HERMENEUTICS OF THE PROBLEM OF GOD AND EVIL IN AUGUSTINE AND WHITEHEAD

SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: Department Of Philosophy

CONTRIBUTORS:

Idoko, B.O;
Odimegwu, I;

ABSTRACT:

The issue of how there can be so much unearned suffering in a world created and sustained by a God who is believed to be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent has always been a problem to Christianity. This problem arises because our traditional ideas of God and evil in philosophy are inspired by Judeo-Christian metaphysical categories. However, the Judeo-Christian notions of God and evil as basically formulated by St Augustine are lacking in two major areas: ‘their inability to resolve the problem of evil and their failure to satisfactorily explain the relationship between the immanent and transcendent natures of God or rather, how a God who is divine and transcendent comes to interact with a world that is both fallen and material. Alfred North Whitehead tries to resolve these problems in his ‘Philosophy of Organism’ where he argued that God and evil are part and parcel of an integral process that is evolutionally moving towards the point of self-actualization. This dissertation employs the method of hermeneutics to argue that Whitehead’s theodicy though, defective in some aspects, offers a robust and more satisfactory explanation of God and evil than the Judeo-Christian inspired theses. To this end, the use of hermeneutics is informed by the fact that Augustine’s works and much more Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the main primary sources of this dissertation are written in what many scholars agree is esoteric and abstract diction. The method brings down Whitehead’s highly technical vocabulary to conventional philosophical language and compares it with Augustinian solution.