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If you tell a lie, you commit an immoral act. But what if you just believe something that turns out to be false? Is that evil? Augustine thought so. He didn't think an intententional lie was the same as an unintentional false belief but both are evil. How so? Surely a mistaken belief isn't evil, is it? Augustine distinguished between moral evil and metaphysical evil. Augustine thought that to believe some false proposition may not be a sin if it is believed unintentionally, but it is nonetheless a metaphysical evil, a lack, or a corruption, of the good. Lying, on the other hand, is a moral evil since it is carried out intentionally. Augustine's view of falsehood and lying derived from his theological vision. For Augustine, God is supremely truthful: He  is  truth and, consequently, internally harmonious. Therefore, for creation to function properly, it must function in harmony with its creator. False beliefs are contrary to the thoughts of God, to his design for th...

The central question for philosophy, says Cornelius Van Til, is the question of the one and the many or the universal and the particular. 1 The question is central to the Greek philosophers especially as found in Plato. Plato, confronted with particularity in experience, advanced a universal realism, a realm of forms from which the soul is able to draw on ideas which connect particular things. For instance, a particular “chair” is connected (or participates) with a universal form, “chair.” 2 The problem of the one and the many continues to plague philosophy in the modern period. David Hume contends that universals are nominal, found solely in discourse about particulars. 3 The question is of epistemological significance. How can we reconcile our encounter with the particulars in experience and in that encounter be conscious of universals? Philosophers generally emphasize one at the expense of the other. Augustine confronts the question in his treatment of the doctrine of the Tri...

I exist. Am I sure that I exist? Well, as sure as I can be. I think I exist. Isn't that enough to assure me that I exist. If I am thinking, I must exist. And so goes the familiar logic of Rene Descartes. Descartes proceeds in his pursuit of knowledge from the following starting point: “When we apprehend that we are thinking things, this is the first notion which is not drawn from any syllogism; and when one says, I think, hence I am, or I exist, he does not conclude his existence from his thought as by a force of some syllogism, he must beforehand have known this major, All that which thinks is or exists.” 1 Descartes begins to know anything by knowing that he is thinking, he is self-aware. For Descartes, this assumption is the starting point to all other pieces of knowledge.