Sheila asked:

What do you feel is St. Augustine's position on original sin?

Also, what do you think is the source of all knowledge according to John Locke and how do you think
these elements function in creating our view of the world?

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Augustine literally believed St. Paul where he says that sin "entered the world by one person and
spread to everyone" (Rom. 5:12). In other words, human existence is fundamentally disordered at the
source. His Commentary on Genesis(De Genesi ad litteram) makes fascinating reading in this
regard. The 'original sin' (peccatum originale) of Adam was pride, the false self-love that makes the
self its own end. In an early work, On Free Will(De Libero Arbitrio) Augustine writes, "The human will
sins when it turns aside from the changeless and universal Good, and turns towards its own private
good, or to goods remote from, or beneath itself. It turns to a private good when it wills to be in its
own power; to a good outside its proper range, when it seeks the knowledge of what belongs to
others or concerns not itself; to an inferior good when it loves bodily pleasure. Thus, a person, given
over to pride, curiosity or wantonness, finds himself in another life, which in comparison with the
higher life, is death ... What is evil is the will's aversion from the changeless Good and its conversion
to the goods that are changing; and this conversion, being voluntary and not compelled, is followed
by the fit and just punishment of misery." (De Lib. Arb. II. 53.) In his Retractionswritten at the end of
his life, in which Augustine went back through his writings and made retractions of things he wished
he had not said, we find him considering this definition of sin as 'natural' and willful and sticking by it.

The source of all knowledge for John Locke was experience, conceived as either external (sense
data) or 'inner' (reflection upon materially produced data). In either case sensation accompanies
experience and reflection works on sensation in order to understand it. Locke is very mechanistic in
his thinking. Because Locke calls the possibility of the self knowledge into question by his
presumption that the so-called 'self' is a blank slate (tabula rasa), a naturally sceptical and
materialistic world view is the outcome. Historically, Locke's philosophy gave metaphysical
justification for the 'enlightened worldliness' of his time. However, his questioning of the idea of
knowledge — that it is abstracted from experience and then fabricated by means generalization and
association — paved the way for Humean scepticism, in which knowledge is reduced to subjective
impressions. But then along came Kant...

Matthew Del Nevo
www.sicetnon.com

Second opinion:

St Augustine's position on original sin

The doctrine of original sin originates not with the story of the fall of Adam and Eve found in Genesis
3, for this text does not say that we are subject to their punishment, but with the interpretation found
in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. It is from here that Augustine formulates and finds scriptural
support for his position on original sin.

Augustine's conception of original sin is morally questionable for two reasons:

1. The old problem of reconciling God's nature as an all-loving being with the fact that when Adam
   sins God punishes him, and the whole of humanity to follow with death.

Further, there is the question of whether God has any just claim to be the author of morality. If all that
constitutes morality is the will of God and to sin is to go against the will of God then this is not morality
at all but prudence, since the only reason we do as God says is not because we see it as right or
good, but because we do not want to die. And if morality is independent of God's will then maybe
Adam was right to go against God's will and so what he did was not even sinful.

2. Leaving that problem aside, there is the general question of whether sin or moral guilt can be
   transferred from one person to another by any causal mechanism let alone the biological "sin gene".
   Some Christians believe that such a transfer is possible and was accomplished in the trials and
   tribulations of Jesus Christ. The idea is that Jesus died as payment to God for our sin. (For an
   entertaining interpretation of this theology see Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ.)

Richard Swinburne, a Christian philosopher criticises Augustine's ideas on original sin along these
lines. Swinburne argues that no one can be guilty for the sins of any other person unless he had an
obligation to deter that person and failed to fulfil that obligation. Since no one alive today (or even
then) could have stopped Adam and Eve from sinning we cannot be guilty for their sins. In fact the
one person who could be said to have an obligation to Adam and Eve was God himself. Ifhe could
have stopped them and didn't then God is responsible for the first sin. Of course that is a big 'If',
raising questions about free will and God's omnipotence.

So it seems that we have good reasons to reject Augustine's conception of original sin.

Locke on the source of all knowledge

At the beginning of Book Four of his Essay on Human UnderstandingLocke defines knowledge as
"Nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any
of our ideas". So knowledge derives from reasoning about our ideas, and ideas according to Locke
originate in experience.

Locke draws certain conclusions from this definition about the extent of knowledge. One is that, "We
can have knowledge no further than we have ideas". Our knowledge cannot go beyond the ideas or
concepts that we have, and the ideas that we have are bounded by experience. (Just a point of
clarification. While Locke holds that all ideas derive from experience, he does not believe that all our
claims to know are justified by appeal to experience. Instead, knowledge is a relation between us and
the perceptions we see between our ideas.)

What does this mean for our view of the world? Locke thinks that knowledge is only possible in such
areas as mathematics, logic and ethics. In other areas such as metaphysics and science we can only
have degrees of probable belief. Why is this? Given his definition of knowledge, Locke thinks that we
are unable to perceive any connection between the constituent ideas of a scientific hypothesis or an
empirical observation. All we do perceive is the conjunction of ideas without any necessary or intrinsic
connection. This is because in the case of material objects (the external world) we cannot know what
their real essencesare, because these real essences can never be objects of human perception.
Locke does not think, however, that this lack of knowledge should lead us to scepticism. Instead, he
argues that knowledge is not required in many instances. Probable belief is satisfactoryfor our
purposes in acting in the world.

So for Locke knowledge is severely limited for us, restricted to the scope of necessary truths. We can
nevertheless have degrees of certainty about aspects of the world. One problem for Locke's account
is that while we may be able to perceive connections between ideas, we have no guarantee that
anything corresponds in the world to our ideas. In other words, the problem for Locke is the lack of
any connection between our ideas and the existence of that which our idea is an idea of.Without any
such reassurance, how can we make any claims about the world? All we know is the ideas we have
and the connections between them. Our world then becomes confined to the realm of necessary
truths, logical relations.

While Locke thought that there was an intermediate stage between certain knowledge and
scepticism, the fact that all one can know is the inside of one's own head, and we have no way of
knowing whether what we think corresponds to anything real outside us, means that we can only
have a limited conception of the world.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield.