Augustine was one of the first theologians to approach the problem of evil from an aesthetic perspective. Even though Augustine is usually known as the champion of freewill theodicy, his anthropological explanation of evil is logically dependent on his aesthetic theodicy. In beauty Augustine finds a fundamental logic of contrastive harmony, which integrates even the wound of human freedom into a poem of the universe. Heaven and hell together highlight God's providential care of the world. After examining Augustine's aesthetic theodicy of harmony, I argue that there can be no eternal hell even in the Augustinian universe. God's beautiful justice will not tolerate the eternal frustration of hell.
Recent advances in technology have brought humanity to a unique point in history where theodicy is no more just a religious matter but also a matter of science and technology. Ray Kurzweil offers a non-religious Singularity theodicy of this-worldly subjective immortality (the survival of the soul after the dissolution of the body) with three strategies: the freezing strategy in cryonics, the cloning strategy in genetics, and the transference strategy in information technology. I argue that three challenges need to be met for the Singularity theodicy to be successful. The first challenge is related to the technological plausibility of human brain scanning and whether one can scan unconsciousness without making it into something other than unconsciousness. Based on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Derek Parfit, I offer the second criticism that the non-identity problem arises, due to personal identity being a temporal seriality of experiences between the biological person and the unloaded data. Lastly, even if intelligent patterns become immortal in the Singularity, this would not be what Christianity has called the immortality of the soul.
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