But God offers us grace and we refuse it. It's not that God was deficient in the actuality of a human moral evil; it's that we were deficient, and this is the cause of the evil. We at best choose a finite good over an infinite good. To be sure, the scandal of human evil results exactly from God's refusal to abandon us, His work/creatures. It is in man's power to make his ways evil; however, it is not in his power to make his ways good because no man is the cause as such of goodness; i.e., man could not be good unless something good was first given to him. Gratitude is thus an extremely important habit and virtue in man.

This is one reason why murder is such a grave sin. We cannot possibly replace or undo the damage we have done, because a human soul is of infinite value and we have but the power to do finite good; and to exchange an infinite good for a finite one is always wrong.

It is our own retreat from God - a refusal to be agents of His goodness - that is the cause of evil in this world. But this should not be exaggerated, as we are ultimately incapable of anything like infinite evil. We cannot abolish God, for example; nor is it even metaphysically possible to eliminate the good or goodness in or from the natural world/creation. Now recalling to mind that a human soul is of itself of infinite value, then it is difficult to see what circumstances of evil and depravity amongst mankind could exist that would utterly make futile the production of human souls as such. Indeed, that there are limits is not known, I think, to reason but only from Revelation. I think in part this is why Aristotle intuited no problems with an eternal universe. The good ultimately cannot be destroyed even in nature/the natural world. To that extent, there is no necessary reason for it ever to cease to be (but if otherwise then there would have been reason for its never coming to be).

Last edited by Timocrates (3/14/2016 7:52 pm)