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The claim here is that we understand God because we can share in his being, and by extension, the transcendental attributes of being, namely, goodness, truth, and unity. [2] So far as Scotus is concerned, we need to be able to understand what ‘being’ is as a concept in order to demonstrate the existence of God, lest we compare what we know ...
The nature of being good has been given many treatments; one is that the good is based on the natural love, bonding, and affection that begins at the earliest stages of personal development; another is that goodness is a product of knowing truth. Differing views also exist as to why evil might arise.
The tree is the soul, that is, the man himself; the fruit is the man’s works. An evil man therefore cannot work good works, nor a good man evil works. Therefore if an evil man would work good things, let him first become good. But as long as he continues evil, he cannot bring forth good fruits.
In the same line of thinking, St. Augustine also defined evil as an absence of good, as did the theologian and monk Thomas Aquinas, who stated "a man is called bad insofar as he lacks a virtue, and an eye is called bad insofar as it lacks the power of sight." [11]: 37 Bad as an absence of good resurfaces in Hegel, Heidegger and Barth.
The absence of good (Latin: privatio boni), also known as the privation theory of evil, [1] is a theological and philosophical doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading.
Good is the cause of evil, but only owing to fault on the part of the agent. In his theodicy, to say something is evil is to say that it lacks goodness which means that it could not be part of God's creation, because God's creation lacked nothing. Aquinas noted that, although goodness makes evil possible, it does not necessitate evil.
The distinction lies both in their source and end. The moral virtue of temperance recognizes food as a good that sustains life, but guards against the sin of gluttony. The infused virtue of temperance disposes the individual to practice fasting and abstinence. The infused moral virtues are connected to the theological virtue of Charity. [16] [14]
The goodness of God means that "God is the final standard of good, and all that God is and does is worthy of approval." [12] Many theologians consider the goodness of God as an overarching attribute - Louis Berkhof, for example, sees it as including kindness, love, grace, mercy and longsuffering. [13]