My friend, I do believe in God, as sincerely as prophets did. They could not find the answer, and I also fail to see it. I do not question God, but Catholic dogma. And you were supposed to be an apologetic, not a psychotherapist to analyze my problems. Your job here is to defend your faith. Good luck.
Oh, we should study metaphysics. I will tell prophets, next time I see them. You should add this to the list as #6 option:
I am not an apologist. But I can speak to what I know. All anyone can do is point to the truth. Even God does not force people to accept the truth. The job of anyone defending the faith is to present the truth. Whether or not it is accepted depends on the good will of those listening. The fact that many will not accept it does not detract from its truth.
It sounds to me that you are confusing “the Problem of Evil” with “evil is a problem.”
But this runs into the same issue. You are just asserting that there is a problem when there is not - especially given a Thomistic appraisal of the universe, in which evil is a matter is less than perfect instantiation of forms and achievement of final causality.
I’m not saying that evil is not an emotional problem. I think it is very difficult to deal with, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attests to that (Psalms, Book of Job, etc.). What I am saying is that it has absolutely no bearing on the existence of God (at least as conceived by the classical Catholic tradition) because there is no contradiction between evil and God’s existence.
Common catholic doctrine is that original sin is the loss of original justice, in other words, we lost perfect control over our bodies and we’re reduced to a natural state of mortality. The bible does not mention anything about the loss of free-will or that we are somehow determined by original sin.What do you mean by unbelief and rejection of personal God? Prophets do not qualify here, and yet they also had a problem understanding.
Life will become more difficult, but where and how exactly is the Sin passed along? …Only with Paul comes the idea that newborn babies have no more free will and choice to be righteous or sinful, but are condemned right from the start, with the sin mysteriously passed from Adam onto them. In Genesis, God curses Adam, Eve and the snake, but note the consequences for Adam were that growing food will be difficult from now on and death will be a fact of life. Not a hint about all humanity will be born sinful by default, with their free will suspended. And hence prophets struggling to cope with the problem all the time. They never knew about the original Sin. And no one did, until Paul.
In fact, when God later says “I will be their God, and they shall be my people”, what does it mean? Isn’t this a covenant after the “Original Sin”, and a hope for righteous to be protected if they chose so?
Finally, I will quote your own words: “As created with free-will, it is mankind’s sin which is the root of all evil.” But now you follow the suit of the prophets, you also struggle to find the explanation, and when mankind could not do the job, you pin it down to Adam. If all mankind abused free will, that would explain why innocents suffer. Only, innocents never had an opportunity to entertain their free will. ( this again fails to answer the cause of natural suffering ) But wait, with your new explanation, innocents are now stained with sin, through Adam. Do try again, I came up with five options, none of them working.
Well, it is me and the prophets. I guess I am in the good company
It is the same thing that Paul condemn in Romans 3:8. So basically I agree with Paul here and use his reason as an argument. I just don’t have time now, am on the road these days.
Romans 3:8 “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh,[a] God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.** And so he condemned sin in the flesh.”
Evil often overwhelms good in this life but how could it be otherwise? No one has ever produced a blueprint of a feasible world in which there is never any injustice or unmerited suffering…
Such ignorance is inexcusable, here. Free will and the resulting sin of Adam and Eve is precisely why mankind, with this Original Sin, is prone to error and further sin. Rom 5:19 explicitly confirms: “a multitude, through one man’s disobedience, became guilty.”
Such lack of knowledge is endemic to a lack of discernment of facts.
All mankind is certainly born with Original Sin, but free will never has and will never be removed – it is a part of man’s nature from God.
Answer
When you are dealing with the spirit, the divine, words don’t cut it - it’s all in the relationship. You want to know God, not know about Him.
Could it be that human’s idea of a perfect good plan/creation is slightly different from a Creator’s perfect plan? Please think about this in terms that we humans, smart as we are, are not equal to God the Creator. At least that is what Catholicism teaches.
Simple. Our original ancestors started out in a personal relationship of real friendship between the creature and the Creator. Since the Creator is good, humans, obviously, in the original relationship had a sense of good. “Sense” is a fair description because humans, on this earth, do not fully know God as He is. This sense knowledge of the goodness of the Creator did not disappear with the wind.
Pardon me. Being older than dirt, this reminds me of those cute images where a devil is whispering into the left ear of a human and an angel is whispering into the right ear. Actually, now that I think about those images, all those cute angels and devils could do is to advise from their stance on the shoulder.
There is a morally neutral way of raising what is called the problem of evil, though. Namely, it is to say, “what evidence do you have that there is an all-benevolent being in the universe that loves you and that cares about your well-being?”
I think the formulation I gave above manages to avoid this pitfall. What remains paradoxical, however, is the proposition “God is morally good” (which any Christian would assert) and “God loves us and cares for us.” The problem of evil poses the question whether, if we say “God is good” and the problem of evil doesn’t change that, then whether God is good according to a human understanding of goodness; and whether God loves us according to a human understanding of love.
Maybe you’re expressing your argument in short-hand here. I grant that the problem of evil is not inconsistent with the existence of God, nor of a sadistic and uncaring God in particular. Such a God could exist, along with cruelty, suffering, and hardship in the world. It could also be consistent with a loving and caring God, in principle – but that would be the paradox. *It is no more or less a paradox * than to say that a human being can torture another human being as an act of love and concern; or, in fact, that a human being can murder another human being based on a “higher” conception of love and concern than most people can understand. Which is conceptually possible.