Editor’s Note: This series on Apologetics is based on the book Catholicism & Reason. Please feel free to use the series for high schoolers or adults. We will continue to welcome your questions for the column as well. You can send them either to the postal mailing address or to the email address below, and we will interrupt this series to answer them.
Special Course On Catholicism And Reason (Chapter 16)
In the Profession of Faith every Sunday, we say that “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, of all things visible and invisible.”
What does this mean? It means that before time began, when nothing else existed except God, the Bible says that “the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.”
God then created everything out of nothing. He created the visible world of sky and sea, sun and moon, plants and animals, and finally the first humans. He also created the invisible world of angels, who are spirits without bodies, although they can take on human form. Some of these angels wanted to be like God, so they rebelled against Him and were cast into Hell (we call them devils). God gave each one of us a special angel, a guardian angel, to protect and guide us from our birth to our death.
The Bible says that this creation took six days and then God rested on the seventh day. This was the author’s way of telling the story of creation in a way that people could understand it. The Bible is not a science book, but a book of religious history that uses popular language to teach us religious truths. God could have created the world in six days, or in six minutes, or in six thousand years. What’s important to remember is that God did create the world and the first humans because He wanted to share His love with us.
Some of the truths that the Genesis account presents are that God created the universe out of nothing, that everything He created was good, and that He created the first man and woman in His image. This doesn’t mean that we look like God because He is a spirit with no body. It means that we are like God in that we can think and choose and love.
The first man and woman are called Adam and Eve and God provided them with a perfect environment that would have lasted forever if they had not sinned. But at the temptation of Satan, who was disguised as a serpent, they disobeyed God and lost their right to Heaven. They also became subject to pain, to suffering, and to death. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that while God could have abandoned Adam and Eve because of their sin, He promised them instead that He would send someone to atone for their sin, and that someone was Jesus. However, the Original Sin of Adam and Eve is passed down to us because we are descended from our first parents. Baptism takes away Original Sin and starts us on the journey to Heaven, but we are plagued by the effects of that sin all through our lives.
The effects of Original Sin are that our minds are darkened (we have trouble distinguishing good from evil) and our wills are weakened (we find it easy to do bad things and hard to do good things). We find ourselves acting like the bad angels in that we try to be just like God. We also find ourselves following the bad example of Adam and Eve in deciding that we know better than God how we should live. When faced with a choice between good and evil, we don’t listen to God, but rather to other people and to the culture around us. That’s a consequence of Original Sin.
Anytime we sin, it’s really a matter of us deciding that we know better than God what we should do or not do. Look at the world around us and see the horrors that attitude has brought about.
A correct understanding of Original Sin and its consequences offers the key to answering such questions as “Why are there pain and evil, sickness and suffering?” Or “Why are there war and violence and natural disasters?” Or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Or “Why can’t we just coast through life without any problems?” The answer to all of these questions is Original Sin and its effects.
The only way to overcome what Pope Benedict XVI called a “foul river of evil” is to follow the “river of light” that comes from Jesus. We do this by prayer and the sacraments, especially Confession and the Holy Eucharist. Remember that God is always more powerful than Satan.
List of Answers:
ADAM
ANGELS
BAPTISM
BENEDICT
BIBLE
EVE
FAITH
GOD
IMAGE
JESUS
LOVE
MINDS
NOTHING
ORIGINAL
PRAYER
SACRAMENTS
SATAN
WILLS
Quiz:
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