Paradox

174 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXAugustine’s more classically Christian solution is thathuman beings are responsible for evil because of their ownfreewill. God cedes people control that they frequently abuse.This freedom does not mean that God is surprised by ourmisbehavior. Since God is all-knowing, there was never atime at which he failed to know that Eve would tempt Adamto eat an apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Therewas never a time when God did not know the whole courseof human depravity. So why did God make creatures he knewwould disappoint him?Shipwrights made boats they knew to be vulnerable tofire. Timber has this engineering limit. Could God beresigned to limits imposed by raw matter itself?Not according to Augustine. Deferring to Genesis, hedenies that God made anything from material that predatedhis activities as creator. God created the whole world fromnothing. In The Timaeus, Plato allowed that the demiurgebegan the universe in the sense of organizing a preexistingstate of chaos. But everyone in antiquity agreed that theuniverse could not have had a beginning.The Manichees teased Christians by asking what Godwas doing before he created the universe. If God waited, thenhe was an idler. And an arbitrary idler at that; there wouldbe no justification for starting the creation at one point of timerather than another.Augustine answers that God created time when he createdeverything else. By this, he does not mean that timedepends on the existence of periodic public phenomena suchas the movement of planets. We can make sense of therebeing no physical events occurring. For instance, we canperceive a long silence. What is inconceivable is for time topass in the absence of mental change.