Augustine3:
Thanks everybody for your answers. I’m afraid I still haven’t got the answer I was seeking. Everyone keeps shouting “free will”. Yes I got that part. Let me phrase my question another way. If they were created good, why didn’t the very idea of rebellion against God repulse them, period?
The basic ingredients for the fall, most simply, is the combination of free will with a finite, created rational being. In other words, God gave a huge amount of responsibility to creatures, who, while awesome in their own right, were nonetheless
not God, and therefore lacking or inferior in terms of possessing His perfect wisdom. They were given all they needed, including knowledge, to be capable of refraining from sin and yet they, having control over their own acts, still retained the possibility of making the wrong choice. Simply by virtue of not being God, they were inherently inferior, and this “flaw” could manifest itself in their choices, the most fundamental wrong choice being to fail to recognize God
as God; all other sin flows from that first one. Another way to state all this is to say that God cannot create another God. And no matter how good He made us, He knows that our perfection, our
justice, is all the greater the more
we choose and participate in it.
And so God’s purpose is to
draw us into willing alignment with His perfect, godly will, without force or coercion. His ultimate purpose, in fact, is to “divinize” man. But man, via Adam, foolishly wanted to be
“be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”, as the catechism teaches. What Adam ended up with by his act of disobedience was simply estrangement from God, with all that entails, even as he may’ve thought that this autonomy meant he was superior to his previous, subjugated, state. He wasn’t though; he had taken a major
fall.
Our whole purpose here on earth is to come to gain the wisdom, with the help of time, experience, revelation, and grace, to come to see the error of Adam’s choice, to come to know just how much we need God, ‘Apart from whom we can do nothing’ (John 15:5). This is the basis of the New Covenant. To the extent that we find our way back to God and cooperate and commune with Him, as is the right and proper order of things for man, He will do a work in us, of transforming us into His own image.
