Dear Catholic Exchange:
God always was and always will be. He is the Three “Os”. God knew everything that would happened when He Created. He knew Lucifer would become Satan, Adam and Eve, etc. So why?
Why have we been living through all this since Eden to go back to where we came from by believing in Jesus Christ? (which I do.)
He sent Jesus to redeem us. Why did He bother with the whole scenario? He could have made us to love Him and serve Him and be happy with Him. Why the testing? We have free will. If He just left it all as “good,” we wouldn't have needed free will.
Also in many places in the Old Testament God asks questions like: “Moses? What have they done? Why haven't they obeyed?”
Moses spent 40 days on the mountain and Aaron and the Israelites were partying and making a golden calf. God knew this would happen, knew it was happening and kept poor Moses up there all that time knowing what was ocurring down below. Then He sends him back down to start all over again.
And other times in the Old Testament, He asks questions about “What's going on?” I don't understand if he already knows knows. Why is He asking?
Thank you,
Jim Connelly
New Jersey
Dear Jim:
You are asking some of the most mysterious questions the human mind can think of, far more mysterious than trivia like “How can light be both a particle and a wave?” Essentially your question boils down to “Was it better for God to have created than for Him not to create?” The problem, of course, is that only God can answer that question and the answer He gives is “Yes!” But when we press Him for reasons, His reply is, “Just you wait!” and His down payment on the promise is the resurrection of Christ. Since it's God saying this, we can take His word for it. But it's not much help when replying to people who don't know Him. Ultimately, the question comes very near to being nonsense. If we say “It would have been better for me if I'd never been born” then the question immediately arises, “In what sense do I mean 'for me'?”
As to whether God could have made us “good” without endowing us with free will (and therefore the possibility of our rejecting Him and going to hell, as well as all the other unpleasantnesses of history), this also ultimately seems to come near to being a nonsense question. A sunrise or a duck are both “good.” But their goodness is not a human goodness. It is not a moral goodness. They reflect, but do not participate in, the life of God. The reason God gives us the peculiar goodness of rational creatures is so that we can not only reflect His goodness, but participate in it by becoming participants in the life of the Blessed Trinity Himself. However, the corollary is: “the higher, the more in danger.”
Free will carries with it the danger that we can radically reject God. And for it to be truly free, God has to allow this possibility, not fudge everything and deny us the ability to really choose if it gets too hairy. As far as I can see, God's “foreknowledge” doesn't really enter into things. Of course God knows everything and therefore, since He can see all time at once, He “sees” our free choices in the eternal now. But to see us doing something is not to make us do it. Our act remains free and God, so to speak, dances around it and weaves it into His providential ordering of things.
Bottom line: we're looking at a mystery, but a mystery which the only One Who knows it fully says is worth all the hassles our sins have entailed.
Mark Shea
Senior Content Editor
Catholic Exchange
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