By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 30
In this article we will consider a different kind of objection: those directed against God’s justice.
Fifth objection: “The punishment which God inflicted for eating a bit of fruit was excessive.”
Reply: In the first place, this objection depends upon a literal interpretation, and we have already dealt with this in previous articles. But even on that score: An act apparently trivial in itself — like eating a forbidden fruit — may change its character because of the motive and circumstances.
For example, to hoist your country’s flag or even your club’s or college’s flag outside of your house is in itself a very small matter, of course. It is just a sign that you favor that particular kind of decoration, and you are proud of your country, club, or college. But if the flag happens to be the one of a country with which your people are at war, your act will be regarded as the outward expression of grave disloyalty. No one would be surprised if you found yourself facing a charge of treason.
Similarly, to eat a bit of fruit is in itself of no great account, but the act of our first parents in eating the fruit, clearly and most emphatically forbidden by God under a dire threat, was the outward expression of grave insubordination.
We have already seen in previous articles the gravity of that disobedience, since they freely chose to obey the Devil instead of God. They believed in the Devil’s words that, by doing what God forbade them to do, they would become like God, choosing for themselves the natures of good and evil. It was no small matter at all.
Hence to eat it meant to arrogate to oneself the power to determine good and evil — a prerogative belonging to God alone. Adam’s sin of eating it, therefore, involved trespassing the limits of his creaturely status, refusing to be subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms inscribed therein by God. It meant pride, defiance, and contempt for God.
Sixth Objection: God has dealt unjustly with the human race. He has punished innocent children for the sin of their parents.
Reply: Not really. If your parents are very wealthy, and, upon their death, they leave as your inheritance a great deal of money, investments, properties, you are the rightful owner of that inheritance, even though you did nothing to earn it. You are called to use everything wisely. But if you do not, and squander the money and properties in gambling and end up reduced to misery, your children will not inherit the goods left to you by your parents. They will inherit your misery.
Anyone can see that just as children may inherit their parents’ wealth, so too they may inherit their parents’ debts and be liable for them. These debts, if not paid, pass on to yet another generation. Thus, it is taken for granted that posterity is liable for its ancestors’ debts.
To employ another illustration: A benevolent king bestows his favor on two of his servants, man and wife, newlyweds, both of lowly station. All he asks of them is to be faithful to him and obey his commands. If the young couple do so, the King promises to adopt them as his heirs, as his children, and to raise them and their future children from their lowly status to the noble rank.
Sanctifying grace: The King generously gives them house and lands, and provides them with every comfort (the other gifts).
But the couple choose to listen to a disgruntled neighbor and consequently prove ungrateful and disloyal. The good King withdraws his promise of adoption, deprives them of their riches, and reduces them to the level at which he had found them.
Notice that the King has not deprived them and their descendants of anything they had before, but only of those privileges he granted them on condition of their fidelity. They never had any claim to those gifts. They could claim them if they had been obedient, and they were not.
This parable, however, must not mislead us into supposing that Adam and Eve, like the servants, lived for some time without any special privileges. From the beginning, they enjoyed sanctifying grace and the other gifts, and, therefore, owed all the more gratitude to God.
Seventh objection: From paleontology, which studies fossils, we learn that earliest man was of low brain capacity, and therefore of low intelligence, and could not have possessed those wonderful gifts which Catholics claim for him.
Reply: We have already seen in previous articles that the evolution theory of ape-into-man or something similar is just a gross scientific blunder, an impossibility from the logical and genetic points of view.
But to walk the extra mile, let us set up the fantastic hypothesis that someday paleontologists may be able to identify an ancient skull of low brain-capacity as the skull of the first man, Father Adam himself. What would follow from that identification?
Merely this: that Adam, when stripped down to his natural powers, as he was after the Fall, was of low intelligence, of “dark understanding” and weak memory. Before the Fall, his small brain — as, for the moment, we suppose it to have been — would not have prevented an Omnipotent God from bestowing on him all the gifts we ascribe to him. The only obstacle to God’s action would have been irrationality, and that is excluded.
The skulls found in a few places showing a small space for a brain can be easily explained as coming from people who suffered dysfunctions in the pituitary gland, and grew up with abnormal skulls. Nothing more.
Today there are so many liberal politicians of small brain, but nobody accuses them of being prehistoric!
Eighth objection: Ethnologists can point to the tools used by a race of men as an index to their culture. Earliest man possessed only the simplest tools. Therefore, we may infer that Adam must have been like the lowest kind of savage.
Reply: Since Scripture scholars are uncertain as to the precise location of Eden, we may dismiss the idea that any vestiges of Adam’s life before or after the Fall will ever be discovered.
Rude implements of themselves are never a proof of feebleness of mind. If you had no training in camp life, and were cast ashore on a desert island with nothing to help you but your bare hands, your efforts at toolmaking would be very crude, but would not entitle us to question your intellectual ability. The same with Adam.
We have treated these objections at some length in order to give an idea of how other seemingly serious objections against the teaching of Scripture are examined and refuted.
Next article: The Person of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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