my understanding already, only because I understand what is said.”  Whereas St Anselm asserts that the atheist, in recognising the word God understands that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” and – because existence is a perfection – necessarily exists in re while simultaneously denying God’s existence, Gaunilo suggests that people often recognise a word without fully understanding what it refers to, as may be the case with God. Gaunilo later elaborates, explaining that as Anselm admits that God is unlike any other thing, it must be impossible for any person to understand what “God” is, because our understanding of new objects is usually built out of like objects. This is persuasive, as Aquinas would later agree [Summa Theologica 1,2,1] because God’s nature is to be mysterious and ineffable, so resisting all attempts to define him, let alone analyse that definition to determine whether necessary existence is part of it. Gaunilo continues by writing “I have in my understanding all manner of unreal objects, having absolutely no existence in themselves” – examples of such could be Gruffalos or unicorns – and he suggests that it would be possible to hold an idea of God who doesn’t exist in intellectu.  This also is persuasive because, as Kant later wrote, “Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside it, in order to attribute to it existence…”  Existential statements must be synthetic and capable of verification through the senses; it is not possible to analyse something, even God, into existence.  While it is clear that Gaunilo (and later Kant) assume existence to refer to existence in the phenomenal world of time and space rather than to a non-contradictory concept or “clear and distinct idea” as Anselm (and later Descartes) did, it is Gaunilo’s worldview which dominates today and this supports the success of Gaunilo’s argument in defeating Anselm’s ontological argument.

Secondly, Gaunilo is successful in pointing out that the idea of God in intellectu exists prior to the existence of God in re being realised.  He used St Anselm’s (and St Augustine’s) example of a painter and painting to make this point, reasoning that the idea of the painting exists in the mind of the painter before paint is applied to canvas. He wrote “The picture, before it is made, is contained in the artificer’s art itself; and any such thing, existing in the art of an artificer, is nothing but a part of his understanding itself.”  In the same way, for Gaunilo the idea of God exists in the mind primarily and before the reality of God is admitted.  This suggests that the atheist could have the idea of God in their mind separately from the necessary reality of God, leaving the possibility that God could only be the idea of a necessarily existing being and not a necessarily existing being.  This links to Aristotle’s concept of the formal cause; the sculptor may have the form of the sculpture in his mind, but until he acts as an efficient cause on the material cause of the stone, the sculpture can’t be said to be real.  Similarly, the soul as the formal cause of the body can’t be understood to exist independently of a body, in the way that a wax seal can’t exist without wax.  Of course, Plato would disagree, arguing that forms are more real than material objects which reflect them, because they are complete and unchanging. However, Anselm’s platonic worldview has been replaced by the more Aristotelian worldview of Gaunilo today.  Few would accept that ideas are more real than material objects, so that most would agree with Kant when he wrote “If then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…” The painting is only an idea until paint meets canvas in the real world… and however perfect it may be in concept won’t change that fact. Therefore, Gaunilo is successful in defeating Anselm’s ontological argument, because he identifies Anselm’s failure to establish God’s existence a posteriori as well as a priori. 

Of course, Anselm rejected Gaunilo’s criticisms one by one in his “Responsio” reasoning that Gaunilo must be a fool if he believed that somebody could recognise the word God without appreciating that it refers to a supremely perfect being which – logically – must have the property of necessary existence.  A person saying that a triangle has four sides could only be an idiot; Anselm cannot accept that an atheist is anything other than a fool.  Further, Anselm rejected Gaunilo’s (mis)use of his analogy of the painter and painting, pointing out that while the idea of any normal object may well exist separately from and prior to its reality, this cannot apply to God who exists necessarily.  In God’s case and God’s case only, the idea and the reality must be simultaneous and identical.  However, Gaunilo’s reduction of St Anselm’s ontological argument to absurdity through the perfect island remains more persuasive than St Anselm’s indignant ripostes in the Responsio.  This is because Gaunilo appeals to common sense when he wrote that “If a man should try to prove to me by such reasoning that this island truly exists, and that its existence should no longer be doubted, either I should believe that he was jesting, or I know not which I ought to regard as the greater fool: myself, supposing that I should allow this proof; or him, if he should suppose that he had established with any certainty the existence of this island.”  In the same way Kant is persuasive when he appeals to common sense, writing “a man might as well imagine that he could become richer in knowledge by mere ideas, as a merchant in capital, if, in order to improve his position, he were to add a few noughts to his cash account.”  We all know that we can’t analyse or think anything into existence, whether holiday islands or money! 

In conclusion, Gaunilo’s criticisms of St Anselm’s ontological argument successfully defeat this attempt to prove God’s existence from reason alone… that is, for those who share Gaunilo’s modern worldview.  Of course, those with a Platonist worldview – like Anselm himself and Rene Descartes – would disagree.  As Norman Malcolm wrote “in those complex systems of thought, those ‘language games’, God has the status of a necessary being. Who can doubt that?” and yet claiming that God exist surely refers to more than a rule of one language-game?  As Gaunilo rightly pointed out, rooting our concept of what exists in mere ideas is more likely to be foolish than rooting existence in shared experience. 

Assess Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit free will. [40 marks]

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Boethius discusses the relationship between God’s eternity and human free will in his “consolations of philosophy” Book V.  Here, in dialogue with “Lady Philosophy” Boethius confronts the apparent problem caused by God’s omniscience, namely that it limits human free will.  He wrote: “if God foresees everything, and can in no wise be deceived, that which providence foresees to be about to happen must necessarily come to pass.”  It seems that if God knows what I will do and there are no alternate possibilities, then I am determined by God’s knowledge and cannot justly be held responsible for my actions.  This undermines God’s goodness, as Christians believe that human beings will be judged and rewarded or punished by God based on their free choices.  Boethius wrote, if God knows what we will do before we do it then “Vainly are rewards and punishments proposed for the good and bad, since no free and voluntary motion of the will has deserved either one or the other; nay, the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous, which is now esteemed the perfection of justice, will seem the most flagrant injustice…” Nevertheless, Boethius argues – through Lady Philosophy’s responses – that God’s eternal omniscience is compatible with human free will, meaning that God’s omniscience does not undermine God’s omnibenevolence and justice.  Unfortunately, Boethius’ argument is unsuccessful in this respect.

Firstly, Boethius argues that because God is outside time and space, his knowledge of our choices is contingent and does not make what we choose necessary.  Boethius uses the analogy of a chariot; my knowledge that it passed me at a particular time does not make it travel faster or slower or take that route… my knowledge of its motion is contingent on its motion and does not make its motion logically or naturally necessary.  Similarly, God’s knowledge of my choices is contingent and does not determine what I choose.  St Anselm later developed Boethius’ argument, again emphasising that God’s knowledge of what I do does not make me do what I do.  However, despite Boethius’ attempt to “play the mystery card” and muddle the issue, writing “the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of the Divine foreknowledge”, his argument is unconvincing because if God is outside space and time then He must be wholly simple and His knowledge of creation cannot be separate from his single act of creation.  The things that God knows contingently, can’t be contingent on human choices or events in time – Boethius acknowledges that  “it is preposterous to speak of the occurrence of events in time as the cause of eternal foreknowledge” – so God knows what he knows about human choices contingently because he created us to act this way and because our choices are contingent on Him.  As St Thomas Aquinas reasoned, and more recently Gerry Hughes sj. explained, God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge… If God is wholly simple, as a timeless-eternal God must be, then God’s knowledge can only be causative and not reflective.  Boethius emphasises the difference between God’s knowledge, which comes from pure rational intuition and not from limited observation, but seemingly fails to appreciate that there can be no separation in God’s timelessly simple nature between God’s knowledge of what he creates and his action in creating it. If God’s knowledge of what we do depends on how He created us to act, then clearly Boethius view that divine eternity does not limit free will must be mistaken.

Secondly, Boethius argues that because God is outside time and space, his knowledge of events in no way precedes those events, so the use of the word “foreknowledge” to describe God’s knowledge of what is future to us is a misleading analogy.  If God’s knowledge is not really foreknowledge, but knowledge of what happens in an eternal present, then there is less sense that God’s knowledge determines choices and events.  Boethius was what Brian Leftow calls a Universal Presentist, seeing that past and future exist because they are eternally present to God.  St Anselm later developed Boethius’ argument, suggesting a four-dimensional view of time, whereby God’s knowledge of the time in which each event occurs is theoretical and part of the eternal present through which God sees creation.  Nevertheless, neither Boethius’ nor Anselm’s view of God’s eternity is compatible with human free will.  Just because every event is simultaneously present to God, there are no alternate possibilities, which is the very definition of determinism.  Further, Boethius’ view of God relating to creation in an “eternal present” only emphasises how Boethius’ Classical Theist God is incompatible with the Bible and thus Christian Theology and faith.  If God’s creation of the world, the fall, the incarnation and atonement, as well as the eschaton and final judgement occur concurrently to God then there can have been no other option for humanity but to have sinned and been saved… their choices were immaterial, and what God punished them for and then saved them from through Grace was always part of God’s design.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”, suggesting that Boethius’ view of divine eternity must be mistaken.  Further, as Anthony Kenny pointed out, the timeless-eternal view of God is “radically incoherent” and leads the divine attributes to be empty… a timeless-eternal God is incapable of acting in time, being morally good or responding to prayer or events.  What, then does it mean to call this being God, who is apparently impotent, amoral and unresponsive?  William Lane Craig likens the timeless eternal God to a granite block and rightly asks what the point of worshipping that would be!  Again, Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit human free will is mistaken because it contradicts its own claim that God’s knowledge must be the same as God’s creative action within God’s wholly simple nature, and because this whole concept of God is not compatible with Christian theology or faith. 

Of course, Boethius’ view has its defenders.  EL Mascall used string theory to suggest that God’s knowledge might have a temporal pole and an atemporal pole, yet while this is a helpful analogy in terms of understanding how God’s eternity might coexist with time and space, it does little to explain how God’s knowledge does not determine our actions.  On the contrary, if God’s knowledge of what I will do at any point in time depends on knowledge that is fixed at its other eternal pole there seems if anything less opportunity for me to act spontaneously.  Further, as already explained, St Anselm saw in Boethius’ view a way to reconcile God’s eternal omniscience with free will, and – according to Katherin A. Rogers in “Anselm and Freedom” (2009) his development of Boethius’ argument “offers a definition of freewill which involves a hierarchy of choice, prefiguring that recently proposed by Harry Frankfurt” p. 60  Like St Augustine, Frankfurt defines freedom as the ability to do what one wants to do.  Remember, St Augustine defines God’s omnipotence as His being able to do whatever He wants to do.  Similarly, for Frankfurt and – if Rogers is correct in her analysis – for Anselm, and perhaps for Boethius also, a person is free if they can do what they want to do. As Rogers reads him, Anselm argues that the human will is created by God with the twin desires for benefit and for justice… the will is created to want both, but able to decide which to pursue and how.  The will, created in the image of God, has aseity and decides freely and not because of preceding natural causes.  Here, Anselm was perhaps anticipated by Boethius, who wrote “that which hath the natural use of reason has the faculty of discriminative judgment, and of itself distinguishes what is to be shunned or desired…” [Consolation Book V.I] Which suggests that human freedom resides in the ability of the will to decide which desire to pursue.  This analysis suggests that Boethius and Anselm were at the least compatibilists on the issue of free will, and that their reasoning may have allowed for a greater measure of freedom. Nevertheless, Rogers’ analysis focuses on the work of St Anselm, which goes well beyond Boethius’ argument, so just because St Anselm’s view of divine eternity might be compatible with some very limited free will does not mean that Boethius view alone can do this.

In conclusion, Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit human free will is mistaken.  Boethius’ view of divine eternity is self-contradictory – reasoning that God’s knowledge can’t be prior knowledge because of God’s eternity, but then relying on God’s knowledge being separate from God’s action in creating what he knows.  Further, Boethius’ view of divine eternity only emphasizes the lack of any alternate possibilities, which shows that his view is inconsistent with Christian theology and faith.  While Boethius’ failure to reconcile divine eternity and human free will does not mean that Classical Theism will always lead to hard determinism, as Rogers’ argument regarding St Anselm’s development of Boethius’ position has shown, the possible success of later developments of his argument does not mean that Boethius’ own view was persuasive. 

‘Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach successfully explains God’s action in time.’ Discuss. [40]

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St Anselm developed his understanding of how God relates to and acts in time on the basis of work already done by Boethius and before that by St Augustine. All these Classical Theists understood that God exists eternally, outside time and space. This means that Aristotle’s arguments for a Prime Mover, as well as Plato’s arguments for a Form of the Good, lend rational support for faith in God. Nevertheless, placing God outside time and space raises significant questions concerning if and how God can act within time, as well as what God’s knowledge of events within time is like and what God’s goodness can entail. If God is outside time and space then all of God’s actions – including every word that God says – must be concurrent within one simple, single act of creation. St Augustine, Boethius and St Anselm all attempted to resolve the particular problem of how God’s eternal foreknowledge seems to nullify human free will, and yet even St Anselm’s sophisticated understanding fails to explain for this, let alone how God could act in time, successfully.

Firstly, what Katherin A. Rogers claims to be St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism represents no real improvement over Boethius’ Universal Presentism in resolving the question of God’s relationship with time, whether regarding God’s knowledge or God’s actions. Whereas Presentism usually entails the belief that only the present moment really exists, the past and the future being illusory, in Boethius’ understanding because every moment is present to God, the future and past are as real as what we perceive to be the present. As Brian Leftow (in PRESENTISM, ATEMPORALITY, AND TIME’S WAY) explains, “Boethius is a temporal presentist… consider his classic simile: an atemporal God is as if on a mountain top, looking out on an entire future those lower down cannot see. It is part of the image that all the future is really there at once to be seen.” (p176) Yet this causes a problem for Boethius when it comes to God’s foreknowledge. If God sees the “future” in the same eternal moment as the “present”, how can any being be free? Because God knows what every being will do there are no alternate possibilities. Boethius argues that this problem results from out imperfect understanding of God’s eternal nature… “the reason of this obscurity is that the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of the Divine foreknowledge” Book V. Further, Boethius suggests that God’s knowledge does not make the outcomes of free actions logically necessary because God’s knowledge of them is contingent and dependent on those choices and outcomes occurring. “Boethius’s solution to the freedom-foreknowledge problem hinges on the claim that God’s knowledge is of all time at once and observational...” (Leftow, p176) Yet how can God’s knowledge of an event truly be conditional on that event taking place, such as to avoid making that event necessary, when God’s knowledge is eternal and identical with God’s power and goodness in God’s simple, single act of creation? Boethius’ analogy of the Chariot does nothing to help, because by his own admission, God’s knowledge is completely different to any knowledge we could have and because, as Boethius himself reminds us, there is no way that God could learn from us… as it seems He would have to if his knowledge of what we do depends on us. Further, St Anselm’s more developed position does little to resolve the problem. Like Boethius he contends that God’s knowledge, being of an eternal present, is not prior to events and so does not necessitate them. Whereas Boethius is what Leftow calls a “Universal Presentist”, St Anselm contends “but simply, you are, outside all time. For yesterday and to-day and to-morrow have no existence, except in time; but you, although nothing exists without you, nevertheless do not exist in space or time, but all things exist in you. For nothing contains you, but you contain all.” Proslogium XIX This suggests that every moment, whether we perceive it to be past, present or future, exist not only in God’s sight, but within God’s eternal being. Reflecting on what this might mean, St Anselm wrote in De Concordia 1.5 “although within eternity there is only a present, nonetheless it is not the temporal present, as is ours, but is an eternal present in which the whole of time is contained.” explaining that… “Eternity has its own simultaneity, in which exist all things that occur at the same time . . . and . . . at different times.” While Boethius position is so similar as to be identical in places, Katherin A. Rogers argues that this makes St Anselm the first true Four-Dimensionalist. She writes “Anselm, in a very clear and conscious way, adopts what I will call the “four-dimensionalist” theory of time, sometimes also called the “tenseless” theory. He is, to my knowledge, the first philosopher in history to do so.” She claims that St Anselm’s understanding of God’s relationship with time “does succeed in solving the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge,” which might imply that it would also resolve the question of God’s eternal action. Nevertheless, Rogers’ detailed argument concerning the differences between St Anselm, Boethius and St Augustine does little to advance St Anselm’s position. While it is true that when it comes to St Augustine and Boethius, “neither elaborates his views clearly enough to rule out other interpretations” (than four dimensionalism) it is fair to say that both philosophers positions suggest that every moment is present to God, and that God’s knowledge of events is not prior to those events occurring so can’t be understood to cause those events. Given this specific overlap between Boethius and Anselm, the technicalities of their positions as regards God and time seem largely irrelevant. Rogers ends by simply restating Anselm’s argument, that God’s knowledge of the outcomes of “free” actions does not make them happen, because although God’s knowledge of those outcomes removes any alternate possibilities God’s knowledge of what we perceive to be future events is knowledge of eternally present events to God. Yet, in all practically, this is the point already made by Boethius, that God’s knowledge of “future” events is conditional like our knowledge of a chariot passing, so not such as would influence or determine such events. Whether made by Anselm or Boethius, this argument is unsuccessful in resolving the problem of freedom and foreknowledge because by these Classical Theists’ own arguments, God’s knowledge is not like ours, being simple and identical with God’s power and being. My knowing that a chariot passes by does not make the chariot speed up or slow down, but God’s knowing is the same as his doing and his being… and his knowing, doing and being in what seems to be this moment to us is concurrent with his total knowledge, action and being because His nature is to be eternal and so wholly simple. It is difficult to accept that actions can be anything other than determined when they are part of God’s eternal necessity in this way. This shows that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Secondly, St Anselm’s so-called Four Dimensionalism is just as inadequate as Boethius’ or Augustine’s Universal Presentism in accounting for God’s actions in time. For example, the Bible’s Salvation Narrative is, as Nelson Pike once observed, “unavoidably tensed”. St Anselm’s four dimensionalist account of God’s relationship with time suggests that every moment is present in God, suggesting that the creation is a simple, single act. However, if the creation happened at the same moment as the Fall, if Moses received the Law from God at the same moment as the same Law was fulfilled in Jesus, if the incarnation, the resurrection and the second coming all really happened at once, then there seems precious little point in Christianity. Human free will and moral responsibility are null and God’s justice a joke. As St Augustine recognized in Book XII of his Confessions, if God is timeless-eternal and wholly simple, as rationally it seems that He must be, “what was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing concluded that the next might be spoken, but all things together and eternally. Else have we time and change; and not a true eternity nor true immortality…” When God said “let there be light” – as if in the same breath he said “I am what I am” and “this is my Son; listen to Him”… meaning either that all apparent “revelations” of God’s words which imply time and a sequence of events are effective fakes… or that God intended to deceive us into thinking his words and actions responded to events and individuals. Either interpretation is gravely problematic for Christians. So much of the Bible depends on God’s actions and words being sequential that accepting a timeless-eternal view of God could only result in abandoning the Bible as a meaningful source of authority. Further, suggesting that God intended to deceive us when he seemed to speak with and respond to the Prophets, or when he seems to respond to our prayers, is both incompatible with St Anselm’s own account of God’s omnipotence – which expressly excludes God’s ability to act from impotence, such as by lying or deceiving people (“Therefore, O Lord, our God, the more truly are you omnipotent, since you are capable of nothing through impotence” Proslogion Book VII) – and a fundamental assault on the Christian faith. What would Christianity be if God’s personal response to prayer and events can only be understood as the equivalent of an AI chatbot response, pre-programmed to give the appearance of personal service by some cynical cost-saving consultant! Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Of course, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism would be defended by Katherin A. Rogers, who would suggest that it is successful in explaining how God can know all events without removing the possibility of free actions or the justice of holding free agents responsible for what they choose to do. She points out how St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is an improvement over the work of other classical theists who suggest that God’s eternal knowledge is so different and abstract that God’s omniscience might entail him not knowing what day it is! Nevertheless, in making God’s knowledge of ever present knowledge a function of God’s perfect self-knowledge, St Anselm comes very close to suggesting that all of creation exists within God. This striking view implies that God’s knowledge is contingent and depends on events, rather than causing them. While this is useful in facilitating free will, because being eternal God’s knowledge is identical with God’s action and God’s being, it also implies that God’s being contains time and space, whose nature is dynamic and the precise opposite to how God’s necessary being is usually understood. How can God be immutable if God’s knowledge depends on contingent events and God’s being contains all contingencies? St Anselm can’t pick and choose, maintaining that God’s knowledge is of contingencies but God’s being is necessary and immutable… if God is eternal, He is wholly simple and, as St Anselm himself explains in Proslogium XVIII all His attributes are really one attribute. Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Further, the alternative explanations of the relationship between God’s eternity and his action offered by Richard Swinburne is scarcely more successful than that offered by St Anselm. Swinburne suggests that an everlasting-in-time God could do anything which is compatible with His own previous actions and his attributes of omnibenevolence and omniscience. As in, God’s omnipotence consists in His being able to do anything that He wills (as St Augustine originally contended), bearing in mind that an omniscient being would not will anything contrary to what He has previously willed or which does not bring about the best possible world. This is a coherent explanation of God’s omnipotence which is better than St Anselm’s explanation in making sense of the Bible, and in making sense of God’s tendency to act in some situations and not in others. If God, from his omniscient (although temporal) perspective, could see that X action would bring about a worse outcome than doing nothing, then He would do nothing. Nevertheless, God’s omniscience could not entail His ability to know the outcomes of free actions, because He in His omnipotence made them free, so God’s assessment of the situation must needs be dynamic and ever-changing. Despite this, Swinburne’s account of God’s relationship with time is unsuccessful in explaining how God’s actions could be omnipotent in an absolute sense… God cannot break the laws of logic (as JL Mackie demanded that an omnipotent being should be able to do) because those same laws depend on God’s previous actions in creating said laws. In this regard, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is more persuasive than Swinburne’s understanding, because being in-time Swinburne’s God is constrained in the present moment by His own past actions, which seems more of a constraint than actions which appear to be at different times to us having to be consistent with each other within God’s single, timeless creative act. Further, while Swinburne’s God can’t know the outcomes of free actions, and while this facilitates libertarian free will and genuine moral responsibility, this also radically limits God’s knowledge of the future, as human actions affect so much, given climate-change even the existence of the Earth. In supporting God’s knowledge of how events would seem to us from any given point in time as well as maintaining God’s knowledge of every moment as present, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism makes more sense of God’s knowledge than traditional Presentism, which holds that God knows every moment as present, but not which moment is present to us. It also makes more sense than Swinburne’s account of God’s knowledge, whereby God’s knowledge is radically limited by His decision to self-limit when it comes to the outcomes of free actions. Overall, while Swinburne’s account of God’s eternity is much more useful for Christianity than St Anselm’s, it offers interpretations of God’s attributes which turn out to be almost as empty as those of the Classical Theists. It seems that while St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully, so also other thinkers fail to resolve this problem.

In conclusion, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully. Yet, this problem remains without a resolution. Classical theism renders God’s attributes empty words and faith in His existence pointless and yet Theistic Personalism, such as presented by Richard Swinburne, renders God’s attributes almost equally empty and surrenders the classical arguments as direct support for their God’s existence along the way. Much as Theistic Personalists like to co-opt the classical arguments for God’s existence to serve in cumulative arguments for God’s existence, or to defend the “reasonableness” of faith… they ignore or evade the fact that these same arguments support a God who is timeless-eternal and not a God who is everlasting-in-time. In the end, they like St Anselm must make a choice… either accept all of the implications of a rationally defensible faith-position and abandon Christianity, or stop appealing to reason at all and accept that faith in an everlasting God with meaningful attributes can only be based on experience.

Critically assess the view that in Christian teaching, all people will be saved. [40]

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Mainstream Christian teaching explains that not everybody will be saved.  The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church confirms, “The Last Judgment will reveal even to its furthest consequences the good each person has done or failed to do during his earthly life”.  It quotes the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats from Matthew Chapter 25, confirming that only the good will be saved and rewarded in heaven while the wicked will be sent to eternal punishment in hell.  Further, the Westminster Confession, accepted by most Protestant Christians, also confirms that “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death” showing that it is not true that “in Christian teaching, all people will be saved.” While a few universalists and inclusivists might argue that in Christian teaching, all people will be saved, perhaps selectively quoting certain Bible passages – such as 1 John 2:2 which suggests that Jesus “is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world…” – in practice this is a distortion of Christian teaching.

Firstly, mainstream Christian teaching is that only baptised Christians will be saved.  John 14:6 famously states “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me!” which strongly suggests that only Christians can be saved and go to heaven.  While Karl Rahner and John Hick might suggest that for all we know, God being omnipotent and omnibenevolent, might give what Rahner called “anonymous Christians” a second chance to accept Jesus and thus be saved through him after death, this is not a mainstream teaching.  In John 3:5 Jesus said “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God…” which most Christians interpret to mean that Baptism is necessary for salvation.  Indeed, the Roman Catholic Catechism 1257 teaches that “the Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation…” and the Orthodox Churches teach that baptism is the means by which Christians receive the Holy Spirit, which is necessary for Salvation.  While Quakers, including John Hick later in his life, might argue that sacraments are unnecessary, because the outward signs of grace have no power in themselves and may serve to distract from the spiritual signs of salvation within, this is a minority view.  Most Protestants also teach that Baptism is necessary for salvation, being a sign of election.  The Westminster Confession confirms that “much less can men, not professing the Christian religion, be saved in any other way whatsoever…”  Further, some Christians might argue that unbaptised infants might be saved by the grace of God, so why not good people of other faiths.  Even the Roman Catholic Church, which had taught that unbaptised infants go to limbo, not heaven, changed this teaching in 2007.  Yet Roman Catholic teaching still suggests that “Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament.” (Catechism 1257) and while it admits that God “himself is not bound by his sacraments…” and might decide to save unbaptised people, this possibility is not known to the Church and seems to conflict with Scripture.  For these reasons then, in Christian teaching not everybody will be saved.

Secondly, mainstream Christian teaching is that only good people will be saved and that the wicked will be punished eternally in hell.  Matthew 25 (the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats) makes it clear that at the Last Judgement God will divide people into the good (sheep) and the wicked (goats) and send them for eternal reward or punishment based on how they have treated “the least of these brothers of mine”.  Similarly, Luke 16 (the Parable of Dives and Lazarus) suggests that once we are in heaven or hell, based on our choices in this life towards the most vulnerable, then this fate is eternal and cannot be changed.  In John 13:34-35 Jesus states “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” This suggests that being “in Jesus” and therefore saved depends on good works, which means that those who do not love others will not be saved.  Based on these scriptures, the Roman Catholic Catechism 1022 teaches that “at the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love…”  and 1033 states “we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbour or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” [1 John 3:14-15] Nevertheless, mainstream Christian teaching also makes it clear that salvation does not depend on works.  Rather, we are saved by grace and God’s decision alone, which does not depend on anything we do or choose.  For Roman Catholics, “Grace is favour, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life” so that being Baptised, taking the sacraments and living a good life are evidence that we have been saved by God’s grace.  Yet, for Protestants, it is possible that a person might be baptised and live an apparently good life and yet still not be saved.  The Westminster Confession explains that “others, not elected, although they may be called by the ministry of the Word, and may have some common operations of the Spirit, yet they never truly come to Christ, and therefore cannot be saved.”  God’s decision to save is one of grace and so independent of anything which we do, or how we might appear to others. John Calvin confirmed that “Therefore, as Paul testifies, election, which is the cause of good works, does not depend upon men.” Commentaries on Election and Predestination. In this way it might seem that it is possible that God saves all people by his grace, including those who are unbaptised and even those who live lives of sin.  Yet there are few Christians who would accept this, because the idea that Hitler and Stalin might end up in heaven alongside the Saints conflicts with Justice, which is one of God’s core attributes.  It follows, therefore, that it is wrong to say that “in Christian teaching, all people will be saved.”

On the other hand, some Christians argue that the existence of an eternal hell is incompatible with God’s goodness. Whatever sins we commit in this life are temporary, so an eternal punishment could not be proportionate, which is a core principle of justice.  If hell is not eternal, it would follow that in the end all people will be saved.  Roman Catholic teaching suggests that after we die, we can atone for sin through Purgatory, a temporary hell, before making progress towards paradise and eventually being released into heaven at the Last Judgement.  The Catechism 1030 stated that “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” Yet this still implies that some people – those who die outside God’s grace and friendship – do go to an eternal Hell.  This is also suggested by the Bible, in Matthew 25, Luke 16 and elsewhere.  Karl Barth and later John Hick both addressed this issue, asking how a just God could punish people for temporary sins – however bad – with an eternal punishment.  They came to similar solutions, that God offers all sinners a “way back” after they die, but that God’s gift of grace is freedom which extends to the ability to reject God’s grace and salvation a second time and choose eternal damnation for ourselves.  Despite this, the idea that all people will be saved eventually is not acceptable to all Christians, because it implies that we are saved by our own decision, not God’s.  Barth tried to get around this by saying that it is freedom which is the gift of grace, so when we choose to accept God’s salvation we are saved through grace.  He wrote “The command of God sets man free…” Church Dogmatics p.586 and “The determination of the elect consists in the fact that he allows himself to be loved by God” p.411  Yet for Augustine and Calvin this is unlikely to be acceptable, because it does seem to limit God’s omniscience.  If God gives us freedom as a gift of grace, allowing us to choose to accept the salvation which is offered to everybody or not, then it might suggest that God does not know whether we will accept or not.  It might be that God limits his own knowledge of who will be saved to facilitate his gift of grace, which is freedom.  Yet this implies that God is limited in power, having to choose between giving us freedom and knowing who will be saved. It might be that God does know who will accept salvation – and who will not accept – despite our freedom. Yet this seems close to Arminianism (and so not compatible with Lutheran or Calvinist Protestant Theology) because God’s knowledge of who would accept salvation and his gift of grace in freedom would be simultaneous in God’s timeless nature and God might be seen to choose who to save or not based on whether they will accept.  It follows that mainstream Christian teaching does not embrace the idea that God offers salvation to everybody and freedom as a gift of grace to either accept or reject that salvation.  In the end, some people will not be saved, and this will be by God’s decision alone, according to mainstream Christian teaching. 

In conclusion, it is not fair to say that “in Christian teaching, all people will be saved.”  While there are a few Christians who might like to think that, and while a few Bible quotes taken out of context might imply that, mainstream Christian teaching is united in its view that some people will not be saved.  This will probably include most non-Christians and serious sinners. 

Critically compare the logical and evidential aspects of the problem of evil as challenges to belief. [40]

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The problem of evil presents such a severe challenge to Christian belief that Hans Kung referred to it as “the rock of atheism.”  On one level, the problem of evil can be presented as a logical puzzle.  As John Hick noted “As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma; if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.”  As such, the logical problem of evil demands Theodicies or logical defences of God against charges of creating or allowing evil. On another level, the problem of evil can be presented as conclusive evidence that God cannot exist – at least in any form that would be worthy of worship – rendering any attempt at Theodicy… and religious faith… nigh-on impossible.  For example, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov presented an evidential challenge to the simple faith of his brother Alyosha, rendering him speechless and certainly not rushing to God’s defence.  In the end, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil is a greater challenge to belief than the logical aspect. 

So challenging is the evidential aspect of the problem of evil to faith that it was presented as an argument for atheism by William Rowe in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979) Rowe focuses on a particular kind of evil that is found in our world in abundance: “intense human and animal suffering” which is, Rowe argues, intrinsically evil…meaning that it is bad in and of itself, even though it sometimes is part of, or leads to, some good state of affairs (p.335)  He uses this kind of evil as the basis for a DEDUCTIVE disproof of God, which is clearly VALID.

P1: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

P2: An omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

C: There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

If there are rational grounds for accepting its premises, to that extent there are rational grounds for accepting the conclusion, atheism.  Rowe gives two powerful examples to support his first, factual premise; the fawn and Sue.  While Stephen Wykstra tries to reject this premise, arguing that “if we think carefully about the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the goods by virtue of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken” (1984: 91) playing the “mystery card” in this way will only ever persuade those with deep and unfalsifiable faith to the point of being what RM Hare called a BLIK.  The author of the Biblical book of Job tried what became known as Wykstra’s CORNEA argument centuries before Christ and it hardly reduced the force of the evidential challenge to belief.  Attempted defences of Wykstra from Alston, Hick and Swinburne do no more than restate the claim that human beings are in no position to judge why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God would allow the fawn and Sue to suffer.  They do not make this claim any more persuasive in the face of the agonies that Rowe describes.  Rowe sees his second, theological premise, as self-evidently true.  While advocates of OPENNESS THEOLOGY disagree, suggesting that God’s existence as everlasting-in-time rather than eternal outside time places logical constraints on God’s power and knowledge so that God may not prevent instances of intense suffering that come about as a result of human free-will.  They argue that “the theistic worldview is not only compatible with, but requires or demands, the possibility that there is gratuitous evil” [Nick Trakakis IEP article on Evidential Problem of Evil] because it hinges on the existence of genuine free will.  Nevertheless, this fails to answer the question posed by JL Mackie in relation to his presentation of the logical problem of evil; why could not an omnipotent God create free beings who always choose what is right?  In practice, advocates of Openness Theology are advocates for a limited, anthropomorphic God for whom there is no credible evidence at all.  It follows that Rowe’s first and second premises are true, making his deductive disproof of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good being is sound, making his evidential argument the biggest possible challenge to belief.   

This conclusion is further supported by Gregory S Paul in “Theodicy’s Problem” (2007).  Where Rowe begins with very specific examples of dysteleological suffering, Paul widens the scope of the evidential argument by citing  “THE HOLOCAUST OF CHILDREN” as proof that there cannot exist any omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.  Like Rowe, Paul fine-tunes his argument to evade classical theodicies, but he also improves on Rowe’s argument because it is much harder to suggest that God could have an unknown purpose for designing the whole world to create maximum suffering than it is to suggest that he has an unknown purpose for allowing specific instances of animal or child suffering. As Paul writes, “The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented… Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from nonhuman causes, before reaching the age of mature consent. Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions. If immature deceased humans are allowed into heaven, then the latter is inhabited predominantly by automatons. Because the Holocaust of the Children bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified.”  He goes on, “The situation could not have been much worse than it actually is. If prenatal and juvenile mortality and disability were significantly higher than they actually are, then the population would not be able to grow, and would be at high risk of crashing, leading to human extinction. The level of natural evil has been about as severe as is practically possible.” p.132 Continuing… “If a creator exists, then it has chosen to fashion a habitat that has maximized the level of suffering and death among young humans that are due to factors beyond the control of humans over most of their history.”  It is very difficult to respond to Paul’s challenge as a believer.  Just as Darwin, Mill and Dawkins found, when faced with the “pitiless indifference” of nature laid bare, it becomes impossible – even ridiculous – to maintain a faith position.  This shows that the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the greatest possible challenge to belief.   

Of course, the logical problem of evil is still a significant challenge to belief.  JL Mackie (in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955)) pointed out that Christians usually believe that

P1.  God exists and is omnipotent

P2.  God exists and is omnibenevolent

P3.  Evil exists

Mackie went further than Hume, who had called this an “inconsistent triad” of beliefs, stating that holding these three propositions as co-beliefs is “positively irrational”.  In this way, the logical problem of evil seems to force Christians to choose between God’s omnipotence and His omnibenevolence, or else deny the existence of evil. Yet it has been the attempt to show that faith is (possibly) rational that presents a greater challenge to belief than the logical problem itself.  If only theologians had been content to admit that faith is irrational, or to choose which of Mackie’s propositions to drop!  The effect of doing so on belief would have been far less dramatic than the logical gymnastics of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas have been.  Firstly, both thinkers demanded that Christians believe that evil is “privatio boni” making God less responsible for its effects. Aquinas used the analogy of silent pauses which add sweetness to the chant!  Yet, as Rowe and Paul have shown, it is difficult to categorise evil as a simple lack of good when the whole of nature seems designed to inflict maximum suffering.  Can the suffering out of which evolution is fashioned really be explained in terms of silent pauses making the totality of nature better?   This Theodicy only serves to highlight how out of touch Christian theology is and this to challenge peoples’ belief.  Secondly, St Augustine claimed that human beings deserve the effects of both moral and natural evil because as a species they misused their free will.  Again, this fails to account for the suffering of animals, which is hardly to be dismissed as an illusion.  It also fails to account for the suffering of innocent children, documented in such detail by Rowe and Paul, without appealing to “Original Sin”, a concept as incredible and abhorrent as it has become necessary to mainstream Christian doctrine.  These examples show how it is the logical gymnastics resorted to by Christian theologians in their blind attempt to defend their position against the logical aspect of the problem of evil that has twisted and distorted the position they sought to defend and presented an enormous challenge to belief, not the logical problem in itself.  As Marilyn McCord Adams noted, to a large extent philosophical reflection on the problem of evil makes the suffering worse.  She wrote ”There is a time to drop philosophical reflection, to forget about questions of meaning… in order to act to get the suffering to stop…”  

In conclusion, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the biggest possible challenge to belief, closely followed by Christian responses to the logical aspect of the problem.  The logical aspect of the problem in itself is not so much of a challenge; believing that God has the all three attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence and as defined by Mackie is not really demanded by the Bible or by Religious Experience or by the rational arguments for God’s existence, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral or Aesthetic.   

Secularists who say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong. Discuss [40]

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Many secularists claim that Christianity is a source of unhappiness, both to individuals and to societies.  For examples, Freud claimed that religion is an “individual obsessional neurosis” which has the potential to cause great unhappiness, causing people to repress their feelings and urges in an unhealthy way.  Dawkins and Hitchens claimed that religion is at what Dawkins called “the root of all evil” in the world, causing conflict between individuals, groups and even whole countries, leading to death and destruction.  Nevertheless, Christian apologists and social scientists have defended religion, claiming that – on balance – it is a source of happiness and not unhappiness.  Feuerbach pointed out how religion makes people and societies happier, being a form of wish-fulfillment.  History has shown that irreligious societies are even more subject to social unrest and conflict than religious ones; take communist Russia and China as examples of that.  Further, Pascal and James argued that faith provides hope and benefits in this life sufficient to make it worth being religious without evidence of the object of faith.  Recent social surveys agree, suggesting that faith adds years to healthy life-expectancy, while also lowering one’s chances of divorce and other misery-inducing experiences.  It follows that it is fair to say that secularists who say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong. 

Firstly, Freud did argue that religion is an “individual obsessional neurosis” which has the potential to cause great unhappiness, causing people to repress their feelings and urges – and particularly their sexuality – in an unhealthy way.  Yet even Freud acknowledged that religion can be positive for individuals, helping to develop their conscience so that they can function in society, and for societies as a whole in ensuring that people work together and observe rules which can’t be enforced.   In The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud referred to religion as “perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization”, arguing that Religion provides a defence against “the crushingly superior force of nature”  Later, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud develops Feuerbach’s argument, suggesting that religion could be explained by the subconscious fulfilling the human desire for “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded…” which stems from a childish fear of the unknown and things ending. This shows that even for Freud, a secularist, religions like Christianity perform a valuable function for individuals and societies in helping people to cope with the human condition.  While Freud concludes The Future of an Illusion by stating that all religious beliefs are “illusions and insusceptible of proof…”  he examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel “exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization”. He notes that “civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers” in whom secular motives for morality replace religious ones; but he acknowledges the existence of “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed” who must be “held down most severely” unless “the relationship between civilization and religion” undergoes “a fundamental revision”.  This suggests that religions like Christianity also increase social happiness in avoiding the need for punitive law-enforcement and subjugation of the working classes.  As Marx had suggested, “Religion is the opium of the masses” but for Freud, drugging the masses and using their addiction to religion as something that makes them happy (albeit temporarily and at a price) to manipulate them may well be kinder than the alternative!  It seems that Freud did argue that Religion causes some individuals great unhappiness, but acknowledged that on balance most individuals and societies benefit from it.  Further, Freud’s methodology has been widely rejected as pseudo-scientific, meaning that his claims and theories carry little weight today in any case.  Therefore, secularists who rely on Freud in saying that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong. 

Secondly, Dawkins did claim that religion is at “the root of all evil” in the world, causing conflict between individuals, groups and even whole countries, leading to death and destruction.  He also claimed that it is religion’s tendency to encourage people to accept authority and ignore reason which makes it dangerous.  The fact that it is “anti-intellectual leads young people to grow up with an “impoverished world-view” and “false-hope” while also making them susceptible to being radicalised and manipulated by unscrupulous leaders. Nevertheless, Dawkins is guilty of building up a “straw man” in his presentation of Christianity, in order to make his task in attacking it easier.  Few Christians are, as Dawkins suggests, Biblical Literalists, Young Earth Creationists or deniers of evolution… most embrace reason and deny Dawkins claims about their world-view being in any way impoverished.  For John Polkinghorne, it is Dawkins’ world-view that is impoverished, given that he closes his mind to all aspects of reality that can’t be measured through the empirical senses.  As Terry Eagleton pointed out in 2006 “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”  He continued, criticising Dawkins for relying on “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince” and claiming that “Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is… Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.”  Eagleton points out that Dawkins makes a series of unevidenced assumptions, such as: “Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly.” Also, as Alister McGrath pointed out in “The Dawkins Delusion” (2008) “either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs.”  It seems that Dawkins’ claims and theories about religion are no more credible than those of Freud, so those who rely on his arguments in saying that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong. 

Of course there are more credible arguments to support the claim that religions like Christianity are a source of unhappiness.  For example, the Secularization Hypothesis, which suggested that the less religious a society becomes, the more socially liberal and economically developed it becomes, was supported by a wide range of sociologists and their research through the 20th century.  In 1994 Jose Casanova wrote ‘The secularization theory may be the only theory which was able to attain a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences… ‘ which goes some way to explain why countries such as Turkey embraced Programmatic Secularism as a means of developing their economies and so increasing social happiness.  Nevertheless, more recent studies suggest that societies lose-out when they abandon religion.  Charles Taylor in “A Secular Age” (2007) points out that secular belief effectively closes off whole areas of human experience so that “The door is barred against further discovery…” (p. 769) agreeing with John Polkinghorne that the spirit of scientific enquiry should lead people to be open to all sources of information, not only the five empirical senses.  Taylor also argued that “our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief” because “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured.” (p. 727) Against the freedom from “unreasoning fears” there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration through the adoption of shallow utilitarianism and there is no room for death.  In 2010 Jurgen Habermas agreed, in his essay “An Awareness of what is Missing”.  Habermas also described the effects of secularism as “a world flattened out by empiricism and rendered normatively mute” (p134) For Habermas, people in secular societies endure a particular form of anxiety, an “awareness of what is missing” which has a significant effect on their individual and social happiness. This anxiety manifests itself in being unable to deal with death; our lack of belief in an afterlife makes us easy to manipulate.  We act in the short-term and for immediate gain, feeling that what we do and are doesn’t really matter. We struggle with loyalty and commitment and to be unable to feel in solidarity with other human beings outside our immediate group. This makes acting together for the common good, such as to promote human rights or tackle climate change, increasingly difficult.  The arguments of Taylor and Habermas show that religions like Christianity are more a source of happiness than unhappiness. 

In conclusion, secularists who say that Christianity is a source of unhappiness are wrong.  Neither the old arguments of Freud nor the newer arguments of Dawkins stand up to scrutiny and even the secularization hypothesis, which once suggested that societies would be made happier – at least in narrow economic terms – by the decline of religion, is beginning to crumble.  A Taylor and Habermas observe, religions like Christianity are crucial components in both individual and social happiness, so that if they decline we quickly gain “an awareness of what is missing.”

Critically assess the significance of Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

This AS question from 2018 is possibly the worst I have seen, and the mark-scheme does little to show that it is a reasonable question to have asked students, let alone AS students, in an examination. Nevertheless, because it is a past question student might encounter it and it is certainly worth considering how it might be answered.

St Augustine taught that human beings existed in a state of CARITAS before the Fall, loving God and loving each other as themselves in an ideal state of AMOR or agape and friendship.  In the City of God Book 14 St Augustine described how God “created man with such a nature that the members of the race should not have died”, such as being IMMORTAL and so in no need of SALVATION.  For St Augustine, human beings had BONA VOLUNTAS before the Fall, much the same as what Kant later describes as a GOOD WILL.  Their choices were directed by REASON and they had, therefore, a UNIFIED WILL and not the DIVIDED WILL that characterizes human nature after the Fall.  It follows that, for St Augustine, the whole blame for the FALL and the evil, suffering and death that it caused, lies within human beings and not with God.  St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is, therefore, a highly significant part of his Theodicy and particularly his Free Will Defence; without his teaching about human relationships before the Fall, St Augustine could not explain how God, being OMNIPOTENT and OMNIBENEVOLENT, allows evil and suffering to exist within His creation.   

Firstly, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall shows that the original choice to disobey God and sin was free in the sense that there were ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES.  St Augustine is clear that with a unified, good will (BONA VOLUNTAS), human beings would have no reason to disobey… it made no sense to do so.  Although St Augustine saw LUST as the explanation for human beings choosing to do what it made no sense to do, he is also clear that “they are in error who suppose that all the evils of the soul proceed from the body”.  If the body was the source of LUST and what caused us to sin, God as the creator of the body would still be responsible for our sin and its consequences, nullifying St Augustine’s Theodicy.  For St Augustine, it was “the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible”, so the choice to disobey God was internal to Adam as the agent and not determined by any external factor, even his own body.  The fist sin was man having the PRIDE to live according to his own desire and not God’s, so disobeying God and following his CARNAL WILL.  It follows that St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is highly significant, making his THEODICY and particularly his FREE WILL DEFENCE work.   

Secondly, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall shows that everybody is a SINNER in need of SALVATION through God’s GRACE.  For St Augustine, all human beings were “seminally present” in Adam (God “was pleased to derive all men from one individual”), meaning that all human beings were originally created having BONA VOLUNTAS and existing in CARITAS, not just Adam and Eve, and all human beings sinned against God and earned the punishment for sin which is death (Romans 5), not just Adam and Eve.  This shows that all human beings are capable of CARITAS and that AGAPE as a moral imperative has force, being towards something that our PRE-LAPSARIAN STATE shows that we can do.  In this way, we fully deserve God’s punishment in this life and the next for existing in a state of CUPIDITAS.  Indeed, if God did not punish us (harshly) for our CUPIDITY, God could not be just because then there could be no incentive to change and do what we know we should.  Further, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall supports his teaching about the Fall and Original Sin, which in turn supports his teaching that we depend on God’s GRACE for SALVATION and can in no way deserve or earn it for ourselves.  St Augustine utterly rejected PELAGIANISM, pointing out that it limits God’s OMNIPOTENCE (suggesting that we decide who is saved, not God), OMNISCIENCE (suggesting that the future is open and unknown to God) and OMNIBENEVOLENCE (suggesting that God only saves those who deserves it, when in fact His goodness extends to saving all those who don’t deserve it).  St Augustine agrees with St Paul, who wrote

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Romans 8:38-39

If we are saved, then we are pre-destined for salvation by God’s Grace, and nothing on earth can change that. For these reasons as well, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is highly significant in his wider THEODICY and THEOLOGY for that matter.   

Nevertheless and despite is significance, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is problematic.  

Notwithstanding the damning consequences of accepting the story of the Fall as conveying deep truth about human nature (Centuries of SEXISM, MISOGYNY and repressed SEXUALITIES flow from the story of the fall, including our pre-lapsarian state – being seen as ARCHETYPAL in the way that St Augustine’s teaching encourages) St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall depends on seeing the Bible as containing deep truth, when BIBLICAL CRITICISM casts doubt on this.  Textbooks are wrong to claim that St Augustine was a naïve literalist in the modern sense, seeing the Fall as historical, when he was fully aware of the different genres that the Bible contained and was amongst the first to develop rules for the interpretation of scripture, and yet St Augustine did rely on the Bible conveying truth, albeit in a more complex way.

Further, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall and how they relate to human nature today depends on an antiquated notion of how human beings reproduce.  Although Aristotle’s theory from “On the Generation of Animals” that the male is the efficient cause of his children (the woman only providing the material causes) was commonly accepted in St Augustine’s day, making his claim that all humanity was “seminally present” in Adam seem plausible, the discovery of the human ovum in the 17th Century undermined St Augustine’s claim.  It may be that the potential for all life was contained within Adam and Eve, but while Adam was fully culpable for his sin in the Fall, arguably Eve was not. Eve’s relationship with God was secondary and God’s command not to eat from the tree given to Adam before she was created. Eve’s sin would in breaking God’s commandment would be towards Adam, who she had been created to help… but then she thought she was helping Adam as the fruit was “as good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom…” If all humanity was not, as St Augustine suggested, “seminally present” in Adam it does not follow that all human beings sinned in his sin or are justly punished in dying for it.

Also, as John Hick pointed out in “Evil and the God of Love” (1966) p173, St Augustine’s attempt to use human nature to explain the fall and justify God in allowing evil and suffering “considered as a contribution to the solution of the problem of evil… only explains obscurum per obscurius.”  Even if we ignore the problems with taking the story of the fall literally in either a historical or scientific sense, St Augustine blaming human nature for the fall – whether in the body or the soul – does little to excuse God from responsibility for the evil and suffering that frail nature causes, because God created that frail nature and God is supposed to be both OMNIPOTENT and OMNISCIENT… in other words he could have done better and should have known how it would turn out.  

It seems that St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is BOTH highly significant AND deeply problematic.   

The extent to which this is true can be seen in Immanuel Kant’s “Religion within the boundaries of reason alone” (1794).  Kant, as a Lutheran, was deeply influenced by St Augustine, but wanted his philosophical system to work without relying on faith.  Like St Augustine, Kant believed that human beings are born FREE, that we choose to do what is wrong against reason and that this has a permanent effect on our moral character, limiting our freedom.  While Kant called what limits the human ability to have a good will RADICAL EVIL rather than ORIGINAL SIN, the concepts are sufficiently similar for Goethe to claim that Kant had “criminally stained his philosophers’ cloak with the shameful stain of original sin.”  For Kant, as for St Augustine, the possibility for human beings to have a good will (BONA VOLUNTAS) is significant, because it ensures that we can do what we rationally know we should do.  Without evidence that it is possible to have a good will, Kant would be arguing that we should do what nobody can do, which is irrational.  Without evidence that it is possible to have a good will, there would be no CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE or reason to believe that we really are free or that the universe is really ordered as it appears to be.  For Kant, living in an age where Biblical Criticism made taking Genesis literally impossible, Jesus was the evidence that it is possible to have a good will and live in a state of what St Augustine called CARITAS, so in this way through Jesus we are “saved” from despair through the knowledge that in Jesus what we know we should do is possible.  Jesus is the evidence that human nature “before sin” is and can be good and so the evidence that we should be good, despite the otherwise seeming impossibility of having a good will by Kant’s definition.  Despite this, like St Augustine, Kant’s teaching on the good will is deeply problematic because human beings are born and grow up through a state whereby that are not capable of having a good will – childhood.  As children we are bound to do what is right, not out of a sense of duty, but out of fear, deference to authority or habit… all of which would make the “right” action pollute the will as much as an obviously wrong action, and pollute it permanently, holding us back from ever achieving a good will as an adult.  While Jesus shows that it is possible for a human being to have a good will, there is no sense that Jesus was like us subject to ignorance and tutelage as a child or that as an adult his will was encumbered with the effects of childhood choices.  Because of this, Kant’s teaching about a good will is no more convincing than St Augustine’s.  Like St Augustine, Kant asserts our freedom but provides no real evidence that we have ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES to choose from.  Like St Augustine, Kant asserts that we are morally responsible for not having a good will (BONA VOLUNTAS) and for living in a state of RADICAL EVIL (CUPIDITAS) without evidence that we could ever have done otherwise.  Just as Kant’s teaching about a good will shows that Kant has no basis for postulating GOD (the universe is not fair, so there is no need to believe in God to explain its fairness), St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall shows that St Augustine has no basis for believing that God is both OMNIPOTENT and OMNIBENEVOLENT in the face of evil and suffering in the world that He created.   

In conclusion, St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the Fall is highly significant.  Without this element of St Augustine’s teaching, St Augustine’s THEODICY and particularly his FREE WILL DEFENCE could not work and St Augustine’s wider THEOLOGY of Grace could not work either.  St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall are crucial in defending the possibility of God being both OMNIBENEVOLENT and OMNIPOTENT, human FREEDOM real and the universe FAIR, so much so that even Immanuel Kant relied on a similar, albeit unsatisfactory and contentious, theory to explain the human condition.  And yet, St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the Fall relies on some degree of Biblical LITERALISM and on scientific NAIVITY. It does not provide the needed evidence that human beings are capable of being good or responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world, because as St Augustine put it, all the evils that affect mankind are “either sin or punishment for sin”.  In the end, the very significance of St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall undermines his wider attempt at THEODICY and THEOLOGY.   

Critically evaluate St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil. (40)

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The logical problem of evil was most famously expressed by David Hume when he wrote “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent…”  The existence of evil seems to demonstrate that Christian faith rests on what Hume called “an inconsistent triad” of beliefs, namely that God exists and is omnipotent, God exists and is omnibenevolent and that Evil exists.  While writing many centuries before Hume, St Augustine repeatedly responded to this same problem and developed a complex, multi-layered theodicy.  While St. Augustine is best remembered for his free will defence, he also proposed that evil is a lack of good (privatio boni) and so not a positive part of God’s creation and reasoned that God allowing there to be privations of good is justified with reference to the principle of plenitude, in that they facilitate diversity in nature which is awe-inspiring and beautiful, pointing to the glory of God and the need to worship Him. Nevertheless, and despite the sophistication and importance of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil, his attempt was not successful.

Focussing first on the free-will defence argument, St Augustine argued that evil results from the human misuse of free-will and is therefore our fault, not God’s.  God, being omnibenevolent, is beholden to create the best possible world and this, St Augustine reasons, contains free beings who can choose the good, rather than achieving it by design.  However, the freedom to choose the good necessarily entails the freedom to choose to sin, causing suffering to ourselves, other people and indeed the whole of creation as God, again being omnibenevolent and so just, is beholden to ensure that evil actions have evil results in order to deter people from choosing them again.  When human beings chose to sin, first corporately at the Fall in Genesis 3 in which all humanity was “seminally present” in Adam, and then as individuals, evil and suffering entered the world not by God’s design, but as a logically necessary consequence of God creating the best possible world. This argument is fraught with difficulties however.  Firstly, as JL Mackie asked in his famous essay “Evil and Omnipotence”, why could not an omnipotent God create a world containing free beings who always chose to do what is right?  Omnipotence suggests that ability to do anything, even (as Descartes reasoned) what seems logically impossible to us, such as making 2+2=5.  Secondly, even if (as St Thomas Aquinas argued) God’s creative action is timelessly simple and cannot, therefore, contain logical contradictions, why shouldn’t an omnipotent God create free beings whose poor choices have less severe consequences than they do in our world.  Is the holocaust a logically necessary consequence of God’s creation of the best possible world?  If it is, the meaning of omnipotence – and of best in the context of possible worlds – seems to be very far indeed from any meaning we can understand. Thirdly, such omnipotence and such a “best” possible world seems incompatible with God’s omnibenevolence; wouldn’t a good God have been better not to create at all than to have created a world in which the holocaust (and perhaps even worse examples of human depravity yet to come) was a logically necessary feature. Fourthly and finally, the whole idea of human beings having free will is inconsistent with the notion of divine omnipotence.  Ass Boethius acknowledged in the Consolations of Philosophy Book V, Omnipotence is usually understood to entail omniscience and, if God knows what we will choose before we choose it, our freedom is not meaningful.  Given that God has both the power to step in to prevent the consequences of our poor choices and the goodness that demands that he should, divine omniscience negates the free-will defence and means that this aspect of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to consider St. Augustine’s suggestion that evil is “privatio boni” and therefore not a part of God’s creation for Him to be responsible for.  While defining evil as a privation has been popular through the history of the Church with Philosophers – St Thomas Aquinas also defined evil in this way – as John Hick pointed out, it is deeply unconvincing in a pastoral context.  To those afflicted by suffering saying that child cancer is not a positive part of God’s creation but only results from a justified instance of a lack of good things seems deeply inappropriate as well as being unconvincing.  Medicine has moved on since the 5th Century and we now know that much sickness is not caused by a lack of health but by pathogens which have a very real existence.  Why did an all-powerful, all-good God create coronaviruses, whose only purpose seems to be to infect beings in order to multiply themselves, whatever suffering that causes?  The standard response to this, pointing out that we are criticising God’s creation on the basis of our own perspective, not God’s, falls foul of the central Christian belief that God created the natural world for human beings.  If aspects of creation make it impossible for human beings to do as God commanded, “be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:28) then this demands an explanation.  If God, being omnipotent and willing human beings to be good, created a world in which the conflicting purposes of organisms naturally and inevitably results in suffering then there is indeed a logical problem.  It is simply not possible to deny the existence of evil or reduce it to a lack of good when “nature is red in tooth and claw”.  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to St. Augustine’s claim that God allowing evil and the suffering it causes is justified with reference to the Principle of Plenitude, this aspect of his Theodicy is also unsuccessful.  St. Augustine claimed that God is justified in creating, even when creation necessarily involved privations (evil), each of which would cause intense suffering, because of the beauty of creation, which would point towards and express God’s own glory.  For St. Augustine, part of God’s goodness is the need to express his nature creatively, yet this implies a limitation on God.  If God is omnipotent, then why should God have the need to express his nature creatively… and even more so if that creative self-expression would inevitably lead to privations on the scale of the holocaust.  St Augustine also reasons that God’s creative self-expression, including its necessary privations, is justified because it points the human mind to the existence and glory of God.  Yet again, this implies that God has a need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified in a way that seems to undermine His omnipotence.  If God is omnipotent He must also be omniscient which, as St. Thomas Aquinas argues in Summa Theologica 1,14,2, includes having perfect self-knowledge such as that “God understands Himself through Himself”. If God knows himself perfectly, then why would he have any need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified by any created being?  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Of course, St Augustine’s theodicy has been enormously influential.  Today Alvin Plantinga’s “God, Freedom and Evil” draws heavily on all aspects of the Augustinian tradition to provide a way for believers to defend themselves against the “defeaters” levelled at faith by atheists.  Plantinga has adapted Augustine’s arguments to address common criticisms, such as by developing his argument for transworld depravity to show that suffering will result from God’s creation of free beings in any possible world without ever having to be part of God’s intention for any world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of the Augustinian-type theodicy, it remains deeply problematic.  Plantinga’s argument still depends on God being both omnipotent and having to create free beings the consequences of whose actions cannot be limited.  He still reasons that God can be both omnipotent and omniscient and not be responsible for the consequences of human choices. He does not so much defeat Mackie’s criticisms of the Augustinian theodicy as deny them. 

In conclusion, St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful at every level.  His free will defence fails to reconcile God’s omnipotence with His omnibenevolence, his re-definition of evil as privatio boni fails to do justice to the real experience of evil and its effects in the world and his Principle of Plenitude implies that God, being omnipotent, is still limited.  Despite the fact that St. Augustine’s theodicy continues to inspire writers like Alvin Plantinga, philosophers of religion should look elsewhere if they want to make progress towards a resolution of the logical problem of evil.

Christians should not show favouritism or prioritize one group over another. Discuss. [40]

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On first sight it seems that there is little to discuss here.  Showing favouritism seems opposed to treating people fairly and equally, as the Christian principle of the Sanctity of Human Life seems to demand. Famously, Jesus taught “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:32), suggesting that Christians should love all people equally and not prioritize one group over another, and his brother James clearly wrote “…believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favouritism…” (James 2:1). Nevertheless, when in 1968 CELAM’s Medellin conference called for what in the same year Fr Pedro Arrupe had called a “preferential option for the poor,” many Christians responded, agreeing that Christian teaching on social justice demands that the Church should prioritize the poor.  Further, in recent months many Christians have supported the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which seeks to prioritize black lives now to address the fact that these lives have long been ignored.  On closer examination it seems that there is a lot to discuss here, not least because the ideas of favouritism and prioritizing one group over another have been conflated in the question, when in fact – as Stephen J Pope argued in 1993 – they are distinct.  In reality, it is true that Christians should not show favouritism, but that does not mean that they should not prioritize one group over another.

In his article “Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor”[1] Stephen J Pope opened by acknowledging that “the preferential option for the poor has become a major theme in contemporary Catholic Ethics.”  The theme is often attributed to the influence of South American Liberation Theology from the late 1970s, but as Todd Walatka argued persuasively in 2015[2], the origins of the preferential option for the poor are really in Vatican II documents “Gaudiem et Spes” and “Lumen Gentium” (1965) and Pope Paul VI’s “Populorum Progressio” (1967), which predate CELAM’s Medillin conference in 1968 and Gustavo Gutierrez’ “Towards a Theology of Liberation” (1971) and far predate the famous articulation of the concept in CELAM’s Puebla conference in 1979.   In this way, Christians have long argued for the poor to be prioritized as a group.  Indeed, there is good Biblical justification for prioritizing the poor.   Arguably, Jesus himself gave a preferential option to the poor and to sinners; he chose to become incarnate of an unmarried mother and to live as and with the poor.  In a society that saw wealth as a reward from God and misfortune, including poverty, as a sign of sin and God’s displeasure, he rebuked those who questioned his spending time with sinners, saying “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners…” Mark 2:17.  Of course, he might have meant that the righteous and, by implication in that society, the wealthy were in no need of his help as they would achieve salvation anyway, but in Mark 10: 23, 25 Jesus remarked “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”…  25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God…” as if wealth is a barrier to salvation.  This suggests that God gives a “preferential option” to the poor, making it easier for them to enter His Kingdom.  Nevertheless, in Romans 2:11 St Paul teaches that “God shows no partiality” and in Galatians 3:28 confirms that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  How can it be that Jesus gave the poor a preferential option and taught that God made it easier for the poor to enter His Kingdom, while “all are one in Christ Jesus” and while “God shows no partiality”?  The answer is, of course, that there is a difference between giving the poor a preferential option and showing favouritism, treating the poor equitably and treating them with what Stephen J Pope calls “unjust partiality.” 

As Pope argues, “the preferential option, properly understood, refers to an expansion rather than a contraction of love and wisdom… this form of partiality must not be associated with those forms which encourage a disregard for fairness…”  In this way offering the poor a “preferential option” does not take away from the love God – or Christians – shows to others.  A parent does not love a child less by choosing to have another child; love is not a finite resource but expands to meet the need.  Further, no Christian who proposes giving the poor a preferential option proposes to treat other groups unjustly from now on.  Of course there will be those who perceive any measures taken to curtail their unjust privilege as unjust treatment, but is it unjust to stop a thief from enjoying the proceeds of their crimes? As Marx said, capitalism is theft because the capitalist relies on seizing the means of production and paying the workers less than he charges for their labour.  Even the father of free-market Capitalism Adam Smith agreed that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.[3]”  In this way, the rich are criminals and justice demands that they should not be allowed to enjoy the proceeds of their crimes with impunity.  Further, as Rawls pointed out “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”[4]  Could those who would complain of the injustice of being deprived of unjust privilege say that they would choose for the unjustly privileged to go unchallenged if they did not know that they were so privileged?  As Gutierrez pointed out[5], the poor are in the vast majority, both now and through history.  They occupy the underside of history and have suffered in every possible way because of material deprivation.  Any theory of justice decided on behind a veil of ignorance could not accept Capitalism, because it is only to the advantage of a tiny and shrinking minority. Further, because Capitalism is structurally sinful it causes even to that minority to be dehumanised and distanced from God, both in this life and the next. Oligarchs and ultra-high-net-worth individuals might appear to benefit from Capitalism – and they certainly enjoy the supercars and mansions – but their property and investments force them to be complicit in the oppression of workers and the destruction of the environment and so ensures that so long as they remain rich, they cannot show agape or follow God’s commandments.  By challenging and even by stopping the continuation of a systemic injustice which has so long and so severely oppressed the poor the Christian does not show unjust favouritism, she works for justice – liberating the rich as well as the poor from the structural sin that is capitalism.

In addition, in Luke 6:20 Jesus taught “blessed are the poor”, continuing in verse 24 “woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.”   In this way Christians who commit to giving the poor a preferential option and so prioritizing the poor seem to do only what Jesus said that God would do.  Further, even if that is to misinterpret Jesus’ teaching about how God will treat the rich, unlike God whose relationship with the poor and other groups is timeless, the preferential option CELAM called for is time-bound and in response to millennia of injustice and oppression.  Where the poor have been given a worse and manifestly unfair option through all recorded human history, addressing this by committing to try to give them a preferential option now is not unfair or unjust.  Just as the Black Lives Matter movement draws attention to the value of black lives now and going forward in the context of addressing the effects of centuries of discrimination and oppression, the preferential option for the poor is a step towards – and only a step towards – combating injustice and not in itself a new injustice.  In calling for some sort of affirmative action to address injustice, Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology and other contextual theologies like feminist and Dalit theologies all draw on the thinking of John Rawls, who pointed out that injustice is done when we treat different groups with different needs differently.  He wrote: “The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.”[6] For Rawls, justice demands that institutions focus resources on those who have need, according to their needs, rather than sharing them out equally and giving to those who already have more than they need.  This echoes Marx’ mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,”[7] a principle that was previously adopted by the Early Church, as described in Acts 4-5. In this way, by prioritizing the poor over wealthier groups, Christians treat all people equitably and so justly rather than equally and so unjustly.  To treat all people equally when some are, to quote George Orwell “more equal than others” is actually to prefer the rich and treat the already-privileged with favouritism. 

Of course, the title-quote does refer to prioritizing “one group over another” and it is true that this might imply what Pope called “unjust partiality” of the type which takes from one group in order to give to another.  If the title is so interpreted then it is fair to say that “Christians should not show favouritism or prioritize one group over another.”  St Thomas Aquinas taught that a good judge should not show any favouritism for or discrimination against the poor when passing sentence[8] and indeed, impartiality seems to be a condition of justice.  For example, Immanuel Kant taught that a “good will” must “treat humanity, whether in the person of yourself or another, always as an end and never as a means to an end,” suggesting that moral decisions should be made in respect of humanity without consideration of any particular characteristic, protected or otherwise.  Nevertheless, Rawls was strongly influenced by Kant and saw no necessary conflict between treating humanity always as an end in itself and demanding that the poor and disadvantaged are prioritized when it comes to resource-allocation. Not giving more to somebody who has enough is not the same as taking from them and so using them as a means to an end of improving conditions for those who lack.  It follows that Christians can prioritize the poor by treating them equitably, without acting unjustly with respect of the rich.

Having said that, those who call for a “preferential option for the poor” often call for the abolition of private property in the same breath, and this could reasonably be seen as using property owners as a means and not as an end in themselves. Kant distinguishes between negative and positive duties, arguing that a negative duty – not to do something evil – always trumps a positive duty – to help.  So, while not giving more to those who already have enough might be consistent with Kantian Ethics, taking from the rich would not be.  This implies that there should be a line for Christians when it comes to giving the poor a preferential option and so prioritizing them and that endorsing the wholesale abolition of private property would cross that line.  Nevertheless, Populorum Progressio confirms that for Catholics at least “the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional…” because “The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich” and “No one may appropriate surplus goods for their own use when others lack the bare necessities of life.” This relates to 1 John 3:17 “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” and to Jesus’ own reaction to the Rich Young Man in Mark 10, in asking why – if he has truly followed God’s commandments – he is still rich.  While Christians should stop short of supporting Marxist revolutions and a legal abolition of private property, that does not mean that Christians should passively accept the capitalist status quo and its concomitant injustices, including the grossly unequal distribution of private property, a large proportion of which was originally appropriated from what was held in common ownership and more would not have been possible without that appropriation. As CELAM affirmed in “A message to the peoples of Latin America” (1979) and as Jon Sobrino reminds us any “solidarity in faith must of necessity pass through solidarity with the poor.”[9]  Christians must choose; even while they should not endorse Marxist revolution, if they want to remain Christians they must divest themselves of their property and stand in solidarity with the poor.  Similarly, the Church must now become a “Church of the Poor” as Gutierrez put it, because there is no way for the Church to passively accept its own wealth and privilege because in doing so it implicitly endorses and seems to advocate for injustice. It follows that Christians should prioritize disadvantaged groups such as the poor and while they should not foment violent revolution as a means of abolishing private property, they should set a positive example, both individually and as a Church institution, in divesting themselves of the spoils of Capitalism as the necessary first step on a journey towards a fair and equitable redistribution of resources. 

So, in conclusion, Christians should not show favoritism in the sense of displaying what Pope calls unjust partiality, giving to one group by taking from other groups, but they still should – must – prioritize disadvantaged groups and show what Pope calls “just partiality” for them to the extent of sacrificing self to work for justice and their equitable treatment.  Jesus’ own example in doing this is one that Christians should follow.  Jesus chose to live poor, in solidarity with the poor, and sacrificed himself to change an oppressive, structurally sinful system which benefited nobody in a real and lasting sense.  In the same way Christians should accept his challenge to “pick up your cross and follow me,” giving all they have to the poor in the knowledge that – if not in the next life then in this one – this is the only way to build the Kingdom of God.

[1] Theological Studies, Vol 54, 1993

[2] Church as Sacrament: Gutiérrez and Sobrino as Interpreters of Lumen Gentium by Todd Walatka, published online by CUP in 2015 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/horizons/article/abs/church-as-sacrament-gutierrez-and-sobrino-as-interpreters-of-lumen-gentium/512E3C124F371744588801B105E72C34

[3] An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1

[4] A Theory of Justice

[5] Towards a Theology of Liberation

[6] A Theory of Justice

[7] 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program

[8] ST 2-2, q. 63, a. 4, ad 3

[9] Jon Sobrino, 1985:37-38