Augustine: His Views on Evil .
A philosophical question faces Christians, and in fact all theists, that challenges the belief in God. To theists, God is an omnipotent, perfect God. He is good. Theists accept this, and embrace it, for how else can they worship God and give their lives to Him unless He is good? However, in this world evil is constantly seen all around us. God is the creator of all things in this world, and he is good, theists must then ask themselves what evil is and where it came from. Augustine attempted to define evil, and in doing so he explains its existence.
Augustine establishes that everything God made is good, and since God made everything, everything must be good. He than asks where evil could have come from. After all, evil did not come from God, it must have come from a source other than God. If this true, then is it not possible that God could have prevented evil from entering into the world as He is God? Evil is clearly see evil in the world, did God allow it to enter? This would seem to mean either that God is not entirely good, or that he is not omniscient and all powerful. These questions Augustine does his best to answer First, Augustine establishes a definition of evil. "Evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains". He observed that evil is something that always injures, and an injury is deprivation of good. If there were no deprivation of good in the thing being injured, then there would not be any injury. Since all things were made with goodness by God originally, then when things are evil, they are deprived of the goodness that God gave them. In other words, everything that God made is good, and when you take away some goodness from something that God made, we call that condition evil. To say that something is evil then is just a shorthand way of saying it lacks goodness.
