On October 25, 2018, Professor Karofsky gave a lecture titled “Augustine” on the teachings and philosophy of St. Augustine in relation to Christianity presented in his work titled City of God. Throughout her lecture, Professor Karofsky discussed Augustine’s beliefs about free will. I found it interesting that Augustine supported the existence of human free will, the ability to choose for oneself, while also believing in predestination, meaning that God has foreknowledge of every event in a person’s life and whether or not they will achieve salvation. How is it possible to believe that the two could coexist?
C.S. Lewis has stated that “free will is perfected by God’s predestination, rather than eliminated.” Many, including myself, make the mistake of assuming that these two things cannot coexist. God does not see the future, but rather can see all. According to Christian teachings, He exists outside of time and has eternal knowledge as He is always present. Augustine writes, “Whatsoever a man suffers contrary to his own will, he ought not to attribute to the will of men, or of angels, or of any created spirit, but rather to His will who gives power to wills” (Augustine 5.10). God is almighty and powerful, and therefore gives us the power to use our free will. Predestination is more-so God’s control over His creation while free will is human beings’ control over their own lives.
In our discussion with Professor Keller following the lecture, we talked about how one’s foreknowledge of an event or decision does not take away an individual’s free will. For example, if I were to be asked whether I wanted coffee or tea, my friends might know what I was going to decide before I even vocalized it just because they know that I really like coffee. A parent can put a bowl of ice cream and a bowl of broccoli in front of their child and know that they will choose the ice cream because they hate vegetables. A person’s knowledge of what you are going to choose does not change the fact that you have free will. Therefore, why should God’s knowledge be any different? God, as well as our friends, may know the outcome of the decision, but they are not forcing us to choose anything.
Professor Karofsky raised another important point. If free will did not actually exist, why would sinning exist? It would not make sense for God to punish us for our actions if he was the one controlling them. In addition to that, why would there be any evil in the world if that was the case? God encourages his people to act peacefully and love one another as He loves us. Therefore he would not control people to commit heinous acts to hurt His Creation. Unfortunately, most sins, and most actions in general, are committed out of necessity and because of human imperfection. God does not make us perfectly follow his rules and strictures, such as the Ten Commandments, but allows us to reconcile for our actions when we do not.
According to the philosophy of Augustine, God may influence our actions and have foreknowledge of them, but does not ultimately choose them for us. We must use our own free will, as well as the goodness of our souls and consciousness, to determine the right path to take in our lives.
Works Cited
Augustine, and Marcus Dods. The City of God. T. & T. Clark, 1878.
“C.S. Lewis Institute – Time and Eternity.” Peter Kreeft, http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/20_cslewis_time-eternity.htm.
Karofsky, Amy. “Augustine.” Hofstra University Honors College, 25 Oct 2018, Hofstra University, Long Island, NY. Lecture.
Tori's Treasure Trove 
I see that your argument is about the conflicting views of Augustine about free will and predestination. I really enjoy this quote by C.S. Lewis that you included to discuss free will. I see that you are also arguing that while God controls his creations, we his creations are able to control our own lives. You made great use of specific, modern examples such as the one about ice cream and broccoli, and in my future vlogs I’ll use specific examples such as these to relate these old texts to a more relatable present day context. I thoroughly enjoyed your blog, but for me there was a lot of new information stuffed into this post. Maybe write different posts based on these many ideas, or edit your blog down to make it more concise. Overall, great blog!
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Hi Victoria! I enjoyed you acknowledged the points made in Professor Karofsky’s lecture and formed your own opinions and resolutions to them in a way that is clear and articulate. Your response to her discussion of free will and evil seem well thought out and make sense, making them an acceptable solution to this problem that seems to plague both philosophers and regular people alike. In my own blogposts I will use the simplistic examples, such as the one where you compare broccoli and ice cream in front of a child, I make my writing more understandable and relevant to the reader. Overall, great job!
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I really like your analysis and deeper thinking about Karofsky’s lecture, but I can’t help but disagree with one point. You say that we as God’s creations have control over our own lives, but if God has control over his creations, doesn’t he then have control over us as well? However, you do reconcile this in your final paragraph in a way that makes sense to me. Overall, I think this was really well written, and I think I might have to follow your example and start using some outside quotes to help my arguments.
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I believe your thesis was “Predestination and free will have the ability to coexist with each other, instead of in substitute of each other.” What was memorable for me was how you included examples of a concept in your writing in order to better explain the concept. I’m going to steal connecting my personal beliefs to my writing and maybe trying to understand opposing viewpoints in my blog.
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I really like the way you frame God’s power as not to create will or destiny, but to give humans power to use their own wills. That’s a neat way of explaining Augustine’s beliefs and also a pretty solid answer to a lot of the questions I was thinking about while writing my own post this week! I think the argument of sin being wholly created by free will answers the questions I had about God being truly good – it places the blame of evil’s existence on people instead of God. I do wish you had speculated more about the impact of God’s allowing free will to create evil on God’s all-powerfulness – would God still be all-powerful if God cannot eradicate sin? Could God do this, but chooses not to in order to allow free will – and wouldn’t this make God not truly good? Overall, your argument was really clear and definitely helped me understand a side to Augustine’s arguments I didn’t fully understand on my own. I also thought it was really cool how you tied together the lecture, Augustine’s writings, as well as your discussion section with Professor Keller and C.S. Lewis! It’s always good to bring in other input – I often get stuck in looking at only the lecture and the reading and I like that you expanded your view of the issue!
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I absolutely love the argumentation presented in this blog post. A lot of it is very insightful, as one of the oldest paradoxes in the history of theology would not have survived if it were not so layered and complex. The correct identification and application of each quotation in the correct context was masterfully executed, to the point where none of them seemed even slightly out of place. The main issue that I would say, however, can be illustrated in that every paragraph begins with someone else’s opinion. A lot of this is wonderful on its own, but, with so many different opinions, I didn’t see much of your own argumentation and logical progression. I wouldn’t say that you didn’t have a thesis, since a lot of your arguments did coalesce into a few clearly interconnected points, but the thesis that I saw didn’t feel like YOUR thesis; it felt like the synthesis of the sources which you had chosen to analyze. For this reason, I think that the next step to take to make this a stellar blog post is to think more about how you can incorporate your own ideas into your analyzation of this piece, while still referring to the sources for information and maybe an idea here and there.
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I love the image you used to represent your post! You make good use of adding a direct quote, however, I feel as if you could’ve tied it back directly to what was said by Professor K in lecture, and also incorporated your own analysis. I would say your logic breaks in the statements that follow the direct quote. You could’ve furthered your argument by going into greater detail about free will and how God could’ve created humans with more free will. Overall, nice job, and great connection to the discussion class that followed! I will definitely keep that in mind for my future posts.
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Your thesis relating to free will and how it’s possible for Augustine’s ideas to coexist is an interesting topic. The idea that it could be messy if God is foreknowing and yet we are able to choose for ourselves is something I wanted to know more about. Your arguments were very clear and made the blog post easy to follow and understand. For me, when you restated Karofsky’s question, “If free will did not actually exist, why would sinning exist?” it became a little confusing. You started your blog post stating Augustine supported the idea of free will. The use of each paragraph to make its own distinct point is something I want to use in my writing to keep it more organized.
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I enjoyed your post. I really like it when people include texts and examples from sources that we were not assigned, and you did that in this post with your inclusion of the C.S. Lewis quote. You ask a lot of questions, which helps the readers think more deeply about the lecture themselves. You also do a nice job tying in quotes from the assigned reading to make a more solid point. The only thing I would change about this post is perhaps making it a bit longer; everything is there, but I feel like you still have some room to really elaborate. Great job otherwise.
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I’m so glad I clicked to your post because I really enjoyed reading it and learned some new insight. I understood that you were expanding on the fact that free will and predestination by God are not contradicting but complimentary. I really loved the way you explained this concept with tons of examples and pulling from other sources. I can really see your wisdom and faith shine through your words, and it was inspiring to read. I’m going to try to follow your example and use more examples and external sources in my future blog posts.
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