God is the father of sin?

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Elohist

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Okay, I understand the title might be provocative but hear me out. The God of classical theology and by further extent, Catholicism’s theology, runs into a lot of philosophical problems when It comes to eternal foreknowledge and true free will. If God is all knowing, than that means before we even existed, God knew that we would sin. God then chose to create us, and we depend on God for our existence. If God is all good, and totally encompasses love In a supernatural infinite way, then nothing we can do can detract from that. None of our sins, due to the nature of God, could ever make him any less happy, or more happy than he already is. In my opinion this dehumanizes God, because how are we supposed to see ourselves as children of a father in heaven when there is an eternal divide between us? And Jesus could not be the answer to the question, because if divinity in the classical sense is what it claims to be, than it wasn’t the divinity of Jesus that felt pain or suffering or anguish or temptation - it was solely his humanity. And if God is all knowing than we also cannot deny that God knows the pain of suffering, but to accept that premise would be to deny the infinitality of his all encompassing goodness!It can be logically broken down like this;

(B1) It has always been true that X person’s will sin tomorrow and it is possible to know this truth now (assumption omnitemporality of truth)
(B2) It is impossible that God should at any time believe what is false or fail to believe any truth (assumption infallible omniscience).
(B3) God has always believed that X person will sin tomorrow (from B1 and B2)
(B4) If God has always believed a certain thing, then it is not in anyone’s power to do anything which entails that God has not always believed that thing (assumption past necessity)
(B5) It is not in X person’s power to act in a way that entails that God has not always believed that Rock will sin tomorrow (from B3 and B4).
(B6) That X person refrains from sinning tomorrow entails that God has not always believed that X person’s will sin tomorrow (from B2–semantically necessary truth)
(B7) Therefore, it is not in X person’s power to refrain from sinning tomorrow (B5 and B6)
(B8) If Rock acts freely when he sins tomorrow, then he also has it within his power to refrain from sinning tomorrow (assumption libertarian free will)
(B9) Therefore, X person does not act freely when he sins tomorrow

So we can either take this two ways, either God has knowledge of all possible future’s but for the sake of free will and choice of love which is required for salvation, or God knows the future definitely and we have no choice in how we act. Thoughts?
 
Could you please put this in a summary? I am not understanding what you mean.
 
Short answer: NO!!!

God cannot violate his nature as being completeness and love.

Sin is incompletion; 666 rather than 777, the absence of good.

Instead of asking questions such as these, why not do the right thing by God and read up on His nature? You will be far less confused and anxious.
 
Sure, If God is all knowing, both past present and future, and us as people are contingent on God for our existence, and the full knowledge of our sins was known by God before we committed them, and because we ourselves had no choice in being created, than ultimately our sins are the result of God’s action indirectly, but even then it would go against the all-good nature of God. Does that help?
 
I think you’re missing the point. If God’s nature is the being of completeness and love, and he had full knowledge of our sins prior to our existence, than either God violates his nature by creating things contingent on his existence that also sin, or we are misunderstanding the nature of God.
 
Elohist said:
… God has knowledge of all possible future’s but for the sake of free will and choice of love which is required for salvation,…
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To share in divinity requires the expression of love which can only be through free will; but free will allows for choice of love or malice – a necessary evil – yet not determined by God but by free choice of the creature. The Holy Trinity desires salvation of all humans, but cannot force it without destroying free will.
 
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Our contingency on God to exist, and God’s foreknowledge of our sins prior to our doing them does logically conclude that God is the ultimate cause of our sin. Nothing can come to pass without the consent of God, if God encompasses all of existence. Anything less than complete goodness and love would be less than the nature of God, so how could he - within his nature- allow it?
 
God can create us in full knowledge of what we will do while still putting the agency for our actions in us. We’re not puppets.

As for “dehumanizing God”. Honestly, a lot of bad theology is from anthropomorphic (or humanizing) conceptions of his divine nature. The Divine Nature is not human. He did assume a human nature and enter into Creation for our sake, but the divine nature is not a human nature.
And Jesus could not be the answer to the question, because if divinity in the classical sense is what it claims to be, than it wasn’t the divinity of Jesus that felt pain or suffering or anguish or temptation - it was solely his humanity.
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Natures aren’t persons. The Divine Person of the Word felt pain and suffering solely through the human nature which he assumed. He could not feel it through his divine nature. But he still felt it, because he is one person with two natures.
 
Elohist said:
… Anything less than complete goodness and love would be less than the nature of God, so how could he - within his nature- allow it?
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A creatures nature is not absolutely perfect compared to divine nature which is. The Holy Trinity makes is possible through grace that an angel or human need not do evil so the responsibility for doing evil is upon the will of the angel or human.
 
This confusion is the reason that there is a move to change the last phrase of the Our Father in some languages. The idea that God would lead us to sin is false.
 
Elohist said:
Our contingency on God to exist, and God’s foreknowledge of our sins prior to our doing them does logically conclude that God is the ultimate cause of our sin. Nothing can come to pass without the consent of God, if God encompasses all of existence. Anything less than complete goodness and love would be less than the nature of God, so how could he - within his nature- allow it?
Click to expand...
You really don’t know our God, do you, but only technical definitions while thinking to study philosophy or observe Catholics from outside?

We do not have a God that does all creation by himself but only jointly in co-operation with a contingent will temporally “at one” with the will of the LORD.

All material reality happens in joint knowing with God by a temporal creature.

The omniscience of God is Not:
“I KNOW AND SO IT IS”.
But the omniscience of God is:
" I eternally know myself creating the soul of @Elohist at the instant when two temporal creatures join together as his father and mother in their understanding of reality".

Temporal creatures know things “one thing at a time”, therefore Elohist was not eternally being materially conceived but once, in time, by people who make mistakes (missed marks = sins) as they know what God knows them knowing when they finally know with Him.

God’s omnipotence does not mean that he is capable at all of doing anything temporally.
 
@Elohist

There’s a lot of misunderstanding in your original post, but to keep it simple I will address 3 of what I think are the biggest misconceptions, and they all stem from the anthropomorphism of God. God is beyond the fullest human comprehension–otherwise He wouldn’t be an infinite God.
  1. You have treated God as being within or restricted by time. God is outside of time, therefore He sees past, present, and future all at the same time–the eternal now. Therefore, to God, He sees the entirety of one’s life all at the same time (both before and after mortal sin), but that does not mean He forces any of the choices we make–good or bad.
  2. Contrary to many of your premises, God doesn’t “believe” anything, because that would imply a lack of knowledge (which would eliminate His omniscience) and also implies that there is a time in which He doesn’t know something (making Him subject to time). He doesn’t need to believe in anything, because He Himself is the object of belief.
  3. Of course God knows the future–Jesus knew that Judas would betray Him, as Scripture clearly tells us. But the same Jesus also tells us that we are to believe in Him and walk with Him, to love one another, to refrain from sin, to pray, to repent, to receive the Eucharist, to be baptized, etc., all actions that are freely chosen by the will. If Jesus commanded us to do these things, but we had no say in the matter whether to do them or not because we are robots forced by God, then God is malicious and Jesus is deceitful. I refuse to believe that.
 
I see where you’re coming from, but I fail to understand how God can be outside of time and also interact with humanity in any meaningful way. We can observe that the universe was created 14.6 billion years ago, which is not an “observable” Infinity. To create something is to imply that there was a “time” at which said thing did not exist. God cannot contradict his nature, and if his nature is omnipotent and outside of time and space than the notion of creation is null. For example, it scems clear that God cannot NOW bring it about that Lincoln is not shot in 1865, though no doubt at one time God could have prevented it from occurring. Thus what has been actual limits God’s power. It seems rather academic to argue that God can do anything logically possible since God is now faced with a world containing free creatures who limit his options. (If they don’t limit his options, we don’t have true free will) then, suppose that the world just happens to have always existed of factual necessity. Since God can not change the past. It follows That God could not change this eternally past fact about the world.
Thus it is logically possible that God is limited by the fact that the the world has always existed.
 
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It makes some sense. While it is a bit hard to understand the steps you took to get to the conclusion. I think we have some choice, but we are not completely free to choose due to our nature
 
I’m sorry, but I’m not following your logic. Your conclusion doesn’t follow your premises.

Of course God has real, authentic interaction with His creation. For nothing would exist or remain in existence without His will. He has been intimately involved with humanity since the dawn of humanity. He can’t NOT be, as He is a God of love, and it was that love that created and sustains the universe.

Again, you are looking at things through human eyes. God created time and space in the Big Bang. There was no such thing as “time” before that. And because God is the author of time, He is in no way bound or limited by it. There was no “before” creation to God.

Just curious how this even relates to the OP?
 
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