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And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else. [21] Augustine also mentioned the doctrine in passing in his City of God, where he wrote that "evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'" [22]
The fourth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo adopted the privation theory, and in his Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, maintained that evil exists as "absence of the good". [66] God is a spiritual, (not corporeal), Being who is sovereign over other lesser beings because God created material reality ex nihilo. Augustine's view of evil ...
Evil may be said to exist in the same way the hole of a donut exists: the donut was created, but the hole itself was not made, it was just never filled in – it is an absence. [10] And just as the hole could not exist without the donut, evil is parasitic upon good, since it is the corruption of a good nature. "God is infinite, and the devil is ...
For some thinkers, the existence of evil and hell could mean that God is not perfectly good and powerful or that there is no God at all. [62] Theodicy tries to address this dilemma by reconciling an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil and suffering, outlining the possibility that God and evil can coexist.
The theodicy argues that humans have an evil nature in as much as it is deprived of its original goodness, form, order, and measure due to the inherited original sin of Adam and Eve, but still ultimately remains good due to existence coming from God, for if a nature was completely evil (deprived of the good), it would cease to exist. [50]
If a god has unlimited power and is completely good, then it has the power to extinguish evil and wants to extinguish it. But if it does not do it, its knowledge of evil is limited, so it is not all-knowing. If a god is all-knowing and totally good, then it knows of all the evil that exists and wants to change it.
Augustine proposed that evil could not exist within God, nor be created by God, and is instead a by-product of God's creativity. [13] He rejected the notion that evil exists in itself, proposing instead that it is a privation of (or falling away from) good, and a corruption of nature. [5]
God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good. The evil of extensive animal suffering exists. Necessarily, God can actualize an evolutionary perfect world. Necessarily, God can actualize an evolutionary perfect world only if God does actualize an evolutionary perfect world. Necessarily, God actualized an evolutionary perfect world. [7] [note 1]