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STT
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What would you do if you believe that God is evil?
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STT
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God is not like gravity. His justice is based on facts. Did Adam and Eve have wrong belief? Then forgive them.
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fhansen
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Gravity and the consequences of “disobeying” its laws are based on facts-and those laws are in fact other examples of God’s laws. Merely forgiving A&E makes no difference in terms of restoring them to the justice, the order, He created them in. A change of heart must occur. God’s plan of salvation included the means to accomplish just that.fhansen:
God is not like gravity. His justice is based on facts. Did Adam and Eve have wrong belief? Then forgive them.
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Gorgias
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Yes… my explanation is the answer to your question.You already explain that. You however didn’t answer my question.
You asked:
In other words, you’re asking how could we suggest that people ‘choose’ eternal suffering over eternal happiness, right?
My answer is that “eternal happiness” and “eternal suffering” aren’t the choices, per se, but the consequences of the choice. (Of course, for those who know the consequences, the choice really is the choice of desired consequence. After all, we make choices based on our knowledge of the consequences, don’t we? And, if we misunderstand the consequences, we can make a bad choice.)
So, those who choose “accept God” are choosing the consequence “eternal happiness” and those who choose “reject God” are choosing the consequence “eternal suffering.” (The difficult comes in when people don’t accept that “reject God” implies “eternal suffering.” So… how can we understand this difficulty?)
Well, right now, as I write this post, the Croatia-Argentina World Cup game is being played. Would any of the fans of Croatia or Argentina make the choice “lose a World Cup game”? Of course not! But, (barring a draw), by choosing one team or the other… they’ve chosen the consequence “lose a World Cup game”! None would think that this is what they’re choosing – in fact, by making their choice, they believe they’re choosing a win! – but the fact is… one group of folks making a choice have, indeed, chosen ‘defeat’. They just don’t know it yet.
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fhansen
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Adam & Eve didn’t think God was evil; they just, like any of us may, preferred to believe a lie rather than the truth, the truth that God had told them. They were carried away by their own desire, a desire to be like God. They had been made in His image but had yet to obtain the perfection they were created to have, a perfection that resulted only as they would consciously and willfully enter and remain in communion with Him, a perfection that would result in their being like Him.They did the opposite instead; they "wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”. CCC398fhansen:
I see all nice things in your wording. But what if a person has a wrong belief, as Adam and Eve had, thinking that God is evil? I would eat the fruit to become like God. Wouldn’t you?
By the way, how come they could die if they were like God?
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Vico
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It does answer to your assertion: “I think we can agree on the fact that Adam and Eve were created perfect.”Vico:
That doesn’t resolve the problem.
So you also ask: “How they could act against their nature, rationality? Their nature was perfect and not corrupted so they could not act against themselves.”
Well their nature was not perfect.
They were constituted with supernatural gifts of sanctifying grace and three preternatural gifts. One of those preternatural gifts was freedom from concupiscence. From Summa Theologiae 1.81.2 “The sentient appetite is generically one faculty, which is called sensuality; but it is divided into two powers, which are the species of the sentient appetite, viz., the irascible and the concupiscible.” So the fall was related to the irascible appetite – ira (anger). Pride it the sin of the fall, seeking to not trust God but to substitute oneself. This is a possibility with free will.
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STT
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So God has His unavoidable plan beforehand?
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STT
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Hmmm. Let’s change your belief a little and assume that you believe God who is creator and evil and Satan who is an Angel and good. Which one do you follow?
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STT
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There is no such a thing like preference for believing a lie if you are a rational being.
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STT
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This is just twisting problem. It doesn’t solve the problem. Eventually those gifts either protect them against sin or not. Sinning is just matter of time if those gifts don’t protect them especially if you believe a lie.
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STT
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An evil God might put you in Hell if you follow Him. Do you still follow Him?
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sevenswords
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It plainly says why they sinned they wanted to be like God, The same as we see today man wants to be god and we see that plainly in the enlightenment movement who reject God and see themselves as gods we see it in the vast majority of people who claim to have rationality, yet they reject Gods words over their own words. You see this best in science where it is sacrilege to question the high priests and humanism is the only fair option given God is so cruel and judgemental, they demand the lie, give us Barabbas and let the blood be upon us and our children. See things haven’t changed much since Eve was first seduced by the fallen one.
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fhansen
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God knew what would happen beforehand; He knew they’d step off the cliff, and had His plan of salvation-of ultimately perfecting His creation to put it another way- in place. The Fall of man is part of an overall bigger picture, one that posed no surprises for God. The Fall was merely a detour in one sense, and one God could obviously deal with.fhansen:
So God has His unavoidable plan beforehand?
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Gorgias
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Well, philosophically speaking, that’d be an untenable belief. ‘Evil’ is the absence of good, so you cannot have a single omnipotent god whose very nature is ‘privation’. Add to that the fact that the act of creation is an inherently good act, so an evil god would be acting against his very nature in order to create. (Remember Jesus’ words in the Bible? “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”)
So, I know that you want to set up a construct that goes something like this: “Choose God” → “eternal suffering”. Unfortunately, you’d need to find a construct that logically gets us there. Without it, you’re just setting up a counterfactual that doesn’t stand up to examination.
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fhansen
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We’re not computers; we have many different and sometimes conflicting desires and needs. In the case of man he can, due to free will, make a “want” into a “need”; he can decide for himself what is of most value, and, not being God, he can be wrong. So the overall lesson: man is not God, and man needs God.fhansen:
There is no such a thing like preference for believing a lie if you are a rational being.
Man’s only “fault” is that he’s not God. Man’s perfection includes definitively finding out that fact for himself.
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STT
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You can accept that as truth if you hear it from a good God. You will never know what is the intention of a evil God.
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Gorgias
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With the caveat that the Church teaches that the condition of having a “darkened intellect” and a “weakened will” – which is what I think you’re talking about, here – only came into existence following the sin of Adam & Eve. So, while that describes our condition, it does not describe theirs. We have to find another explanation in order to understand the first sin…
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