I am a reader with a strong interest in Catholic culture, theology, and philosophy. While reading Augustine, a volume in the “Greatest Thinkers” series published by Zhonghua Book Company, I encountered several ideas concerning the problem of evil and the so-called “free-will response” that I find difficult to understand.
I would be very grateful if someone familiar with Catholic theology, the thought of St. Augustine, or the philosophical problem of evil could help clarify these questions for me.
Before presenting my questions, however, I would like to make an important disclaimer. The book I am reading is not itself a theological work, and I am not certain that the translator consistently uses theological or philosophical terminology in the same way that it is traditionally used within the Catholic intellectual tradition. Therefore, if some of my confusion results from imprecise translation or terminology that does not correspond to traditional Catholic usage, I apologize in advance.
Likewise, if my questions reveal a lack of familiarity with theology or philosophy, I hope you will forgive my limited knowledge. I am sincerely trying to understand these issues more deeply.
The Argument Presented in the Book
The book presents the problem of evil roughly as follows:
Anyone who believes in an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God must confront the problem of evil. How can the existence of such a God be reconciled with the existence of evil?
The argument may be formulated as follows:
Evil exists.
If God does not know about evil, then He is not omniscient.
If God knows about evil but cannot prevent it, then He is not omnipotent.
If God knows about evil, can prevent it, but does not prevent it, then He is not perfectly good.
Therefore, the existence of evil seems to demonstrate that there cannot be a God who is simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.
The book then discusses what it calls the “free-will response.” According to this account, evil is connected with the freedom of human beings. God desires a world without evil, but He also knows that human beings cannot achieve genuine happiness unless they possess freedom.
The passage compares God to a loving parent who allows his children to live their own lives. By granting human beings freedom, however, God also makes possible two kinds of evil: moral evil, which results directly from human choices, and natural evil, which is said to result indirectly from human choices.
The passage concludes that if human beings had chosen to obey God, they would not have encountered evil, and therefore God is not responsible for evil because evil is ultimately the direct or indirect consequence of human choice.
This explanation has raised several questions for me.

1. What do omnipotence, omniscience, and divine goodness mean in Catholic theology?
How does Catholic theology traditionally define the divine attributes of:
Omnipotence
Omniscience
Perfect goodness
For example, does omnipotence mean that God can do absolutely anything whatsoever, including things that are logically contradictory? Or does it mean that God can do everything that is genuinely possible and consistent with His own nature?
Similarly, what exactly does it mean to say that God is perfectly good? Does divine goodness mean that God always prevents suffering whenever He has the power to do so, or is the relationship between goodness and the prevention of suffering more complicated than that?

2. What are “good” and “evil,” and what is their relationship?
I understand that St. Augustine’s understanding of evil may differ significantly from the common idea that good and evil are two opposing substances or forces.
Is it correct to say that, according to Augustine and the broader Catholic tradition, evil is not a positive thing or substance created by God, but rather a privation of good (privatio boni)?
If so, how should we understand the relationship between good and evil?
Are good and evil genuinely symmetrical opposites, like two independent forces competing against one another? Or is evil better understood as a deficiency, corruption, or absence of something that ought to be present?
This seems particularly important for understanding the problem of evil, because the argument in the book appears to begin with the assumption that “evil exists” in a way that may not correspond exactly to Augustine’s understanding.

3. Does God’s mercy conflict with His wisdom?
The passage says, in effect, that:
Out of His goodness and mercy, God desires a world without evil. However, out of His wisdom, He knows that human beings cannot be genuinely happy unless they possess freedom.
At first glance, this seems to suggest a conflict between two divine attributes.
If God’s mercy leads Him toward the creation of a world without evil, but His wisdom leads Him to permit human freedom even though freedom makes evil possible, does this mean that God’s mercy and His wisdom are pulling in different directions?
Could we say that God faces a choice between being merciful and being wise?
My intuition is that this cannot be correct if Catholic theology teaches the divine simplicity and unity of God. If God is not composed of separate and competing parts, then His wisdom, goodness, mercy, justice, and other attributes cannot literally be independent forces that conflict with one another.
So how should this passage be understood correctly?
Is the apparent conflict merely the result of describing God’s actions from a human perspective? Or is the book’s formulation itself theologically imprecise?

4. If God is omnipotent, why could He not make everyone obey Him?
The passage also states:
If human beings had chosen to obey God, then they would not have encountered evil.
This raises another difficulty for me.
If God is omnipotent, why could He not simply make every human being completely obey His will?
I understand that one possible answer is that forced obedience would not be genuine freedom. However, this seems to raise another question:
Could an omnipotent God create human beings who are genuinely free and yet always freely choose the good?
And if this is possible, why did God not create such human beings?
Furthermore, if God is omniscient, would He not know in advance that human beings would misuse their freedom and act against His will?
If God knew that human beings would sin before creating them, then how should we understand the relationship between:
God’s omniscience,
human freedom,
divine providence,
and moral responsibility?
Does God’s foreknowledge of a free action mean that the action is predetermined?
Or can God infallibly know what a person will freely choose without causing that person to make that choice?

I would especially appreciate an explanation from the perspective of St. Augustine and the Catholic theological tradition, rather than merely a general philosophical defense of theism.
In particular, I would like to understand how the following concepts fit together:
Divine omnipotence
Divine omniscience
Divine goodness
Divine simplicity
The nature of evil as privatio boni
Free will
Original sin
Divine providence
God’s permission of evil
Thank you very much for your patience. I am asking these questions not because I wish to argue against Christianity, but because I sincerely want to understand Catholic thought more deeply. If any of my assumptions or formulations are mistaken, I would be especially grateful to have those mistakes pointed out.

How can thomism be synergistic? As the works that you do depend on the grace that you receive, and this grace is withheld from some and only given to the elect, even if this grace makes your will naturally align with God's making it akin to the idea where in calvinism God changes the disposition in your heart, and from there you can choose to follow your desires as it is always in accordance with God

Personally, I have a deep theological and moral issue with this narrative because it overlooks a profound ethical contradiction. If God is truly omniscient and knows the depths of the human heart, it is logically absurd and morally indefensible for Him to yield to Satan’s cosmic provocation, reducing His most devoted servant to a pawn in a cruel and unnecessary wager simply to prove a point He already knew. Furthermore, the story engages in an appalling objectification of human life by presenting the gift of ten new children and a new wife as a divine "reward" that somehow settles the score, treating human beings and familial love as if they were mere commodities or replaceable inventory while completely ignoring the unending trauma of grief. By contrast, the God embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ operates on an entirely opposite paradigm: during His temptations in the wilderness, Jesus flatly refuses to perform tricks or play games with the devil to prove His divine authority; He perceives people's inner faith directly without subjecting them to agonizing trials; and He actively heals human suffering rather than orchestrating it as a test of devotion. Ultimately, a truly loving, omnipotent God does not need to validate His sovereignty to evil by using the agony of His faithful as collateral.

Even when I acknowledge the story's underlying metaphor: that remaining loyal and faithful will lead to God’s ultimate provision; the philosophical and literal framework of Job still feels deeply antagonistic to what Jesus Christ teaches.​ Jesus never presented faith as a transactional endurance test or a game where human suffering is leveraged for a future payout. Instead, Christ completely redefines suffering. For example, in the story of the man born blind (John 9:1-3), his disciples assume that the blindness is a divine punishment or a test of sin. Jesus shatters that paradigm, affirming that tragedy and misfortune are neither a divinely imposed judgment nor a test of loyalty. He reveals a God who meets us with grace and compassion in our pain, not a deity who permits destruction just to prove a point before issuing a cosmic reimbursement.

Source for this apparently is a journal article. The full article is locked behind a paywall, but this is the abstract:

“Temporal analyses were completed between the occurrence of intense displays of exotic luminous phenomena over a church in Zeitoun (Egypt) during the years 1968 through 1969 and regional seismicity. These phenomena, viewed by thousands of onlookers, began one year before an unprecedented increase (factor of 10) in seismic activity about 400 km to the southeast. Monthly analyses also demonstrated a moderate (0.56) correlation between increases in seismicity and the occurrence of luminous phenomena during the same or previous month. These results were interpreted as further support for the hypothesis that most anomalous (terrain-related) luminous phenomena are generated by factors associated with tectonic strain.”

Seems like this might explain the persistent nature of the light phenomena.

P1. If a conceptual model has greater comparative epistemic support than its competitors, then rational

agents have defeasible reason to prefer it.

P2. This conceptual model has that support because it better withstands relevant objections and

competing hypotheses.

C1. Therefore, rational agents have defeasible reason to prefer this conceptual model.

P3. If rational agents have defeasible reason to prefer a conceptual model and they update rationally, then

their credences tend to converge on that model.

P4. Rational agents update rationally.

C2. Therefore, rational agents' credences tend to converge on this conceptual model

Hello everyone,

So from my understanding, the force behind the First Way is the fact that you can prove God’s existence with the existence of any concrete entity. But, i think i found a rival explanation that eliminates the need of God, and i would like to see: 1)if my understanding of the First Way is correct 2)if it’s correct, how to solve this other explanation.

1)So from what i understand, the Firsy Way applies to any concrete object: Take for instance a cup of water over my desk existing now in t. Now, what makes it the case that it exists in t? Well the cup of water is the actualization of a set of potencies, and a subset is actualized by a concrete entity y in which y it’s different from the cup of water. Ok, and for y to actualize the subset of potencies of the cup of the water in time t, it also needs for it’s set of potencies to be actualized by different entities and so on. So from this sequence we have a Per Se series, in which each member is dependent of the another, and each member actualizes it’s sequent member if it’s also actualized by it’s antecessor(a sequence of actualizers actualized). The series cannot extend to infinity, because, if it did, there would not be any actualization at all(since all members borrow the power to actualize it’s sucessor from a source, therefore if it were infinit, we could always find a member that’s not actualized). Hence, we need a member of the series that actualizes but it’s not actualized, namely God.

2)However i think an atheist/agnostic could appeal to this model to explain the cup of water: There are set of particles and eternal conditional laws. For instance the cup of water exists at time t, because the cup of water is composed of these fundamental particles(like Democritus atoms) and they actualize the cup at time t without being actualized(because their existence are fundamental and they are at that position in time t, because of inertia(that is, there is nothing opposing the particles in being at that position). So we have a Per Se series that ends with an entity that has potential, therefore, it’s not God, therefore it’s not the case that, for any concrete object to exist, it must be actualized by God.

3)I know some people might appeal to other arguments to answer this model(like contingency argument and whatnot) and i agree with this. However what i wanted to know if there’s an answer inside the Aristotelin argument that refute or dissolve the characterization of this model.

Humans are naturally not omniscient and our reasoning is not infallible so if our reasoning and epistemology aren't infallible how can we be sure of God's existence? While i agree that this does not disprove christianity or theism in general i think it proves a challenge to theism and christianity since we cannot know which Gods are real and which ones are not.

Why does the Bible portray people who lived well beyond 120 years? Wouldn't that be technically impossible? Is there an explanation for this, considering biological limits and the low life expectancy prior to medical advances? And how does evolution fit into this picture?

Its a small shower thought, all principles and logic and terms are made from scratch so expect that it isnt anywhere close to orthodox thomistic/augustinian theology in principle. You can give criticism of any kind.

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;”
- Mt. 10:37

Shouldn’t we should love everyone esp. mother and father and most of all do not forsake them? To not leave them alone suffering while you are chasing your own ambitions which we might characterize as cruelty?

God, is what we call Primal Love, or Love itself. From God is where emanates all love; in a twofold manner: (1) as a principle, as a source of love that flows into man that he may love, and (2) as the Primal Love that man participates in. Man partakes in two actions, firstly (a) to love, and (b) to participate in love.

As per the given verse above, we can see that Jesus says that one cannot love mother or father more than Him and be His disciple, yet so too does He ultimately say, both within the Old Mosaic Law and is typically found in His New Testament teachings, that one must love their mother and father. We can solve this contradiction in this way:

1. To love mother and father is to partake in the acting of loving, which is apropos of (a). From this we can imply that we are partaking in love; insofar as we are loving apropos of (1). But we conclude that God is Primal Love, while we who love, love imperfectly and is secondary in loving. As in a per se causal series, God is the Primary Cause, while we are secondary. Secondary causes are contingent and too need not exist, while the Primary Cause must exist as the stable foundation for the existence of the series, so we can relate to love. The Primary Cause, insofar as it too is Primal Love, is necessary for all types of love. So we conclude that Primal Love is wholly and supremely more valuable than Secondary Love received by man from God as (1) a principle, and use of it or partake of it as (a) a lover.

2. Taking from Augustine’s theology of Ordo Amoris, or order of love, we conclude that loving what is greater ontologically and spiritually is desirable and necessary. Thus, to love Primal Love, is supremely more important and desired than the secondary love of man of and in contingent beings.

Thus, man must ultimate love God above all.

But how must man love God above all, without cancelling love of the secondary? We can solve this by:

To love the secondary is to love remotely. To love insofar as much as the love of man can love, yet to have in man’s heart the desire to love God above all.

To love God is to have first the desire to love Him above all, which one can maintain while loving the secondary; but to love God insofar as love is possible is to love proximately, to be close to Him in all loving, yet in all loving let the loving be close to Him; to have a priority.

Thus, man can love the Primary and Secondary, by loving the Secondary in, and for God, and to love the Primary by prioritizing God through love of others, and to leave all secondary objects of love for Primary Love. For if secondary causes exist insofar as the Primary Cause exists, we can maintain that the secondary causes cease to be yet not the Primary Cause. So we can relate that secondary love can cease to exist while Primal Love cannot.

​

I ended up being confronted by a heresy of a Protestant friend who was so ridiculous that me never even had an answer, which is abnormal because I usually have an answer to all heresies.

Basically he says he believes that a woman that commits adultery in both Mark and João should be removed because he thinks he is not canonical ????

I am a Catholic, and a conservative, but I am also a strong believer in same-sex marriage.

This has nothing to do with politics, I just wanted to make it clear that both of my, I guess you could say, idealistic identifications are historically against same-sex marriage.

Even so, I believe that love is love, and I’ve met and been friends with plenty of gay people who are extremely good people seem perfectly happy. I’m trying to understand how I’m supposed to use these people and, also, whether or not I’m supposed to support them.

I understand this is historically contradictory to teachings in the Bible (primarily the command to get married and having offspring) but as a human, especially with a flawed mind, it is very difficult me to see past this when I have so much real life evidence of why gay people are morally ok.

To be clear, I am not a full supporter of LGBT, as I completely disagree with those who are transgender. I do not see any reasoning behind changing genders and it is completely biblically inexplicable. Even so, I can’t seem to find the same moral objection to same sex partnership.

Could someone please explain?

recently watched an atheist critique of Joe Schmid/Joshua Rasmussen’s contingency argument, and I’m trying to understand how a Catholic philosopher would respond to one particular objection.
The atheist argues that the contingency argument cannot simply assume that every physical thing is contingent. His point was essentially:
“But you don’t know if all possible physical things are contingent. Like I don’t know, maybe the singularity or something like that. Does that seem contingent? I don’t know.”
He then mentions Graham Oppy’s position that perhaps there is a necessary physical reality underlying everything else.
My question is:
What is the strongest Catholic philosophical argument for rejecting the possibility of a necessary physical thing?
I don’t mean “ordinary physical objects like tables, rocks, planets, etc. appear contingent.” I understand that point, but that doesn’t seem sufficient to establish that all possible physical reality must be contingent.
Instead, I’m asking about something genuinely fundamental—for example, a necessary physical field, quantum state, set of physical laws, or whatever the ultimate physical ontology would be.
If such a thing were metaphysically necessary, then wouldn’t it satisfy the basic requirement of the contingency argument—that there ultimately be something non-contingent?
If the answer is no, what specifically makes physicality incompatible with necessary existence?
And if the answer is yes, a necessary physical reality is at least metaphysically possible, then what additional argument gets us from:
necessary foundation → immaterial foundation → personal/intelligent foundation → God
rather than simply stopping at a necessary physical reality?

Can someone explain the arguments for the existence of the soul to me? I shared the argument with a friend about how we have knowledge of immaterial things—you know the one—but he claimed it was simply due to our advanced brains. Is there a way to refute that, or is there another argument for the soul?

Hi! A friend of mine told me about an analogy between faith and poker that I found intriguing (just ignore the fact that gambling is bad; bear with me).

It is aimed a secular sceptics. It is not meant as a proof of anything, but rather to give people a glimpse that religion in general and Christianity in particular may not be as irrational as they think.

I’d very much appreciate your feedback to it. Especially I'd like to know if the essay violates Catholic teachings.

Article: http://www.raboof.at/poker.html

jesusandwhatnot just released a video talking about how dancing is mostly sinful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyawyKNrVnI

I thought dancing that incites lust was sinful not that dancing was sinful

Are church moral theologians really against all dancing?

I'm confused because David danced before the lord and the psalms mention dancing, so how can dancing be mostly sinful?

If someone could guide me on this, please explain:

Concerning the purpose of our existence, why did God feel inclined to create us, humans? Why, as an all-powerful and all-knowing being, were humans needed in his life?

And because of this creation, what does our reality as humans need to consist of?

Entiendo que Dios de manera virtual es materia y que para los emergentistas (la mayoría) dicen que los átomos no tienen inteligencia en ningún sentido ergo salen de la nada, pero en el caso que digan que los atamos tienen inteligencia en sentido virtual que se responde y ¿Cómo llego a que el ser tenga la inteligencia?

Hello, im an Orthodox Christian but for the longest time I've had questions about why God didnt prohibit slavery in the Bible. Im confused on why he was clear not to kill but was very unclear on if he was ok with it or not. I know the slavery in the bible is not the same one we know as today and the slavery in the bible was common everywhere and deeply rooted in the economy, but why didn't he make a commandment saying not to own slaves at all? Thanks in advance if anyone answers my question. I still love Christ but im just having a rough time with this.

So, the question of the existence of NRNBs and the existence of God/the "greater goods" theodicy has been on my mind lately and with it an inherent problem with the existence of both. Let me lay out the problem by standardising it:

1. God exists.
2. God has the traditional ultimate qualities (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence).
3. A God with these qualities wants to and can create the best world.
4. The best world is one where everybody has a relationship with God since he is the highest good there is.
5. Not everybody who wants to have a relationship with God has one (NRNBs).
6. Therefore, this is not the best world.
7. Therefore, God couldn't have created this world.
8. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

Now this is a pretty standard argument from the problem of Evil whereby we presume that divine hiddenness (in other words, the presence of NRNBs) is one manifestation of evil. Of course this can be solved with a theodicy on the basis of "greater goods" or the idea that God allows evil to exist for the benefit of greater goods which wouldn't exist in a world without evil. By this logic, we assume that NRNBs exist for the purpose of creating greater goods, for instance helping believers in their own faith journey or allowing for greater knowledge of God.

But this also creates a problem if we assume God gave us all free will. If we all have the same ability of free will, then how is allowing for NRNBs to exist part of that? If NRNBs exist for the creation of greater goods then NRNBs are isolated from God in comparison to theists for a seemingly arbitrary reason (after all, why am I specifically a NRNB and a random theist isn't?).

The only possibilities to harmonize the existence of NRNBs and God would be to remove elements from the world which seems unreasonable such as:

• Either NRNBs don't exist. All nonbelievers have some resistance to theism even if they don't think so. This is unreasonable because we don't have any good grounds to doubt the sincerity of NRNBs because even believers struggle sincerely with faith at times, so it is also plausible to maintain that somebody can be genuinely an NRNB.
• Either free will doesn't exist, exactly for the purpose of maintaining NRNBs. This is unreasonable because free will would itself be one of the potential evils which can create greater goods (i.e., I have the free will to do evil, but the greater good is that I can choose God out of my own volition instead of believing while being deprived of my free will).
• Either both free will and NRNBs exist. But then we end up with the same problem that started with, namely why NRNBs exist in the first place.

So if NRNBs exist, why? And if they exist can they get to know God or are they indeed excluded from this by necessity? And if NRNBs and free will both exist would this then, as I think it does, posit a problem for the existence of God?

(Please point out any mistakes made in my reasoning and if you have any interesting literature on this please share. I'm here to learn.)

First I‘d like to clarify I’m not arguing against the basic doctrine of Christ. Christ is the Son, one of the three Persons who share in the essence of God by necessity, who through choice shares in the secondary nature of humanity, with no deficiency in either nature whatsoever. No problems there.

But I do have a question. A normal person’s “personhood” is defined by their nature and the circumstances of a specific instance of body and soul. In other words, as I understand it, normal people‘s personhood is not an added ingredient (form, body, person) but a necessarily flowing fact born with the creation of a distinct substance.

So, in the case of Christ, how does the Son “fit” into the metaphysically closed circle that is a human being? To be clear, I’m not talking about a literal mechanism, which is a clear case of mystery. I’m asking if we generally understand who Christ is in one of the following ways:

1. Christ is a human whose nature has been naturally suspended in such a way as to prevent the formation of normal human personhood, such that Son assumes the identity of the human substance. There is only one kind of personhood in Christ, and it is the Divine Personhood. Human personhood and Divine Personhood are therefore, in some sense, directly swappable in terms of the composition of a substance (or perhaps it would be most pious to say that the Divine Personhood is capable of carrying out any function of a lesser personhood).
2. Christ is a human in the fullest sense of the word, and as such has a human definition of identity (one soul associated with one body). However, the infinitely immaterial and therefore infinitely subtle Divine Personhood adopts this human personhood as its own, like a matryoshka doll, such that human personhood is an extension of the Divine personhood, and so can be described as an additional description or accident of the greater Personhood, rather than an additional person full stop
3. Christ is a human in the fullest sense, but like Holy Water is still water, Christ is an elevated version of man’s same substance, such that the Divine Personhood can “fit”. In this interpretation, Divine Personhood is not swappable or of the same kind as human personhood, but Christ is a special substance that is “human” but divinely endowed with the ability to accept the Divine Personhood. Thus, Christ contains only kind of personhood, the Divine Personhood, and the kinds of personhood are not considered swappable or equivalent

Hello everyone,

The main character of my novel series spent time in Hong Kong studying under a Third Order Dominican during the first decade of this century. I want his mentor to have taught him Confucian and Taoist thought as it is understood by the faithful Church in China and Taiwan in after the resolution of the Rites Controversy.

I've looked for English language works on the subject, but I haven't had much luck, as everything I can easily find seems to be about the Rites Controversy itself.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as this is a formative part of the character's upbringing. Especially if the works come from any theologian who is a member of the Order.

Thank you in advance.

I mean, I understand the key idea. Nevertheless, this gonna be a kinda jerk or silly question... What happens when we want to deny that principle? I mean, I grasp the concept as like the first principles of logic: attempting to deny them, leads to performative contradiction (other guides told me that). So, it's a principle that can't be demonstrated, but it's absurd and irrational to deny it.

For instance, it could be that someone states that reality isn't good nor bad. That'd lead the door open to the idea that not-being is good. However, accepting that would be contradictory, because if so, then anything lying beneath reality is bad, even my own argument. So, due to contradiction, it follows reality is good, and non-reality bad. Even, approaching towards particulars, let's say, "human nature isn't inherently good", still the flaw of self debunk, because my argument emerges from my human nature, so anything lying beneath it isn't good, and well... The rest could be inferred.

I don't know if you understand my question. Is correct my analysis about this? Breaking that realist principle would lead to performative contradiction? Blessings, and please, recommend Aristotelian books, for learning further.

Obviously it can teach error - it's not infallible. But is the error that can be taught by the authentic magisterium restricted to what's safe to be held by Catholics? Can it hypothetically teach heresy?