Explain How the Theodices Help Us Understand the Responsbilty of God for Evil?

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Explain how the theodicies help us understand the responsibility of God for evil in our world (20) A theodicy is a justification of God’s character in the face of evil. A theodicy has to hold God’s omnipotence, God’s benevolence and the problem of evil to work. A theodicy has to deal with the two types of evil, natural evil and moral evil. The two main theodicies is the one by Augustine and the one by Irenaeus. The theodicy by Augustine makes God not responsible for evil and that evil does not exist as a thing, but it is just a privation of good. Augustine starts his theodicy with creation. He states that creation was good and harmonious. One of the reasons that creation was good, was because humans were given free will. Free will is where humans have the ability to make their own choices in life that are unconstrained by external circumstances. But things quickly after creation went bad for humans because of the misuse of free will given by God to humans. This was during the angelic and human fall. This is where some angels who had gone against God, tempted Adam and Eve to also go against God. The consequences of the sin of Adam, was that all humans and angels fell and became separate from God and Adam’s sin is seminally present in all humanity, because we all originate from him. Also because of the angelic fall, natural evil was created because of the disharmony created in nature from some Angels going against God .Augustine says that the only solution to come back to God and remove original sin is to follow Christianity. This is where humans have a choice to accept Christ and God or reject it, this is a soul deciding choice. If humans choose to reject Christ then they will go to Hell and are morally evil because they have a lack of good in them to follow Christ. If humans choose to follow Christ they will go to heaven. Humans here still have free will, because

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