Why wasn't the "Original Creation" made the same as the New Creation one day will be?

[JerryZ]

Well your question is implying that GOD should just force everyone to be perfect. Right?
The new Heaven and the new Earth will be created by GOD and those who merit being in it, will be in it.
So we have a choice it would seem.
The other questions you posit are not really relevant to the question of the first creation and the final one.
And that also is another point, the first creation (this one we live in) is finite. It will come to an end. The second creation will never end.

 

[Latin]

If God would willed He could create everyone to be perfect without any force. – With God all things are possible.

If only those humans could enter to heaven who are merit it to enter, then no human would be in heaven because heaven is God’s UNMERITED FREE GIFT.

Furthermore, if even one person would reject God’s gift of efficacious grace of invitation to heaven, in all Christian history, God would instantly lose His omniscience, (DE FIDE).

God bless

 

[Vico]

So it would be fair to say that God intentionally created the Universe with an imperfect nature.

And the Fall of Man is a separate issue, which did not fundamentally affect the imperfection of the Universe.

Even if the Fall of Man had not happened, the Universe would retain natural evils until an eventual one day New Creation?

Yes. Catechism:

302 Creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. The universe was created “in a state of journeying” ( in statu viae ) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it. …

1048 " We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way in which the universe will be transformed. The form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away, and we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, in which happiness will fill and surpass all the desires of peace arising in the hearts of men."641

 

[JerryZ]

If God would willed What is the difference between this sentence and GOD forcing everyone to be perfect?

When you will that means that you have taken away the free will of the other. GOD gave us free will.

 

[Latin]

We could say, the distortion/ corruption of this world is triggered by sin and probably out of every 100 Christians 70 - 80 blaming and demonizing Adam and Eve for the distortion/ corruption of this world.
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But the question is; who designed/ planned this world journeying” (in statu viae ) toward an ultimate perfection and who designed/ planned sin and the corruption in this world and who pulled the trigger of sin for to unleash sin in this world, God or Adam and Eve?

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Of course this is not a question in the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church has the Fullness of the truth and the Catholic Soteriology wisely teaches as follows:
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THE MYSTERY OF PREDESTINATION by John Salza explains:

Page 121; Fr. Most identifies the metaphysical issue as follows:

Sufficient grace gives man the potency to do good, but do not give the application.

For the application efficacious grace is required to move him from potency to act.

Therefore, sufficient grace is insufficient to move him to act. End quote.
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Page 77; When God wills a person to perform a salutary act (e.g., prayer, good works), He grants him the means (an efficacious grace that infallibly produces the end (the act willed by God).

If God wills to permit a person to resist His grace, He grants him a sufficient, and not an efficacious grace.

FOR EXAMPLE
Page 113: However, the Church teaches that God infused Adam with sufficient grace to resist temptation and to perform his duties with charity.

God, however, willed to permit Adam to reject His grace and to sin. End quote.

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As we see above; God is the one who pulled the trigger for unleash sin in this world and we blame Adam and Eve for it.

God designed/ planned and caused their “fall” for the reason to unleash sin in the whole world for the benefit of the entire human race.
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CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA Divine Providence explains.

He directs all, even evil and sin itself, to the final end for which the universe was created.

Nor would God permit evil at all, unless He could draw good out of evil (St. Augustine, Enchir, xi in P.L. LX, 236; Serm.

Evil, therefore, ministers to God’s design (St. Gregory the Great, op. cit., VI, xxxii P.L.

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307 God thus enables men to be intelligent and free, causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbors.
Though often unconscious collaborators with God’s will, they can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions.
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308 The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator.
God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes: For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
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God effects everything, the willing and the achievement. … (Thomas Aquinas, S. Th.II/II 4, 4 ad 3).
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God’s graces does NOT hinders our free wills, God’s efficacious graces enlightens our minds and we always freely choose the good.
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God bless

 

[Vico]

We could say, the distortion/ corruption of this world is triggered by sin and probably out of every 100 Christians 70 - 80 blaming and demonizing Adam and Eve for the distortion/ corruption of this world.
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Metaphysical evil is imperfection because it cannot be absolutely perfect, which only God is.

Moral evil (“deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation”) and physical evil (“includes all that causes harm to man”) are held to be caused by mankind. Evil is “the loss or deprivation of something necessary for perfection”.

Ref: Sharpe, A. (1909). Evil. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05649a.htm

 

[Latin]

Evil is “the loss or deprivation of something necessary for perfection”.
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EVIL. THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA and the Catechism explains;
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We cannot say without denying the Divine omnipotence, that another equally perfect universe could not be created in which evil would have no place.
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[The above statement explains; evil and sins are God’s design/ plan out of love for the benefit of the entire human race by converting evil and sins into greater good.]

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St. Thomas replies (C. G., II, xxviii)
Mutability would be a defect in the Divine nature (and therefore impossible), because if God’s purpose were made dependent on the foreseen free act of any creature, God would thereby sacrifice His own freedom, and would submit Himself to His creatures, thus abdicating His essential supremacy–a thing which is, of course, utterly inconceivable.
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308 The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator.
God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes: For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

2022 The divine initiative in the work of grace PRECEDES, PREPARES, and ELICITS the FREE response of man.
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[Seems like the above statement of St. Thomas and 308; 2022; etc. are mortal blows of the theory of Molinism.]

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All realities (entia) are in themselves good; they produce bad results only incidentally; and consequently the ultimate cause of evil is fundamentally good, as well as the objects in which evil is found (I, Q. xlix; cf. I, Q. v, 3; De Malo, I, 3).

Evil, therefore, ministers to God’s design (St. Gregory the Great, op. cit., VI, xxxii in “P.L.”)

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05649a.htm
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God bless

 

[Vico]

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Nothing evil exists in itself.

 

[Rubee]

But no one today seriously thinks that the Fall of Man fundamentally distorted the original creation

I would be an outlier then.

I personally think there’s a lot in what Carl Jung intuited that’s very true about human beings. For example, I really do think there’s a real spiritual bond between all of humanity, and between humanity and the cosmos. That that is the fundamental design of the cosmos.

From quantum physics, we know our consciousness interacts with the physical universe in ways no one can explain. You tend to find people in the New Age making the most out of this but I see it from a Catholic perspective myself.

I think we are connected to the universe in such a way that deep acts of our will, i.e. our sin as well as our love have real effects on its structure in ways we can’t yet perceive. Not the “Your thoughts come true” like New Agers think, but that our moral condition or the real state of our intention/will has true effects on the cosmos.

In addition, we can also affect each other as human beings.

For me it then makes perfect sense that Adam, who was created pristine, when he made a radical intention of separation or non-love with God, created a rapture that fundamentally altered the cosmos down to its roots, in ways we might not be able to detect.

It also makes sense that God chose incarnation as the means by which to save this creation, so that his own radical intention/act of love, would fundamentally restore not just the connection between us and God but also between each other (i.e. the church or communion of saints) but also between us and the cosmos as well (the New Creation you’re referring to).

I remember seeing a physicist talking about the shroud in one documentary where she said something interesting. That the burst of an incredible light without heat energy that came from within the body that caused the image as the body went through the clothes seemed like a “big bang” or the beginning of “another universe” right in that cave/tomb.

Of course it’ll take time for the full restoration of the cosmos (the last stage) because, as I said, I personally believe the Cosmos is directly impacted by the moral state and acts of individual humans and we all know that everybody is not “saved” yet. In fact I see that as part of the function of judgment day. So after judgment, there’ll be something like a fundamental rapture or separation that will occur amongst humans who opted for love and those who chose separation like the fallen angel. They will no longer affect each other so that the inhabitants of the new creation will be in one, perfect accord with the Lord, with each other, and with the Cosmos.

 

[Rubee]

Fr. Spitzer explains in one of his books that God designed the universe fundamentally to enable true exercise of love above all else. He allows the possibility of non-love towards himself and other people and the distortion of the universe into a place of suffering because he is serious about the privilege and power he grants to man to enter into loving communion with his God and his fellow man. I will add also, to participate in creation. It’s all for the sake of the ability to make true acts of will/choice.

So God allows us the true possibility to hate him and other people, because without that possibility our “love” of him and other humans would not really be a true choice or communion. It’d fall far short of the communion he invites us to participate in which is the one he has in himself as the Trinity. The true possibility of malevolence (not necessarily its actuality) is the necessary condition for true acts of love. If there’s no real option of “Not A” then “A” is not a true act of freedom. And yet “A” (Love) is what God built us and the universe for. It’s the entire point. Everything in the universe works to make that possible or support that.

In my opinion, distorting the universe from the moral plane is also the condition for the true freedom to “contribute” to building it in accordance with the Divine plan (co-creation). Kinda like the music of the Ainur in Tolkien’s Heaven.

So he made a universe that was beautiful and free of suffering (this is my opinion: I believe if the evolutionary record happened as it appears to us then there was death in non-spiritual creatures but not suffering. There was no pain. On the other hand, perhaps Adam’s acts were so rapturous that we can’t really know if everything really looked the way it does now before ensouled humans sinned.)

 

[Rubee]

302 Creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. The universe was created “in a state of journeying” ( in statu viae ) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it. …

This means incomplete, not fallen or “distorted”, though. I do think Adam’s sin had an unintended distorting effect to the universe, entirely separate from the fully designed, willed, and wholesome “becoming” or incompleteness of the universe. For example,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.

Also, Romans 8, 19-22:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

 

[Vico]

Vico:

302 Creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. The universe was created “in a state of journeying” ( in statu viae ) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it. …

This means incomplete, not fallen or “distorted”, though. I do think Adam’s sin had an unintended distorting effect to the universe, entirely separate from the fully designed, willed, and wholesome “becoming” or incompleteness of the universe.

The types of evil that are generally held to be cause by man are moral and physical, not metaphysical. Your idea is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination.282 Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man.283 Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”.284 Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”,285 for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history .286

 

[Rubee]

The types of evil that are generally held to be cause by man are moral and physical, not metaphysical.

I don’t understand this. Is original sin not a metaphysical effect? It affects our souls? Also, the cosmos is just physical, besides ourselves, so that’s not contradictory to me. I know the Catechism speaks of lost harmony, but I’m suggesting something a tad “extra” that’s not inherent to the idea of harmony. That we fundamentally alter the structure of the cosmos through our moral acts not just that we lose our harmony with it. I’m glad there’s no reason to think that possibly heretical or “New Agey”.

 

[Vico]

Vico:

The types of evil that are generally held to be cause by man are moral and physical, not metaphysical.

I don’t understand this. Is original sin not a metaphysical effect? It affects our souls? Also, the cosmos is just physical, besides ourselves, so that’s not contradictory to me. I know the Catechism speaks of lost harmony, but I’m suggesting something a tad “extra” that’s not inherent to the idea of harmony. That we fundamentally alter the structure of the cosmos through our moral acts not just that we lose our harmony with it. I’m glad there’s no reason to think that possibly heretical or “New Agey”.

Adam and Eve lost the preternatural and supernatural gifts they had been given, so we did not inherit those as was expected.

Metaphysical evil is necessary because nature could not have been endowed with the infinite perfection which belongs to God alone.

 

[STT]

There would be no journey without original creation. Life could be rough at some point. But you can look at back when the life is done and tell yourself that you lived a life.

 

[Aloysium]

no one today seriously thinks that the Fall of Man fundamentally distorted the original creation

Given the state of human relations, it’s not clear that most people think seriously, if by that we mean earnestly and profoundly.

But whatever, I personally believe that there was a Fall that distorted God’s original creation. Even though what little we can be sure of, is difficult to express. here goes:

Consider that what was originally created was a harmonious system with checks and balances, plenty for everything as everything contributed to the formation of the whole of nature. Death would be built into nature as an aspect of change. Living forms have their moment in the sun in each successive generation. Life sacrifices itself to life, that life will thrive and diversify. There’s a belief that speaks to a fall before our own, that involved many angels who would have brought about a corruption of nature, thereby causing disharmony in the world. That would be the origin of the serpent in the garden. Not many of us today seriously think in these terms, but I believe they reveal a reality of what happened in creation in a language that is clear and understandable. Self interest in nature, as in human affairs is responsible for the problems of this fallen world, and would be among the reasons why we are here, to tend to it.

We should also consider that we see out there what is in our hearts. We can understand how it is our human nature, corrupted by original sin, that we project onto creation. The tooth and nail, competitive vision of nature has an emotional, philosophical and moral sense that arises within us. We would see more evil than there is in nature by simply framing the relationship between living beings as one where the self-interest of individual organisms is in conflict with others in its environment.

Creation occurs from eternity, where ontologically speaking everything is one, as it is brought into existence from and within an eternal Now. This does not apply to just some presumed initially singularity, but all time and space, created by God who is in everything, includes everything and is outside everything, through a Divine Act of Love. God has created a garden universe and original sin would be a primary ontological event that arises within us as we are brought into being. We being the crown of creation, have contributed our part in the corruption the universe by sin, from its beginning to its end. That choice at our foundation is at the core of every moment, where we are broken within and among ourselves and healed in Christ. Time as we know it then becomes a journey towards salvation that began historically with the first man, and at the same time transformed everything that happened before and would occur after that moment.

I don’t think I can express the thinking well enough in the few words we are allowed, but yes, count me in as one who today seriously thinks that the Fall of Man fundamentally distorted the original creation.

 

[Rubee]

My word! This is my view as well! I think Adam’s sins changed the structure of reality to the extent that even “the past” cannot be trusted to represent to us today what exactly happened before the first sin. He altered even “evolutionary history” and caused the cosmos to become something distinctly different than it was. Like a puncture/fall that created ripples in all directions of time, sending the cosmos from paradise to this world of suffering. That’s my belief too! I do not believe God made the world with suffering in it. Even if animals died, supposing they did, they did so without suffering until Adam raptured the universe. We of course, were never intended to die.

 

[SeekSalvation]

FOG, if there was “no imperfection until the Fall of Man” how do you explain the “Serpent”? The evil serpent clearly existed before the “Fall of Man”.

 

[goout]

great work

 

[Latin]

If God would willed What is the difference between this sentence and GOD forcing everyone to be perfect?

When you will that means that you have taken away the free will of the other. GOD gave us free will.

Only God has an absolute free will and God has given us a limited free will, we free to do everything God causes or permits us to do.

God permits us to do some acts of sins, for the only reason to convert our sins into greater good.
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God forces no one to be perfect, God will makes everyone of us perfect without forcing it.

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This is the way as follows our free wills are working:

THE MYSTERY OF PREDESTINATION by John Salza.

Page 84. St. Thomas properly explains the chain of causality:

It is to be observed that where there are several agents in order, the second always acts in virtue of the first: for the agent moves the second to act.

Because God is the cause of action in every agent, even man’s free will determination to do good comes from God.

And thus all agents act in virtue of God Himself: and therefore He is the cause of action in every agent. ST, Pt I, Q 105, Art 5.
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God bless