In Catholicism, mortal sins, even those that result in excommunication, are most certainly forgivable. The correct procedure is to go to Confession. That’s why it’s there!
And one God to rule them all.
Every virtue is a gift from God and a gift of God’s grace. Alone we are capable of nothing.
So is there a difference? I assume there has to be, or there wouldn’t be separate terms.
Then why is it my fault if I do commit a sin? I’m not capable of anything else unless God is helping me out. If I can’t choose to be charitable, for example, on what account may I be fairly punished for miserliness? And by what account may I be rewarded for the deeds that aren’t my choice or my will?
Again, I’m forced to say; Ouch.
Of course you can choose to be charitable – and when you do your will is in concert with God’s will. I don’t mean God is doing it for you, I mean all good things you do are because of Him. You can also choose miserliness, and your will will be different from His.
If I have no charitable feelings or desires of any kind unless God decides, “Ok, this guy is going to be charitable now.”, then on what account can I be responsible for any of it? If my miserliness is because God hasn’t bestowed charitableness on me, then I can no more be blamed for that than can a rock be for not being charitable.
It’s like me saying “My arm can only give money away when I will it to do so. My arm isn’t replacing me in the process, both it and me can be said to be giving away money. All the good things my arm does is because of me.” Which works, sure - but I wouldn’t call my arm good or evil, because it’s not the intelligence in control, here. If God elects to drive me via implanted charitableness, I’m basically just an arm of his will.
That’s a fair question, and a conundrum.
The Catholic answer is that to God, all moments of time are present simultaneously. His plan is fairly described as “predestination”, but it includes each person’s free response to His grace: “In this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever [God’s] hand and [God’s] plan had predestined to take place.”
It’s difficult to come up with an analogy that makes sense. I thought of discussing blackjack: as you sit in front of the dealer, you might think to yourself, “Come on, next card be an ace!” as though your act of will had some effect on the next card.
But of course the deck was already shuffled and in the dealer’s card shoe; the next card is a matter of predestined fact at this point.
But because you don’t know what it is, it makes a weird sort of semi-sense for you to think about it as though it’s a variable event under some sort of control in the present moment.
Of course, a moment’s rational thought dispels that illusion.
But then you might ask yourself: why worry about whether I take a hit or stand, whether I double or surrender? The cards are already in there; what I do won’t change them. And of course that’s both true and incomplete: you can’t change the cards, but you can change your free response to the situation in front of you. You can hit your 16 against a dealer’s 9, because even though the card that comes out will most likely break you, it’s still more likely to be a winning move than not.
Your free will also exists in response to, and as a result of, God’s grace. Merely because God already knows the cards in the shoe does not mean that you are stuck doing what He wants, or what He programmed you to do. You can always choose.
Maybe chess is a better example, since it’s so much more complex. I think you’d agree that chess is not a game of actual infinite possibilities. We can imagine a future in which the game of chess is literally solved – every single possible outcome is known. But that doesn’t negate the fact that when you sit down to play a game of chess, you are freely choosing to advance your pawn to e4, even if you’re playing a Deep, Deeper, Deepest Blue that has calculated every single one of the twenty possible moves it can make in response, every one of the thirty moves you could then make in response, and so on, culminating in its awareness of every possible ending that could happen.
I actually have no issue at all believing in the simultaneous possibility of free will and predestination (I actually would say free will is an illusion anyway, but that aside). The analogy I use is if I watch a football game from the stands, and after the game I hop in my time machine and watch it again. So long as I do nothing to alter what’s happening, I know exactly the same things will occur - not just with every player, but all the fans in the stands, too. They still choose freely what to do, but I’ve cheated and know what will be chosen freely. With an omnipotent god, they have that method available to them of course, plus there’s also the omniscient approach. I don’t know how a friend of mine will react to winning the lottery, for example, but I know him well enough to guess. But if I knew everything about my friend, each little detail, then I could exactly predict how he would react - and yet it would still be his free will.
That part I don’t have a problem with. I’m afraid I don’t see the connection between that part and how “we can do good things only because of God” doesn’t negate away our own moral culpability. It would seem to indicate that God is intervening - or has intervened, at some point - to allow these things to occur. To go back to my first analogy, it’s as if the first, natural time through my watching the football match the game ends nil-nil. The second time round, though, at half-time I go up to one of the strikers and tell him when the time comes to shoot for the upper-left corner of the goal instead of the upper-right, because I know which way the keeper dives. A goal is scored where it would not have been otherwise, thanks to my intervention. Yes, the striker is the one who scored the goal - but without me, that would not have been possible. He would have made the wrong decision - could not have made any other decision, in fact.
If the plan is set out in advance, that is one thing, and there needn’t be a free will issue. But if we’re talking about God’s gifts, God’s active will, we’re talking about intervention (and, for all other times, lack of intervention) in that plan, to change a situation that would go one way to an alternative. Responsibility lies in his court, not ours.
Beyond that, I’d have to question how, exactly, this intervention is made. Is it just the implantation of charitable feelings? Because were I to secretly drug someone to alter their emotional state or decision-making ability I think I’d be fairly found culpable for any actions they took as a result, not they.
This is what I was trying to say. It’s not like God it treating you like a puppet saying at one time, I will make this guy be charitable and another time withhold grace. I mean that when you make your choices, grace is always available to you to give you the strength to do the right thing. You can always choose differently.
The part that blew my mind is God already knows everything that will ever happen since He doesn’t exist in time. So we might think what’s the use – but for us it is new and a new choice.
No, I don’t get the sense that the concept implies an active, purposeful intervention. It’s true God is omniscient. (“Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”) But I take the “Nothing is possible without God,” comments to mean a simple observation of the truth that God created both you, and all the framework in which you now operate. You can’t be charitable without God not because God has forced your hand, but simply because without God there is nothing to give to charity, and no recipient to accept charity.
Yup!
And yup!
And for whatever it’s worth: I am pleased beyond that which words can express that this OP, in the Pit of all places, has spawned such a pleasant discussion of theology.
That’s fair. But, by the same standard, it would be equally correct to recognise that no evil in the world could exist without God. Without God there is no violence to inflict, nor victim to be abused.
Since this has spun into theology, I’ll present my “problem” with the idea of God in the most basic way I can think of: I can’t conceive of a morality in which it’s anything but ‘evil-the-most-foul’ to have the power to stop children from being raped and tortured but not utilize this power. I understand that perhaps there is more to morality then what I can conceive, but I can’t see a way to set aside my own understanding of morality and the way the universe works and embrace a proposed entity that, from my deepest understanding, must absolutely be incredibly evil, were he to exist.
He made us for love but He also made us free. It doesn’t make Him evil that his free children choose evil.
It makes him evil if he is capable of preventing “his free children” from torturing and raping, but chooses not to. Most people are “free” and don’t rape or torture. If God wanted (assuming his existence and omnipotence), he could have figured out a way to make us “free” and still not allow us to rape and torture.
Not that I believe he exists. But if he did, and if he was actually omnipotent, then I can’t understand a way in which he’s not evil.
Then why does it make him good that his free children choose good?
My understanding is that God is, by definition, good - that according to all the monotheistic religions, whether or not someone or something is good is determined by whether it is in accordance with God’s will. That’s what I was taught, and in fact that idea - that things that I so clearly perceive as evil are in fact good - is one of the reasons I left the church (not Catholic, so if there’s a different nuance to their beliefs I’m sure someone will comment),
The problem of evil was what finally made me unable to continue the charade of being a theist.
Nickles:
I heard upon his dry dung-heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water.”
~J.B. : A Play in Verse