Andrew Chau
Augustine: Faith and Rationality
Augustine describes the world in terms of natural order in a hierarchical structure.
God is the peak of the hierarchy – the highest and greatest of all things – followed by the
truth, humankind, beasts, and inanimate objects. However, implicit in Augustine’s belief
in the Free Will Defense is the assumption that God is working within logical limits. If
logic limits God in the same way that the truth limits human beings, logic perhaps
deserves a higher place in the hierarchy than God. I believe that because Augustine
accepts the Free Will Defense, he must amend his hierarchy to use the notions of logic,
God, truth, and man consistently.
In section I, I will describe the content of Augustine’s hierarchy and examine the
method by which he reaches his conclusions. Section II will explain the Free Will
Defense and consider the possible logical limitations of God from the perspective of
Alvin Plantinga’s analysis. In section III, I will draw the parallels between truth, man,
logic, and God as conceived in Augustine’s hierarchy. Section IV will address
Augustine’s possible options with regards to amending his hierarchy. Section V will
reply to possible objections to my conclusion.
Augustine’s whole philosophy is based on the “chain of being” in nature – the
hierarchical natural order of things. The first observations Augustine makes are easy to
accept; the order starts with non-sentient objects, living non-rational things, and rational
beings. An example list of this hierarchy could contain rocks, beasts, and humans, in that
order (Augustine 95). Intuitively, this is an acceptable approach towards understanding
the world; it is hardly controversial to say that a woman is better than a rock. Note that I
will only use the word “better” as a way of describing a better form of existence or a
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higher form of being. A polished ruby may be better than a cockroach in terms of
monetary value or aesthetic worth, but an animal is always better than a rock in
Augustine’s sense of better. I will not dispute these claims, although I suspect the
goodness or value of something may depend on more than its measure of being. My goal
is not to criticize Augustine’s method, but to question whether or not it is consistently
applied throughout his philosophy.
The next step Augustine takes is to discover where objective truths and logical
truths belong in the hierarchy. He argues that all truths are better than human beings
since they are immutable and essentially the limits of human thought and action. We act
according to certain natural laws and we make judgments according to certain logical
laws (Augustine 89). It is not hard to deduce further that logical truths, or necessary
truths, are better than contingent truths since the former must be and the later merely is or
happens to be. What is important to Augustine is that human beings, along with all
things that exist, ultimately answer to the truth.
While faith plays an important role for Augustine, rationality is equally important;
they should not be opposed, but work together to lead to the truth (Augustine 88). This is
why Augustine was compelled to give a rational answer to the problem of evil. Although
many Christians might be satisfied to say that “God works in mysterious ways” and leave
it at that, Augustine believes humans have the capacity to find reasonable answers while
still working within the context of faith. The problem of evil is an ancient one – there are
four propositions:
(1) God is omniscient.
(2) God is omnipotent.
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(3) God is purely good.
(4) Evil exists.
Augustine takes each of these to be true prima facie, yet there is a seeming
contradiction built into these beliefs. While any three of the propositions may be held
true, the inclusion of the fourth always causes problems. If God is unaware of the evil in
the world, or it is not in his power to destroy it, or he is not actually purely good, then
perhaps the presence of evil could be explained. The fourth proposition, that evil exists,
seems to be the most obviously true – but that is the first one Augustine disputes. He
believes that evil is a “privation of good,” and that evil does not exist, but is the
observable lack of goodness (Augustine “City of God” 125). By making this claim,
Augustine is able to make the perception of evil consistent with his belief that all that
exists is good and comes from God. However, this alone will not solve the problem of
evil, but gives rise to the new problem of why God allows this lack of good. The fourth
proposition could be changed to “(4) The world is not purely good,” thus calling evil the
“privation of good” seems like a semantic solution to the problem of evil and not much
more.
The more important contribution Augustine makes is the formulation of the Free
Will Defense, which is vital to his conceptualization of the nature of God. The basic idea
is that God gave us free will – the ability to choose to act rightly or wrongly in any
situation. The evil in the world comes from immoral human decisions, not from God.
Evil cannot come from natural causes or anything that exists, since God made everything
and God is purely good. Augustine also believes that given free will, to borrow a phrase
from Leibniz, God made this the “best of all possible worlds (Plantinga 168)”. Free will
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allows for evil human action, but everything outside of those actions is good. The Free
Will Defense hinges on the possibility that God could not have created a world with
moral good and without moral evil (Plantinga 167). The implication of the Free Will
Defense is that God cannot give human beings free will and still make a purely good
world. This is not to be seen as a fault or a lack of power, but merely the consequence of
logical necessity.
In order to clarify the role that logic seems to play in the nature of God and his
abilities, I will examine the work done by Alvin Plantinga in his book Nature and
Necessity. First, it is worth pointing out that Plantinga acknowledges that God works
within the confines of logical possibility. He clarifies what it means for omnipotence to
be predicated to God. He writes, “God is omnipotent - which means, roughly, that there
are no non-logical limits to his power (Plantinga 167).” He then explains that properties
themselves are not created, but objects exhibiting those properties can be created. He
says, “…God did not create numbers, propositions, pure sets, and the like…,” because
there was never a time at which they did not exist (Plantinga 169). To wit, God can
create a chair that is red but he cannot and did not create the quality of redness itself.
He goes on to consider God’s powers in terms of modality and possible world
semantics. The Free Will Defense, he says, depends on the ability of the defender to
show that “it is possible that God could not have created a universe containing moral
good… without creating one containing moral evil (Plantinga 167).” Accordingly, the
question that Plantinga tries to answer is: “Which worlds could God have created
(Plantinga 169)?” First, Plantinga explains that God cannot undo what has already been
done, that is, he cannot work retroactively. This does not detract from the free will
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defender’s argument since what God can or cannot do with our world does not
necessarily bear on what worlds he could have created. Plantinga also says, quite
uncontroversially, that God could not actualize any possible world in which God does not
exist. That is, of course, even if God were a contingent being (Plantinga 170).
Regarding free will, Plantinga says that while God can cause a person to be free,
God cannot cause a person to freely perform or refrain from an act. If God causes me to
freely refrain from an act, “…he causes it to be the case that I refrain from A, in which
case I do not do so freely (Plantinga 171).” The logical contradiction is between causing
and acting freely; an agent cannot have free will and be caused to perform an action at the
same time. That describes one set of possible worlds that God cannot create, just as God
cannot create any possible world containing proverbial round squares. God cannot create
any possible world in which people are both free and causally determined.
The next argument Plantinga tackles as a challenge to the Free Will Defense is the
possibility of a world in which all agents are free, yet choose the morally right action in
every case. It seems reasonable that God could actualize the world so that every state of
affairs is one in which people will make the morally right choice. To deal with this
possibility Plantinga introduces what he calls “transworld depravity (Plantinga 184)”.
Transworld depravity is the property of a person who will always choose the morally
wrong act regardless of the state of affairs God chooses to actualize. Since it is possible
that every actual person and every possible person has the property of transworld
depravity, it follows that there is a possibility that God could not have created a world
with moral good and no moral evil (Plantinga 188-189). That claim is enough to support
the Free Will Defense.
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Return now to Augustine’s philosophy and consider the relation between God and
logic. Augustine allows for two possibilities; either God is the source of logic or God is
logic. He says, “…if there is something more excellent than truth, it is God. If there is
not, then truth itself is God (Augustine 92).” It seems difficult by Augustine’s rationale
to say that God is higher than logic in the chain of being. He may be inclined to say that
logic exists and everything that exists comes from God, therefore logic comes from God.
The flaw in this reasoning is that if God willfully set his own logical limits, he could have
set them otherwise – namely he could have created logic so that he could have created a
world with moral good and no moral evil. It has already been demonstrated that implicit
in the belief of the Free Will Defense is the belief that God has logical limits. Those
limits seem to constrain God very much the same way objective truths limit humankind.
Our very actions and thoughts are constrained by the truth; God’s actions, as the Free
Will Defense demonstrates, are limited by the laws of logic.
If placing God higher than logic seems inconsistent, what then of the possibility
that God is somehow the embodiment of logic? Perhaps this was simply Augustine’s
way of proving the existence of God; essentially, he said that if there is at least one thing
above human beings, God must exist (Augustine 80). I do not think that Augustine
would have been willing to say that God is merely the incorporeal manifestation of
logical laws. If God is logic and God created logic, then God created himself. If God did
not create logical laws, then he is subservient to those laws in the same way that human
beings are subservient to objective truths.
I have shown that parallels can be drawn between these four important subjects on
Augustine’s hierarchy. God may be conceived as the perfect form of humankind and
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logic as the perfect form of truth. If human beings answer to the truth, then God answers
to logic. Since Augustine believes that the Free Will Defense is true, he has two choices
with respect to amending his chain of being. Logic and truth must be better than God and
human beings respectively, or the reverse. I believe it is reasonable to say that logic in a
trivial sense may be above God. This claim is undoubtedly anything but trivial to many
Christians; however, I do not think this poses a serious problem for Augustine.
Rationality and faith go hand in hand - logic and God must exist to give them meaning.
If, however, placing logic above God is not acceptable, he must raise humankind above
truth.
There are many objections to the notion of logic having a higher place in the
natural order of things than God. One objection is that logic is merely the manifestation
of the limits of human knowledge. That is to say things such as round squares and
impossible possibilities are, well, possible – human beings simply cannot understand it.
This is a plausible rejoinder; the concept of logical reasoning is predominately a
phenomenon of western thought. At least it is fair to say that not all people think alike,
so it is not such a stretch of the imagination to think that we are simply missing
something, that humans exhibit a cognitive blind spot to non-logical possibilities. A
second objection is that logic and rationality undermine faith. The typical response to
irrational events and non-logical possibilities from this perspective might be something
like, “God works in mysterious ways,” and nothing more. There is a sense in which an
attempt to prove God’s existence seems to defeat the purpose and importance of faith
within Christian belief. Proving that there is a logical reason for moral evil might be seen
from the same perspective. Augustine would most likely reject these first two objections
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based on his belief that faith and rationality are inseparable. Belief in God on rationality
alone is hard to justify for Augustine, although Aristotle and Aquinas may disagree.
Similarly, faith alone allows for a belief no better than a child’s belief in Santa Clause.
The third objection is that without God, nothing exists. This is the most Augustinian line
of reasoning out of these objections, and I think the most compelling. The best way to
reject this objection is through Plantinga’s explanation of properties. He says that logical
laws, numbers, properties, and the like are not things to be created or destroyed.
Nothingness is not a lack of logic, but a lack of the instantiation of logical laws.
Augustine’s contributions to the philosophy of religion are monumental, and his
chain of being approach is intuitively appealing. I think the mistake was not in his
method, but in his glorification of the truth. It seems absurd to think that the fact that
gravity exists or that 1 + 2 = 3 is somehow existentially better than human beings or God.
His Platonism is quite clear in his reasoning, but whereas Plato’s form of the good was
not an active, creative being, Augustine’s God is exactly that, and that is why problems
arise. I am inclined to believe, like Alvin Plantinga suggests, that logic is simply a
property, not an entity. One last alternative for Augustine is to omit truth and logic from
his hierarchy altogether. If such things are understood as properties, perhaps they do not
belong on the chain of being to begin with. Although I think a few of his ideas might
have room for improvement, Augustine’s venture into theology with one eye for
rationality and one for faith has produced an insightful and elegant work of philosophy.
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Works Cited
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Augustine, Aurelius. “City of God.” Medieval Philosophy Ed. Forrest E. Baird, Walter
Kaufmann. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Augustine, Aurelius. “On the Free Choice of Will.” Medieval Philosophy Ed. Forrest E.
Baird, Walter Kaufmann. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Plantinga, Alvin. The Nature of Necessity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
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This source is documented as (Augustine “City of God”) in the essay.
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