According to the Catechism, the reason for the first sin is that (CCC 398) “man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God…. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to “be like God” but “without God, before God and not in accordance with God”.
My question is, why would pre-fallen man prefer himself to God? It seems Adam, while created very good, was easily susceptible to emotions of fear, mistrust of God’s promise, and possibly pride. God could have left out these traits and desires during his creation and still preserved Adam’s free will. So why didn’t God create a man of strong character who would have resisted temptation (while still preserving his ability to choose)? It seems to me there are two responses:
- It was God’s divine plan for Adam to fall. Or…
- It is beyond our ability to understand why Adam was created this way.
The first answer is problematic because it is contrary to the faith. Yet saying we can’t know is challenging, since our understanding of the fall is critical to everything that follows, from free will to salvation.
God is inherently, unavoidably, superior to man in every way-
infinitely superior. And no matter *how *great God creates a being, that being will always be limited and imperfect relative to
His limitlessness and absolute perfection. And therein lies the crux of the “problem”. Only God can know with perfection of His true value, of His unlimited worthiness. We don’t have the mind of God; we lack the capacity to know him the way He knows Himself; we are capable of error and wrong choices, of valuing lesser things over greater ones. He is not.
We can benefit, however, from learning the hard way, learning just Who deserves the title of God, and why, as we experience life distanced from Him and the sin and error and evils that enter upon us as we participate in this “exile” from Him. As we come to learn this valuable lesson we have the opportunity, in light of God’s revelation and grace, to turn away from ourselves and to Him, to align ourselves with Truth and Reality and Goodness.
God made His creation in a “state of journeying to perfection” according to Church teachings. He didn’t cause evil (that which is opposed to Him, aka “sin”), but allows us to experiment with it for the ultimate purpose of demonstrating its futility, ugliness, negativity, and destructiveness so we’ll begin to identify and learn to freely shun and turn from it-and turn
to Him, the Ultimate Good, as we’re called.
And in this way, of first of all freely coming to acknowledge God’s worthiness above all else, placing Him first, we come to participate in our own
justice, our own perfection. This is what God desires to draw out of us-
our part, what Adam failed to do.
