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davidv
Guest
We only need full knowledge of the sinfulness of something, not everything.
By believing the one who told you not to do so.
How so? They were informed that they would die if they ate of the forbidden tree.
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fhansen
Guest
I think the question then is, ‘why didn’t they believe God?’ For whatever reason it seems that humankind, like the Prodigal, needed to learn the value of the Fathers wisdom.
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aspirant
Guest
The Catechism quote said: “Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray.”
Yes.
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thecone137
Guest
Message delivery and understanding of that message are two different things.
I"m hearing free will begin to dominate this thread as an objection to the original arguement. It also seems from the direction this discussion is heading is that is that whether or not Adam and Eve could have always made the right decision is a matter of (full) knowledge of the consequences. Whether one chooses to define that full knowledge of all things or of the specific situation is another matter, but if someone could confirm what I am gathering, that would be much appreciated.
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Love4All
Guest
And yet, Eve did.
Not any more.
But they were ignorant of the actual result, which was the loss of Bliss. Had they understood that as the consequence, they never would have sinned.
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Love4All
Guest
No, God created him good, and free. His freedom entailed that he could remain good by choosing grace, or become evil by choosing malice. He chose malice.
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Love4All
Guest
Because deliberation is the opposite of chance.
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Love4All
Guest
They were ignorant of some, not all, of the consequences. They were aware of God’s command to the contrary of their action, so they were aware that one consequence, at least, would be defiance of God’s command. They had sufficient knowledge to understand that it was bad; they didn’t know how bad.
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Love4All
Guest
They doubted God because the Serpent gave them a conflicting idea.
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Love4All
Guest
Indeed, the answer to the OP objection is just that our first parents sinned by their own free will, not by statistical chance. They were not in fact marbles, they were and are human beings, with the dignity of human beings, part of which is freedom from mechanical necessity, which is a property of inanimate rather than animate matter.Message delivery and understanding of that message are two different things.
I"m hearing free will begin to dominate this thread as an objection to the original arguement. It also seems from the direction this discussion is heading is that is that whether or not Adam and Eve could have always made the right decision is a matter of (full) knowledge of the consequences. Whether one chooses to define that full knowledge of all things or of the specific situation is another matter, but if someone could confirm what I am gathering, that would be much appreciated.
Actions have consequences, and sin has consequences. Without the Serpent’s suggestion, Adam and Eve would not have sinned. The Serpent had greater knowledge than Adam and Eve. Thus the full brunt of the punishment of the first sin fell, not on Adam, nor on Eve, but on Satan. That is why he is condemned to hell without possibility of reprieve, whereas Adam and Eve were promised a Redeemer.
Had Adam and Eve decided, all on their own, without any prompting from Satan, to eat of the Tree of forbidden knowledge, they would have been condemned without reprieve, because the original suggestion of sin in the context of innocence was entirely a malicious act. In their innocence, Adam and Eve would never have come up with it.
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TomD123
Guest
Infinite amount of time?
No…eventually, their test in the garden would have ended and they would have passed on original justice to their descendants. We don’t really know how it all worked but even beyond Adam and Eve’s initial trial in the garden, the time for ALL men would have ended. Time is finite and will end. The fall did not make that happen. Eventually Adam and Eve and all of humanity wouldve been taken up into heaven like we hope to be…where there is no sin.
Hope this helps
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fhansen
Guest
That doesn’t change the question. Why would they believe satan rather than God?
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fhansen
Guest
OK. But this doesn’t quite explain why God"s good creation would choose malice/evil.
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Love4All
Guest
I’m not sure Eve saw it that way. What Genesis tells us is that “she saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” Those are her reasons, given. Satan’s words, or believing Satan rather than God, is not among them. In other words, after Satan suggested it, Eve considered the suggestion on her own and went with it for the reasons listed. All three of those reasons are true about the tree, they were not part of Satan’s lie, they were part of what Eve already knew or could see.
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Love4All
Guest
You are trying to see darkness by shining a light on it. It won’t work. It does violate right reason, to choose deliberate malice. The other thing we know about that, in light, is that some do in fact choose it. “Why?”, most certainly escapes me.
It has been explained to me that they wanted to deprive God of His Infiniteness, by removing themselves from all possibility of God loving them, thinking that if God were deprived of them, He would no longer be Infinite. And, God does not love them. And, God is still Infinite.
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fhansen
Guest
Maybe if God were no longer infinite they could see themselves as infinite, or no longer dependent on Him for their very existence in any case
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MPat
Guest
No, such reasoning is wrong. And for many reasons.
First of all. the second premise is wrong. A possible event is not necessarily an event with a positive probability. If you try to choose a random real number from interval [0; 1] with each number having equal probability, each number will have probability of zero. That’s because there are infinitely many of such numbers and one divided by infinity is zero. So, for such probability distributions the probability density functions are used.
Second, the event hasn’t really been defined. If we will look at this argument literally, the event is “Adam and Eve sinned.”. There is no indication that we have repeated experiments. Now, perhaps it is assumed that the event is something like “Adam and Eve sinned during their n-th day in the Garden.”. Yet even then nothing in the argument says that probabilities for different values of n are the same. And that seems to be the assumption that found its way into the argument without any support…
So, we do not even have to decide if use of probabilities makes sense in this case.
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Love4All
Guest
Indeed. Perhaps it is because Infinity is the one thing that God has that sets Him apart from them, and they wished to be equal in all things to God. Absurd as that notion is. It seems, too, that with the massive intellectual gifts they possessed, they’d have known it could never work.
It is, in the end, something I accept on Faith, not from reason.
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thecone137
Guest
Would you accept choosing or not choosing to eat fruit in the garden positive probabilities?
Would you agree that every arguement carries some assumptions? The classic syllogism of Socrates being a man carries assumptions as well, but we don’t question that so much.
We don’t have to, but it sure is fun to try!
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thecone137
Guest
How about this: They were fed a different set of ideas/beliefs by satan -someone who they may not have necessarily known was a bad guy -, and their senses (sight, smell) confirmed that those ideas/beliefs were true. People do this everyday. It’s too bad that senses are not always 100% reliable. A choice like this doesn’t require malice.
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