Dominican thomism and the problem of evil

[Aelred_Minor]

No rejected grace is efficacious. The efficacy of grace consists in the free will accepting it. No one is “unconditionally elected.” Co-operation with grace is a requirement for salvation. Not even the Mother of God could have been saved in any other way than her co-operation with grace. In her special case, her co-operation was always 100%.

The first of these sentences that I’ve put in bold is a view shared by Molinists, Congruists, and Arminians. The second is shared by Molinists and Arminians but rejected by Congruists. Both ideas are rejected by Thomists, and Thomism is the subject of this thread.

 

[Love4All]

Actually the angels were not given the Beatific Vision immediately upon their creation, otherwise they could never have chosen to fall. Basically they seem to have been given some sort of test. Those who chose to remain faithful to God were granted the beatific vision while those who chose to rebel did not.

As I said in my past post our free will is not taken away by the Beatific Vision. The fact that we can be entirely confident we would not fall away after being given that Vision is, again, the difference in implications for our will’s attraction to universal goodness when confronted with infinite rather than finite goodness. Until we receive this Beatific Vision we can come to an awareness of God’s existence through faith and/or reason, but we absolutely can not perceive that absolute Being as He Is. It is this knowledge about God without a true intellectual “sight” of Him as He is that is the reason sin is possible for ourselves and for the demons.

It is true that the angels were not immediately granted the Beatific Vision, but only the good angels after they chose God. However, I didn’t say the Beatific Vision, I said the immediate intuition of the Supreme Good. The angels all knew that God is the Supreme Good. They chose, once, with finality, and in freedom, either to give their free wills to God or to use them to rebel against Him.

There is no free will in Heaven. There is only One Will in Heaven, the will of Love. There are no more moral dilemmas in Heaven, so how can you say there is free will? Free will is for one purpose and one purpose only: to choose Love. Sinning with free will is thus an abuse of free will. It is impossible for those in Heaven to sin. Impossible means impossible, and since free will is for choosing, and it is impossible for them any more to choose, consequently there is no more free will in Heaven. Almost every human being who hears about this objects to it at first, because each of us has, from concupiscence, a deep and secret attachment to self and self-will. But the Kingdom of Heaven consists in the relinquishing of all self-will and all self.

In Heaven, there is only God’s Will. How then can you say there is free will?

 

[Aelred_Minor]

It is true that the angels were not immediately granted the Beatific Vision, but only the good angels after they chose God. However, I didn’t say the Beatific Vision, I said the immediate intuition of the Supreme Good. The angels all knew that God is the Supreme Good. They chose, once, with finality, and in freedom, either to give their free wills to God or to use them to rebel against Him.

There is no free will in Heaven. There is only One Will in Heaven, the will of Love. There are no more moral dilemmas in Heaven, so how can you say there is free will? Free will is for one purpose and one purpose only: to choose Love. Sinning with free will is thus an abuse of free will. It is impossible for those in Heaven to sin. Impossible means impossible, and since free will is for choosing, and it is impossible for them any more to choose, consequently there is no more free will in Heaven. Almost every human being who hears about this objects to it at first, because each of us has, from concupiscence, a deep and secret attachment to self and self-will. But the Kingdom of Heaven consists in the relinquishing of all self-will and all self.

In Heaven, there is only God’s Will. How then can you say there is free will?

I see that indeed you did not mention the beatific vision. That was my error in reading that into your post. But my point remains, that until we receive the beatific vision we only know about God in a kind of abstract and highly mysterious way. We have no intellectual grasp of what He really is, so we combine creaturely attributes and abstract ideas and hold them in our minds as a placeholder for God. Or to use a more beautiful analogy, we create a mental icon of God which we know is not God Himself but use as an aid for prayer (particularly kataphatic prayer). But as long as our intellects have not perceived God Himself, which not even an angel’s intellect could do prior to being granted that intellectual vision of God, the idea we have of Him remains imperfect and therefore remains a partial good that it is in our power to reject.

I’m afraid I have to go, but I’ll try and get back to address your other points tomorrow.

 

[Love4All]

All this is true on one level (at least, . . . )(snipped to meet character count)

Free will is real. God gave it to us for choosing Him, and He respects it in us. Now surely, there is more grace in the one who goes to Confession than in the one who does not. But what determines the difference? Not God, for we are not Calvinists. We do not hold that grace is irresistible, but rather that it requires co-operation. So one co-operates, the other does not. It is not possible, given the nature of Love, that God did not wish for both to co-operate, and thus, He most certainly gave to both the necessary grace to co-operate. But one accepted it freely, and the other rejected it freely.

None of this is to say that any of our goodness has its source in ourselves. “God alone is good.”

Perhaps we can utilize the error of Calvin to bring out a point. Calvin says grace is irresistible, but does he mean by this that no believer commits sin? Clearly not. Nor can he possibly mean that every believer goes to Confession whenever he knows about his sin, since Calvinists reject the Sacrament of Confession. So what does he mean? Remember that an additional error in the heresy of Protestantism is “salvation by Faith Alone.” They are not actually talking about Faith in the Catholic meaning of that word, what they are referring to is bare intellectual assent to the Truth of the Gospel, and that, in its stripped down version of “Jesus died for your sins.” That is the entirety of religion in a nutshell, according to Luther and Calvin. Just hold that proposition as true, and you’re saved. But how does a person come to hold that proposition as true? Not by reasoning or proofs. It is by hearing, according to Saint Paul, that Faith comes. When a person first hears about Jesus, he has an immediate reaction to the “News.” It is like learning for the first time that 1 + 1 = 2. No one who knows this can possibly deny it. The Gospel is like that, initially, in some, and not in others. It is the “and not in others” part that causes all the nastiness that is Calvinism.

Our Lord Himself stated, “think not that I have come to bring Peace on Earth. I bring, not peace, but a sword of division. I have come to set a man against his father and a woman against her daughter, and a household of five shall be divided, two against three and three against two.” That is what the Gospel does. It is selective. Some, immediately believe, others, do not. Since for a Protestant, salvation is by “Faith Alone,” according to Calvin, the selectivity of the Gospel message is manifestly God’s selecting some to save and others to condemn.

O.K., I’ve kind of drifted onto a tangent here, but I’m going to leave all this in because it seems to me to have value. My point was this: the idea, “I ought to go to Confession,” has the character of “1 + 1 = 2.” No one can resist experiencing an idea that God puts into their head. What we can resist, is acting on the idea. So, the idea in the first place, “I ought to go to Confession,” is part of the grace to actually go, and actually going is the rest of it. God’s purpose in granting the grace is to bring the soul to Confession. It is not a first grace, the idea, and a second grace, actually going, rather, it is one grace: God bringing you to Confession. You either co-operate and go, or refuse to co-operate and skip. Since no one can resist the idea, if we call the idea a grace, it seems we are kowtowing to Calvinism and affirming that there is actually irresistible grace after all. But “irresistible grace” implies infallibly efficacious grace, and plainly, in the one who refused to go, it wasn’t. So while we must insist that the idea was an actual grace, we must at the same time maintain that experiencing the idea is not the same thing as accepting the grace. The idea comes, irresistibly, and is part of the grace of getting to Confession. Pushing the idea aside is resisting the grace, so in the one who pushes the irresistibly encountered idea aside, that is the end of it. There is no completion of the work of grace, because there is an obstacle offered by the one who received it. The grace was merely sufficient due to the fact of the free will resisting it. The one, on the other hand, who co-operated with the grace and did go to receive the Sacrament, rendered that selfsame sufficient grace efficacious by acting on it. Since it was an actual grace, its whole purpose was action, and in the one who co-operated it was both sufficient and efficacious, while in the one who resisted it was merely sufficient. Receiving sufficient graces and rejecting them is cause for damnation. Thus grace is not irresistible; but receiving grace is irresistible. God gives sufficient grace for salvation to all without exception, both the elect and the reprobate. The elect, freely accept them and increase in grace until finally, they are accepting 100% of the graces they receive, and they are in Heaven. The reprobate, reject all grace until finally, God no longer grants them any, and they are in Hell.

A lot of words. I hope I’ve made my point clear.

 

[tdgesq]

As I said in my past post our free will is not taken away by the Beatific Vision. The fact that we can be entirely confident we would not fall away after being given that Vision is, again, the difference in implications for our will’s attraction to universal goodness when confronted with infinite rather than finite goodness.

Aelred, I welcome these observations. I do have a question though. It seems to me that from a Thomistic perspective the state of heaven is eternal, and, therefore, timeless. On the other hand, free will implies that change is possible - that I as a free human actor, even with a glorified body, could change my decision to say “yes” to God. I still tend to believe that what you say is correct, but I would like to see your thoughts on the matter.

 

[Love4All]

The first of these sentences that I’ve put in bold is a view shared by Molinists, Congruists, and Arminians. The second is shared by Molinists and Arminians but rejected by Congruists. Both ideas are rejected by Thomists, and Thomism is the subject of this thread.

I’m a Catholic. So is Molina and so is Saint Thomas. I don’t much care about the nuances of the Protestant heresy, but Catholicism is Catholicism.

You will have to show me, from sources, what you are talking about. Thanks!

 

[Love4All]

I see that indeed you did not mention the beatific vision. That was my error in reading that into your post. But my point remains, that until we receive the beatific vision we only know about God in a kind of abstract and highly mysterious way. We have no intellectual grasp of what He really is, so we combine creaturely attributes and abstract ideas and hold them in our minds as a placeholder for God. Or to use a more beautiful analogy, we create a mental icon of God which we know is not God Himself but use as an aid for prayer (particularly kataphatic prayer). But as long as our intellects have not perceived God Himself, which not even an angel’s intellect could do prior to being granted that intellectual vision of God, the idea we have of Him remains imperfect and therefore remains a partial good that it is in our power to reject.

I’m afraid I have to go, but I’ll try and get back to address your other points tomorrow.

O.K., but initially, I must insist that God is Love, and I do know Love. I don’t create false gods in my head and worship them, to me that is idolatry just as surely as worshiping wood or stone. I worship the Consecrated Host. I don’t have to have any ideas about it, since it is a physical reality in the selfsame world in which I am. I let God be God, and my imagination, while it shows me many pretty things, I know can never show me God, so I don’t bother with what you are calling an “icon,” that I would call an idol.

And I know that God is Love, and I know that Love is the Supreme Good, so I have no need of substituting lesser goods for Love. I love Love, and Love is my God. I love, as much as I can, and that is essentially my practice of religion. Catholicism helps improve me in that.

It is the Simplicity of it that remains baffling to some who themselves, have allowed themselves to become too complex. God is Simple. He is Love.

 

[Boywonder23k]

Minor,

The entire point of my thread was to determine how a Thomist would defend the problem of pain and suffering from an apologetics standpoint? Do they still attempt to run the free will defense or are their other arguments used?

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I’m beginning to feel the weight of all the material I’m expected to respond to, especially since I’m in a house where other things are going on and it’s hard to concentrate.

I’ll try and respond to Love4All all at once here…Scratch that, it’s too complex. I’ll respond piecemeal to individual posts.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

It is true that the angels were not immediately granted the Beatific Vision, but only the good angels after they chose God. However, I didn’t say the Beatific Vision, I said the immediate intuition of the Supreme Good. The angels all knew that God is the Supreme Good. They chose, once, with finality, and in freedom, either to give their free wills to God or to use them to rebel against Him.

There is no free will in Heaven. There is only One Will in Heaven, the will of Love. There are no more moral dilemmas in Heaven, so how can you say there is free will? Free will is for one purpose and one purpose only: to choose Love. Sinning with free will is thus an abuse of free will. It is impossible for those in Heaven to sin. Impossible means impossible, and since free will is for choosing, and it is impossible for them any more to choose, consequently there is no more free will in Heaven. Almost every human being who hears about this objects to it at first, because each of us has, from concupiscence, a deep and secret attachment to self and self-will. But the Kingdom of Heaven consists in the relinquishing of all self-will and all self.

In Heaven, there is only God’s Will. How then can you say there is free will?

I said I would respond to the rest of this so that’s how I’ll start. There is free will in heaven. For one thing even as people in heaven experience the infinite goodness of God it appears they also experience lesser goods like meeting loved ones and perhaps, after the General Resurrection at least, things like actual feasting. Free will in the sense of choosing between different good options would still operate in those cases (do I greet Aunt Bertha or Uncle Albert next; shall I take a bite of the turkey or the mashed potatoes now, etc), though no such choice would be made that constitutes a rejection of God.

Even were such lesser goods not experienced, however, that would not mean free will is lost. First of all, a faculty does not need to be exercised to be possessed. A human zygote or a person who has lost consciousness has free will but does not have the ability to exercise it, for example. Second, freedom does not actually demand the possibility of making any choice other than the right one, otherwise God would not be free.

That brings us to the idea that in heaven there is only God’s Will. Even if this were the case there would still be free will, since God is free. But it’s also not true. Human beings still retain their own wills in heaven, though these are perfectly obedient to the Divine Will.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Free will is real.

[snipped because otherwise CAF says my post is too long]

A lot of words. I hope I’ve made my point clear.

I think most Protestants would say you have misrepresented their position, but that’s a completely different discussion.

Most of this post seems to be a reassertion of the (correct) principle that God gives sufficient grace to all and by our own free choice we cooperate with that grace or not, and the (incorrect, in my opinion) deduction from this that efficacious grace is nothing other than sufficient grace which has been accepted and allowed to continue to operate.

The key question that this leaves out is, what caused the will to chose to accept this sufficient grace? Yes we could say that God creates and sustains the soul with its free faculty of volition, but this still does not answer the question of how an individual free choice passes from potentiality to actuality if God is not the cause of this.

It is at this deeper level of consideration, foundational to free will rather than superimposed onto it, so to speak, that efficacious grace works according to Thomism.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I’m a Catholic. So is Molina and so is Saint Thomas. I don’t much care about the nuances of the Protestant heresy, but Catholicism is Catholicism.

You will have to show me, from sources, what you are talking about. Thanks!

I’m a little confused about what you are asking here. Molinism and Congruism are both Catholic schools of thought (technically Congruism could be considered an alternate form of Molinism, actually). Arminianism is of Protestant origin and in its original form was clearly heretical as it denied the possibility of repentance for apostates, but the modified Arminianism of Wesley jettisoned that aspect of it and gave rise to the Wesleyan Arminianism that is most common today. To me it seems most poorly or moderately educated Catholics today, at least in the United States, are basically Wesleyan Arminian (we might call it Catholic Arminianism), though they may slap the label of Molinism onto it. In my opinion a philosophy cannot reasonably be called truly Molinist unless it clearly includes the the key Molinist idea of scientia media.

Anyway, if we leave out Arminianism for the sake of simplicity all I’m saying is that your ideas about efficacious grace seem to be that of Molinism and Congruism (both Catholic philosophies) rather than Thomism (also a Catholic philosophy) and your rejection of unconditional election is that of non-Congruist Molinism but not that of Congruism or Thomism, both of which accept unconditional election (though not the Calvinist deduction from this that God does not will or make possible the salvation of those who are not among the elect).

This is not an imputation of your Catholicism at all, though it is the first time I’ve noticed you explicitly identify yourself as Catholic. I simply want to make you aware, if you are not already, that such opinions are not Catholic dogma but are theological proposals that are open for debate in the Catholic Church.

Does this answer your concerns?

 

[Aelred_Minor]

O.K., but initially, I must insist that God is Love, and I do know Love. I don’t create false gods in my head and worship them, to me that is idolatry just as surely as worshiping wood or stone. I worship the Consecrated Host. I don’t have to have any ideas about it, since it is a physical reality in the selfsame world in which I am. I let God be God, and my imagination, while it shows me many pretty things, I know can never show me God, so I don’t bother with what you are calling an “icon,” that I would call an idol.

And I know that God is Love, and I know that Love is the Supreme Good, so I have no need of substituting lesser goods for Love. I love Love, and Love is my God. I love, as much as I can, and that is essentially my practice of religion. Catholicism helps improve me in that.

It is the Simplicity of it that remains baffling to some who themselves, have allowed themselves to become too complex. God is Simple. He is Love.

You are right that in the consecrated host we come fact to face with the incarnate God Himself. This is the great revolution that the Incarnation brought about and the source of our Christian hope. Still, even there God is present in a hidden way, under the appearance of mere bread. God in His Divinity remains hidden from our intellects.

Moreover it is clear from what you say that you do create at least an icon of God in your head, namely that of love. As we have discussed on another thread, God is indeed Love, but God’s Love is not what we know as love. God’s Love is, ultimately, identical with His Power, His Knowledge, His Justice, His Mercy, His Essence, His Existence, and so forth, for as you say God is Simple. This infinite Being is not something we can ever fully understand as He understands Himself, and it is not something we can even begin to understand apart from mystical experiences and ultimately the Beatific Vision.

Perhaps you are a mystic and have experienced profound infused contemplation. If so you are among the privileged few who have received a foretaste of the Beatific Vision even before death, though perhaps even then the veil merely becomes thin and translucent rather than being lifted entirely (metaphorically speaking, of course). But aside from this possible complication any idea of God’s Love, or any other characteristic of God, is not knowable to us as it (or rather, as He) actually is. Instead, since we know that God is by no means unloving, we must take the human experience of love, magnify it as much as our finite human imaginations are capable, and use it as a kind of beautiful symbol for God’s real and unimaginable Love. If we instead identify our human idea of love as God Himself then we have really deified something creaturely and so have really created an idol instead of an icon.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Aelred, I welcome these observations. I do have a question though. It seems to me that from a Thomistic perspective the state of heaven is eternal, and, therefore, timeless. On the other hand, free will implies that change is possible - that I as a free human actor, even with a glorified body, could change my decision to say “yes” to God. I still tend to believe that what you say is correct, but I would like to see your thoughts on the matter.

I would say that both your assumptions are false. First of all, we know heaven is eternal in the sense of unending, but not that it is eternal in the sense of being outside of time or of any kind of sequentiality of events. The contrary appears to be the case. After all, we speak of the personal judgement happening, then any purgatory (which seems to be a progressive process) then the beatific vision, then the general resurrection, then the general judgement. There certainly seems to be a sequentiality after death, and why should this change after the general judgement? If we were in time or something analogous to time even when separated from our bodies, and also immediately after receiving our bodies, why should this change later?

Also the angels seem to experience some kind of sequentiality, since they were first created, then given a choice between obedience and rebellion, then rewarded with the beatific vision or punished with hell as a result of that choice. Also the Bible speaks of a future punishment for Satan. If even pure spirits experience events in a sequence, why should it be different for us after death?

The facts could be interpreted otherwise, but even then this would not preclude free will. God after all is perfectly free, and He really is “outside of time” or “in an eternal now” as we say. A decision made eternally rather than in time can still be free.

Edit: also seem my posts to Love4All on the subject of free will and the impossibility of rejecting God in heaven.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Minor,

The entire point of my thread was to determine how a Thomist would defend the problem of pain and suffering from an apologetics standpoint? Do they still attempt to run the free will defense or are their other arguments used?

Sorry, these kinds of asides do occur on these boards, especially in the case of controversial subjects that don’t simply have a dogmatic Catholic answer.

From a Thomist point of view, as from an Augustinian point of view, the ultimate reason why God permits evil is to bring a greater good out of it. The problem is the evils that are permitted are often so heinous, and the goods that come about because of them so hidden and mysterious or so apparently not worth the evil (for instance, community solidarity after a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but who would not rather the disaster had never happened?) that we don’t understand why God allowed those evils at all.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, speculated that at the General Judgement it won’t just be our own actions that are revealed and judged, but that God will essentially judge His own management of the universe and reveal the rationale behind it to everyone (at least to the degree the human intellect can understand it).

Anyway, the role of free will comes in at another level. Specifically, while God can permit evil in order to bring about a greater good we can never hold that God is the author of evil, that he actually commits or literally causes evil in order to bring about a greater good. Such a Machiavellian, ends-justify-the-means God would not be worthy of any worship. Indeed it is the perception, whether right or wrong, that the Calvinist idea of God does this that is the reason so many Catholics compare it to the Devil.

Now human and angelic sin, even to the point of damnation, is probably the worst evil there is. A Thomist would say that this evil, and every individual instance of it, is permitted by God in order to bring about a greater good, but a Thomist would also insist that God was not the cause of this sin and so is not personally guilty of the evil of it. From a Thomist perspective free will cannot explain the problem of evil by itself, since God could have created a universe in which people had free will and never sinned, but it is an important component of the Thomist argument that God’s identity as the First Cause does not make him the author of evil.

 

[Boywonder23k]

If it was possible for God to create a world in which everyone had free will and no one sinned then that opens up enormous philosophical problems. Simply saying “God is not the author of evil but He allows it so that some greater good can be accomplished but we have absolutely no idea what that greater good may be” is just appealing to mystery and is not an adequate answer to one of the greatest practical, emotional and philosophical objections to the existence of an all good God. I think that Molinism competes far better in the market place of ideas on this level. Very poor explanatory scope. If there are no other reasonable replies to that objection then IMO score one for the molinists

 

[Aelred_Minor]

If it was possible for God to create a world in which everyone had free will and no one sinned then that opens up enormous philosophical problems. Simply saying “God is not the author of evil but He allows it so that some greater good can be accomplished but we have absolutely no idea what that greater good may be” is just appealing to mystery and is not an adequate answer to one of the greatest practical, emotional and philosophical objections to the existence of an all good God. I think that Molinism competes far better in the market place of ideas on this level. Very poor explanatory scope. If there are no other reasonable replies to that objection then IMO score one for the molinists

It’s a mystery. That means it can’t be fully explained. In this case we have probably the most emotionally difficult mystery there is. A bad, shortcut answer to try to bypass a difficulty may be “marketable” but this should not be regarded as a point in that theory’s favor. If it were, shortcuts like Modalism or Nestorianism would be good answers for things like the Trinity and the Incarnation.

 

[tdgesq]

I would say that both your assumptions are false. First of all, we know heaven is eternal in the sense of unending, but not that it is eternal in the sense of being outside of time or of any kind of sequentiality of events. The contrary appears to be the case.

It surprises me that you would argue that given St. Thomas’ position on the matter:

“IT follows from what has been said that those who obtain ultimate happiness from the divine vision, never fall away from it. Because whatever at one time is, and at another time is not, is measured by time, as stated in 4 Phys. xii. Now the vision in question that makes intellectual creatures happy, is not in time but in eternity.[1] Therefore no one can lose it having once become a partaker thereof.”

Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.62

After all, we speak of the personal judgement happening, then any purgatory (which seems to be a progressive process) then the beatific vision, then the general resurrection, then the general judgement. There certainly seems to be a sequentiality after death, and why should this change after the general judgement? If we were in time or something analogous to time even when separated from our bodies, and also immediately after receiving our bodies, why should this change later?

These are all interesting questions, and I think you do have a point. The particular judgment and the general judgment certainly have a logical sequence, and there is a strong implication that there is some type of temporal sequence; at the very least from a human perspective inside the universe. The purgatory question doesn’t seem to have much bearing, because - well - it’s the purgatorial state and not the beatific state. That there is a temporal state called purgatory “prior” to the beatific vision doesn’t appear to have any implications for the temporal or a-temporal reality of heaven.

Also the angels seem to experience some kind of sequentiality, since they were first created, then given a choice between obedience and rebellion, then rewarded with the beatific vision or punished with hell as a result of that choice. Also the Bible speaks of a future punishment for Satan. If even pure spirits experience events in a sequence, why should it be different for us after death?

Again though, I find these arguments to be inapposite to the issue. The angels were created at the beginning of time, and I believe that to be a de fide declaration of the Church. There is nothing to my knowledge that indicates the angels are timeless, although they are immortal. To the extent the state of heaven equals the beatific vision, the actions of angels prior to the beatific vision don’t have bearing on whether heaven is temporal or a-temporal.

The facts could be interpreted otherwise, but even then this would not preclude free will. God after all is perfectly free, and He really is “outside of time” or “in an eternal now” as we say. A decision made eternally rather than in time can still be free.

I agree with you. I do not perceive a contradiction between free will and heaven where a human soul irrevocably makes a choice (at whatever point that might be) to dwell with God.

 

[tdgesq]

If it was possible for God to create a world in which everyone had free will and no one sinned then that opens up enormous philosophical problems. Simply saying “God is not the author of evil but He allows it so that some greater good can be accomplished but we have absolutely no idea what that greater good may be” is just appealing to mystery and is not an adequate answer to one of the greatest practical, emotional and philosophical objections to the existence of an all good God. I think that Molinism competes far better in the market place of ideas on this level. Very poor explanatory scope. If there are no other reasonable replies to that objection then IMO score one for the molinists

What if the greater good is the possibility of free will? I don’t know that St. Thomas declared that it is possible for God to create a world where everyone had free will and where no one sinned. He may very well have, but I haven’t seen it.

 

[Daniel_Lysinger]

Trust me, Thomism is not close to Calvanism.