St Augustine (354-430 AD)

In the Middle Ages there were basically four approaches to the question of how to reconcile reason/philosophy and faith/revelation:

    1. Ignore philosophy because all you need is faith.  This was popular with some early Christians such as Tertullian, and with Muslim mystics such as al-Ghazali..

    2. Faith seeking understanding.  This is the slogan adopted by those (such as Augustine and Anselm) who believed that faith is most important but that it is good to use our God-given powers of reason too.

    3. Reason is primary and faith that contradicts reason is only for the ignorant masses.  This idea is associated with the philosopher Averroes.

    4. True faith and reason agree with each other, rational argument leads to religious conclusions.  This is the view of St Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine used Platonic philosophy to explain some puzzling or obscure Christian beliefs and shared Plato's contempt for the body.

According to Augustine, God "orders all things for the good," so apparent evil is really part of an overall good scheme.  Evil has no positive existence because God would not create evil.  Evil is a turning of the will away from God toward some lesser good.  The will itself is good, but it is free to pursue what it likes.  When it pursues a lesser good than God, that is evil.  In other words, no object is evil since all owe their existence to God.  But some are better than others.  Evil is not a thing but an act, the act of choosing an ungodly path.

The Roman philosopher Cicero argued that either the will is not truly free or else God does not know what we are going to do (so He does not know everything).  Augustine pointed out that God could know what we will freely choose to do without this making us unfree. 

Cicero's defenders today claim that if God knows what I am going to do then it must be true that I will do just that: it is inevitable.  And if it is inevitable, then I am not free to act otherwise.  BUT all that is inevitable is that, whatever I choose to do, God knows I will choose to do it.  If I choose to eat two doughnuts and then two doughnuts more, it is inevitable that I will ('inevitably') eat four doughnuts.  But my choice to do so could still be perfectly free.  If God knows everything, and if everything includes my future action, then it follows logically that God knows my future actions.  But a purely logical 'constraint' on what I do is no more a real constraint than the mathematical 'constraint' that if I eat two doughnuts and then two more I cannot but eat four doughnuts.  Neither God's knowledge nor logic limits my behavior in any way.  Another way to think of it is like this: If I see you leave the room then it must be true that you leave the room.  Of course this says nothing about your choice being unfree.  Now imagine that God sees things in the future.  His seeing them does not make them unfree.

What might be a problem is the idea that there is any such thing as the future for God to see or know about.  But if there is no such thing, then the problem of God's foreknowledge does not arise.  He still knows everything that there is to know, but the future would then not be one of these things.

Either way, Cicero seems to be wrong.