Why Did God Make Us Ignorant?

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edarlitrix

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I know it should produce awe and wonder when someone points out the mystery of God, and how puny our minds are compared to his mind(s), and how we can’t presume to know anything since he is so great and we are so impotently helpless and stupid, but it instead troubles me. Why would God make us so ignorant, irrational, and incapable of comprehending him? He’s omnipotent. He can make us smart enough to understand him, and the Trinity, Incarnation etc. Instead he lets us remain uncomprehending, so that some who don’t understand refuse to believe because Christianity appears absurd.

I am troubled by how irrational we are. Our brains are not “designed” to achieve truth, and so our thinking is marred by biases etc., and we are unaware of our idiocy unless another person points it out to us. But, how can God expect us to seriously believe in Christianity when he gave us brains that will incline us to whichever belief we grew up in, be it Islam, Hinduism etc., and he made us so our brains tend to follow emotions and subjective experience rather than logic and reason. Feelings certainly lead billions astray when it comes to what’s true and false. God could have made us rational by default, so we are not so easily deceived. Then more souls would be saved. I thought God desired all people to come to a knowledge of the truth? So why make our brains living obstacles to the truth?

My two questions for you are–
Why should God (at least some aspects of him) have to be incomprehensible?
Why did God make us inclined to follow our passions?
 
When God created Adam, he provided him with a preternatural gift known as infused knowledge. Without having to learn, Adam possessed knowledge of the physical universe, both material and spiritual, the moral law, the Divine Attributes of God, and man’s relationship to his creator. St. Thomas said: “The first man had knowledge of all things by divinely infused species”. In other words, all of this knowledge was infused directly into Adam’s intellect, without having to learn.

Ignorance is an effect of original sin, as if the rebellion of our lower nature (our passions and emotions) against our higher nature (our reason). When god created man, in addition to infused knowledge, God gave him a gift called “integrity”, which kept man’s lower nature perfectly subordinate to his reason, with no rebellion at all. Just as our arms and left obey an act of our reason and will, with no rebellion, so too did our passions and emotions in the state of Original Justice. When man rose up against God, God removed this give and man’s lower nature rose up against his higher nature. That is the reason for the battle between the flesh and the spirit that St. Paul often talks about. “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit: and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary one to another” (Gal. 5: 17). “For to will is present within me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do." (Romans 7: 18-19) All of this is due to original sin and the loss of Original Justice and the gift of integrity. On this point, St. Thomas wrote:

“**y the sin of our first parent original justice was taken away, whereby not only were the lower powers of the soul held together under the control of reason, without any disorder whatever, but also the whole body was held together in subjection to the souls without any defect…”.

The late Fr. Hardon wrote the following about the gift of integrity:

“In order further to clarify Adam’s gift of integrity, we may say that he was perfectly sound, entire and integral, in the sense that he did not experience within himself that division which mankind now understands so well. Our own indeliberate tendencies, we know, often oppose themselves to what we decide or want to do. …This conflict is variously described as a tension between spirit and flesh, between the interior and exterior man, or simply between soul and body. But in our first parents there was no such internal discord. Their integrity was ‘the absence of any resistance from their spontaneous tendencies, notably the sense appetite, in the performance of good or avoidance of evil.’ In a word it was a perfect dominion [over the] animal and spiritual passion”.

The disorder we see in the world is due to original sin (and actual sin). Had there been no original sin, man and the world would be in perfect peace and order, and man would not suffer from the ignorance he does today.**
 
You might as well ask why did God make us emotional. Ignorance, just like emotion, is part of what it is to be human. And in a sense, I love my ignorance. What value would it be to me to be all knowing? Sure, I could exploit that knowledge, but once you know all things there is nothing left to learn. Purpose, direction, growth, development, motivation, passion, and emotion are all a part of what it is to be human. If you take away man’s ignorance, all this disappears.
 
God did not create us to be ignorant…any more than He created us to be mean. God have us free will.
 
jimmy said:
Ignorance is part of human nature.
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It is part of the human condition, but not part of human nature. Souls in heaven possess the beatific vision and therefore are no longer ignorant, yet they are still human. Jesus possessed a human nature, and he was not ignorant. Jesus possessed the beatific vision from the moment of His conception, and knew all things that would be reduced to act, even in his human intellect.

Man’s intellect was made for truth, which is the proper object of the intellect. The more truth possessed by the intellect, the more perfect it is. Ignorance is a defect of the intellect, and therefore nothing to be proud of. Evil is defined as “the lack of a due good” (meaning a good that should be present, but which is not). Therefore, ignorance of what we should know is not only a defect, but an evil (not necessarily a moral evil, but certainly an evil).
 
edarlitrix said:
My two questions for you are–
Why should God (at least some aspects of him) have to be incomprehensible?
Why did God make us inclined to follow our passions?
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The simplest explanation refers us not to the convenient story of the Fall (we were perfect and enlightened - Adam and Eve were punished - now we are stupid and limited), but to nature itself. The human species evolves towards civilization (aren’t we taught that the people of OT weren’t prepared to abandon polygamy or bloody sacrifices?) and the child evolves towards adulthood. Our understanding about ourselves and the world is different when we are 10 years old, 30, 40 or 60 and the difference is not explainable by the formula “more rationality / less feeling”, but by the effects of life experience, which gradually refines our thoughts and feelings alike and helps us seeing things in their complex unity rather than as systems of opposites.

Check out St Irenaeus, Doctor of the Church:
Irenaeus repeatedly insists that God created the world and has been overseeing it ever since. Everything that has happened is part of his plan for humanity. The essence of this plan is maturation: Irenaeus believes that humanity was created immature, and God intended his creatures to take time to grow into his likeness. Thus, Adam and Eve were created as children. Their Fall was thus not a full-blown rebellion but a childish spat, a desire to grow up before their time and have everything now.
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Everything that has happened since has therefore been directed by God to help humanity overcome this and grow up. The world has been designed by God as a difficult place, where human beings are forced to make moral decisions - only in this way can they mature. Irenaeus likens death to the whale that swallowed Jonah: it was only in the depths of the whale’s belly that Jonah could turn to God and do his will. Similarly, death and suffering appear evil, but without them we could never come to know God.
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The high point in salvation history is Jesus Christ. Irenaeus believes that Christ would always have been sent, even if humanity had never sinned; but the fact that they did sin determines his role as a saviour. He sees Christ as the new Adam, who systematically undoes what Adam did: thus, where Adam was disobedient about the fruit of a tree, Christ was obedient even to death on the wood of a tree. Irenaeus is the first to draw comparisons between Eve and the Theotokos, contrasting the faithlessness of the former with the faithfulness of the latter. In addition to reversing the wrongs done by Adam, Irenaeus thinks of Christ as “recapitulating” or “summing up” human life. This means that Christ goes through every stage of human life, from infancy to old age, and simply by living it, sanctifies it with his divinity. Irenaeus is therefore forced to argue that Christ did not die until he was quite old!
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Irenaeus thus thinks that our salvation comes about, essentially, through the incarnation of God as man. He characterises the penalty for sin as death and corruption. God, however, is immortal and incorruptible, and simply by becoming united to human nature in Christ he conveys those qualities to us: they spread, as it were, like a benign infection. Irenaeus therefore understands the atonement of Christ as happening through his incarnation rather than his crucifixion, although the latter is an integral part of the former.
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orthodoxwiki.org/Irenaeus_of_Lyons
 
Texas_Longhorns said:
It is part of the human condition, but not part of human nature. Souls in heaven possess the beatific vision and therefore are no longer ignorant, yet they are still human. Jesus possessed a human nature, and he was not ignorant. Jesus possessed the beatific vision from the moment of His conception, and knew all things that would be reduced to act, even in his human intellect.

Man’s intellect was made for truth, which is the proper object of the intellect. The more truth possessed by the intellect, the more perfect it is. Ignorance is a defect of the intellect, and therefore nothing to be proud of. Evil is defined as “the lack of a due good” (meaning a good that should be present, but which is not). Therefore, ignorance of what we should know is not only a defect, but an evil (not necessarily a moral evil, but certainly an evil).
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Can the divine nature be comprehended by the human mind? Are those in heaven omniscient? Are those in heaven telepathic? Can they read minds?

I would answer in the negative. As long as the answer to those is no, there will always be ignorance. Ignorance can only be said to be evil if it is regarding knowledge that is necessary. But what is necessary? Is ignorance of others thoughts a bad thing? Is ignorance of the future an evil?

I would agree that ignorance is sometimes an evil, but I would mostly say that about subjective knowledge. It is an evil to not know how to love someone, because you never have. That is an evil ignorance. Behavior can spawn ignorance, and that is evil.
 
jimmy said:
Can the divine nature be comprehended by the human mind? Are those in heaven omniscient? Are those in heaven telepathic? Can they read minds? I would answer in the negative.
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Me too.
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Jimmy:
As long as the answer to those is no, there will always be ignorance. Ignorance can only be said to be evil if it is regarding knowledge that is necessary. But what is necessary? Is ignorance of others thoughts a bad thing? Is ignorance of the future an evil?
I would agree that ignorance is sometimes an evil, but I would mostly say that about subjective knowledge. It is an evil to not know how to love someone, because you never have. That is an evil ignorance. Behavior can spawn ignorance, and that is evil.
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Evil is only the lack of a “due good”, meaning a good that should be present, but is not. Since we aren’t required to know all things, a simple lack of knowledge does not itself constitute evil.

There is also a difference between, what is called, “nescience” (lack of knowledge), and ignorant (lack of knowledge about those things we have a natural aptitude to know.

St. Thomas addresses ignorance and nescience below, and also mentions some things man is required to know:

Question: Whether ignorance is a sin?

I answer that, Ignorance differs from nescience, in that nescience denotes mere absence of knowledge; wherefore whoever lacks knowledge about anything, can be said to be nescient about it: in which sense Dionysius puts nescience in the angels (Coel. Hier. vii). On the other hand, ignorance denotes privation of knowledge, i.e. lack of knowledge of those things that one has a natural aptitude to know. Some of these we are under an obligation to know, those, to wit, without the knowledge of which we are unable to accomplish a due act rightly. Wherefore all are bound in common to know the articles of faith, and the universal principles of right, and each individual is bound to know matters regarding his duty or state. Meanwhile there are other things which a man may have a natural aptitude to know, yet he is not bound to know them, such as the geometrical theorems, and contingent particulars, except in some individual case. Now it is evident that whoever neglects to have or do what he ought to have or do, commits a sin of omission. Wherefore through negligence, ignorance of what one is bound to know, is a sin; whereas it is not imputed as a sin to man, if he fails to know what he is unable to know. Consequently ignorance of such like things is called “invincible,” because it cannot be overcome by study. For this reason such like ignorance, not being voluntary, since it is not in our power to be rid of it, is not a sin: wherefore it is evident that no invincible ignorance is a sin. On the other hand, vincible ignorance is a sin, if it be about matters one is bound to know; but not, if it be about things one is not bound to know.
 
I couldn’t imagine knowing it all; couldn’t process it all. My head would explode.
 
vames said:
The simplest explanation refers us not to the convenient story of the Fall (we were perfect and enlightened - Adam and Eve were punished - now we are stupid and limited), but to nature itself. The human species evolves towards civilization (aren’t we taught that the people of OT weren’t prepared to abandon polygamy or bloody sacrifices?) and the child evolves towards adulthood. Our understanding about ourselves and the world is different when we are 10 years old, 30, 40 or 60 and the difference is not explainable by the formula “more rationality / less feeling”, but by the effects of life experience, which gradually refines our thoughts and feelings alike and helps us seeing things in their complex unity rather than as systems of opposites.
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The problem with your hypothesis is that it leaves out Divine Revelation, which is one of the two principles of truth. The two principles of truth are human reason and divine revelation. It is true that man does make progress in knowledge by the use of his reason. Knowledge builds on prior knowledge, and we learn from our mistakes, etc. But human reason is also prone to error and can easily be mistaken. And just as one truth can lead to another, so too one error can lead to another, and so forth.

Divine Revelation (the other principle of truth) is knowledge that has been communicated to man by God. This knowledge is absolutely certain and in no way subject to change. Divine Revelation protects the human reason from deviating into error; it "frees and guards human reason from many errors, and furnishes it with manifold knowledge”, as the First Vatican Council teaches.

Due to the progress man has made in recent centuries in the natural sciences and technology, he has become prideful and no longer accepts many of the truths revealed by God. This is a serious error, which God will punish by allowing man away from the truth, which is exactly what we see today.

Rationalism, which is an almost universal error today, rejects Divine Revelation and maintains that human reason alone is the only source of knowledge, and the sole judge of what is true and false, good and bad. From what you wrote, it seems as if you have been influenced by this error.

The Fall of man has been revealed to us by God. Therefore, it must be accepted by Faith. Since the time of Christ, Revelation does not advance. During the time of the Old Testament, Revelation was ongoing; but public Revelation ended with Christ and the Apostles. The truths revealed by God are fixed and changeless. There can be a development in our understanding of the revealed truths, in such a way that we are able to grasp more clearly what has always been believed, but there is never a change in what has been believed. A “change” in belief, also known as “evolution of dogma”, is one of the errors of Modernism and has been formally condemned by the Church many times. The following condemnation of this error is from the First Vatican Council:

''The doctrine of the faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine Deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding".

"Therefore … let the understanding, the knowledge, and the wisdom of individuals as of all, of one man as of the whole Church, grow and progress strongly with the passage of the ages and the centuries; but let it be solely in its own genus, namely in the same dogma, with the same sense and the same understanding".

“If anyone shall have said that it is possible that to the dogmas declared by the Church a meaning must sometimes be attributed according to the progress of science, different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema”.

The following condemnation of evolution of dogma is taken from the Oath Against Modernism:

“Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical’ misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. I also condemn every error according to which, in place of the divine deposit which has been given to the spouse of Christ to be carefully guarded by her, there is put a philosophical figment or product of a human conscience that has gradually been developed by human effort and will continue to develop indefinitely”.

So, while it is true to say that man makes progress in knowledge by the power of his reason, reason is also prone to error, whereas God is not. Therefore, the truths revealed by God are absolutely unchangeable and certain, and must be accepted by Faith in order to protect reason from deviating into error.
 
edarlitrix said:
I know it should produce awe and wonder when someone points out the mystery of God, and how puny our minds are compared to his mind(s), and how we can’t presume to know anything since he is so great and we are so impotently helpless and stupid, but it instead troubles me. Why would God make us so ignorant, irrational, and incapable of comprehending him? He’s omnipotent. He can make us smart enough to understand him, and the Trinity, Incarnation etc. Instead he lets us remain uncomprehending, so that some who don’t understand refuse to believe because Christianity appears absurd.

I am troubled by how irrational we are. Our brains are not “designed” to achieve truth, and so our thinking is marred by biases etc., and we are unaware of our idiocy unless another person points it out to us. But, how can God expect us to seriously believe in Christianity when he gave us brains that will incline us to whichever belief we grew up in, be it Islam, Hinduism etc., and he made us so our brains tend to follow emotions and subjective experience rather than logic and reason. Feelings certainly lead billions astray when it comes to what’s true and false. God could have made us rational by default, so we are not so easily deceived. Then more souls would be saved. I thought God desired all people to come to a knowledge of the truth? So why make our brains living obstacles to the truth?

My two questions for you are–
Why should God (at least some aspects of him) have to be incomprehensible?
Why did God make us inclined to follow our passions?
Click to expand...
To speak in general terms, man’s problems, his lack, his failure in possessing what he needs in order to have moral integrity, a sound mind, adequate and satisfying knowledge, peace, harmony, and happiness is grace, is God. And the message of the the Fall of man is that, by disobedience of God, man spurned God, preferring himself over God, and thereby “forfeited” the One Thing he truly desparately needs in his life first above all else. And we’re here now, in this life which is effectively cut off from God, to learn of this need, to learn just how wrong Adam was, so we may gain the wisdom, with the help of revelation and grace, to turn back to God and be healed. Because we’re all lost, all sick in spirit, all in need of grace.
 
Texas_Longhorns said:
Due to the progress man has made in recent centuries in the natural sciences and technology, he has become prideful and no longer accepts many of the truths revealed by God. This is a serious error, which God will punish by allowing man away from the truth, which is exactly what we see today.

Rationalism, which is an almost universal error today, rejects Divine Revelation and maintains that human reason alone is the only source of knowledge, and the sole judge of what is true and false, good and bad. From what you wrote, it seems as if you have been influenced by this error.
Click to expand...
But I didn’t even think about changing dogmas or about civilization understood as boasting about technological progress. I thought about the simple comparison between the development of humanity as a whole and in individuals, the process of becoming mature, as described by St Paul: “When I was a child, I was speaking as a child, I was led as a child, I was thinking as a child, but when I became a man, I ceased these childish things”. Is the development of our mind a natural and painful process, as we gain experience? Yes. Is this development guided by God’s grace, which can come earlier or later and can be accepted or rejected? Yes. One doesn’t exclude the other. That’s why I used the examples from the Old Testament. We all know the frequent questions, including here on CAF: why God didn’t tell the people of the OT to stop polygamy and bloody sacrifices? why didn’t Jesus come earlier? And all the answers I’ve seen say: it was too early, they were unprepared, the Divine Revelation wasn’t complete.
 
vames said:
The simplest explanation refers us not to the convenient story of the Fall (we were perfect and enlightened - Adam and Eve were punished - now we are stupid and limited), but to nature itself. The human species evolves towards civilization (aren’t we taught that the people of OT weren’t prepared to abandon polygamy or bloody sacrifices?) and the child evolves towards adulthood. Our understanding about ourselves and the world is different when we are 10 years old, 30, 40 or 60 and the difference is not explainable by the formula “more rationality / less feeling”, but by the effects of life experience, which gradually refines our thoughts and feelings alike and helps us seeing things in their complex unity rather than as systems of opposites.

Check out St Irenaeus, Doctor of the Church:

orthodoxwiki.org/Irenaeus_of_Lyons
Click to expand...
I’ve heard it said that perhaps one reason Jesus came when He did is because, by that time, man (Aristotle) had independently arrived at a belief in a creator God by the use of reason alone-that the use of reason had reached a sufficiently high level so that man was ready-just barely- to experience that which he’d already proved to himself, detractors from this concept of deism notwithstanding. Just a thought.
 
vames said:
But I didn’t even think about changing dogmas or about civilization understood as boasting about technological progress. I thought about the simple comparison between the development of humanity as a whole and in individuals, the process of becoming mature, as described by St Paul: “When I was a child, I was speaking as a child, I was led as a child, I was thinking as a child, but when I became a man, I ceased these childish things”. Is the development of our mind a natural and painful process, as we gain experience? Yes. Is this development guided by God’s grace, which can come earlier or later and can be accepted or rejected? Yes. One doesn’t exclude the other. That’s why I used the examples from the Old Testament. We all know the frequent questions, including here on CAF: why God didn’t tell the people of the OT to stop polygamy and bloody sacrifices? why didn’t Jesus come earlier? And all the answers I’ve seen say: it was too early, they were unprepared, the Divine Revelation wasn’t complete.
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But you did say this: “The simplest explanation refers us not to the convenient story of the Fall (we were perfect and enlightened - Adam and Eve were punished - now we are stupid and limited), but to nature itself”.

You rejected a teaching of Revelation, which you referred to as, “the convenient story” in favor of a mere theory - one that you considered to be “the simplest explanation” - thereby placing a theory proceeding from human reason, above Divine Revelation. That is the problem. you rejected the certain, in favor of a possible theory.

Progress in human reason is fine, and I agree with that, but reason is also prone to err, whereas Divine Revelation is not. Why, then, would you refer to a truth revealed by God as “a convenient story”, in favor of a theory?
 
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