Why not embrace Teilhard’s notion that humanity was created with a profound potential for sin and separation from its Creator. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss . . . .” The building material for man, earthen clay, seems imbued with a great potential for darkness, although it certainly need not develop in a dark way.

Adam and Eve, the prototype original humans, were persuaded to indulge a yearning to be like gods themselves and so they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, their eyes were opened, and suddenly they became so self-conscious and self-absorbed that they perceived a shame in their nakedness. An ego-centered, comparing mind that sees everything as good or bad, better or worse, worthy of envy or worthy of disdain, takes root in mankind. Life is no longer perceived as a unified harmony, and becomes something commenced in pain, lived in toil and surrendered in death and bodily decay. Adam and Eve’s legacy is that each succeeding generation embraces life in this fallen way — it is taught and reinforced by example, again and again and again. We quickly forget and abandon the unified harmony that enveloped us in utero and in infancy.

Part of the Good News is that this fallen way can be unlearned, and part of the notion of being born again is learning to perceive God’s unified harmony and learning to keep the judging ego in check. Our Lord provides a great gift with his Parable of the Prodigal Son. It seems that until we descend and humbly surrender like the prodigal son, we tend to live like the prodigal’s brother, in a hard-hearted delusion of virtue.

Teilhard led a life filled with great triumphs and great difficulties. It is interesting that the importance of his observations of conditions from a century ago have great relevance and recognition now.

Death does not surprise a wise man, He is always ready to leave….

Jolly

I’ll try to answer 1 and 2 together. The traditional definition of evil, as I’m sure you know, is privation of a good. Augustine was the first to really coin this definition and work it out. He was also the first to distinguish metaphysical evil, physical evil, and moral evil. Metaphysical evil is basically the situation of finite beings which are not perfect insofar as they lack certain perfections. Finite beings are defined in a metaphysical sense by what they are not: not perfect, infinite, necessary, etc. And, in striving to achieve the perfection of their nature, they necessarily overstep the bounds of other creatures. This is physical evil, which seems to be a part of the very fabric of finite beings, especially when we look at laws like natural selection. Thus, animals eat each other, wasps lay eggs in caterpillars, which eat them away from the inside out causing terrible pain. Finally, moral evil is freely chosen privation, freedom deciding to choose against the good rather than for it.

I think these must be used analagously, since the similitude is greater than the similitude in some sense. There is huge difference between physical suffering and moral suffering, insofar as the latter includes the experience of freedom and self-consciousness. But at the same time, all suffering is the result of a privation that comes from being finite. In this sense they both share the same genus.

As far as number three, while it may not look like particular atoms experience lack, their chemical “impulse” toward combination with other atoms to form higher level unities and more complex unities that at one time resulted in the origins of life and then consciousness seems to point to a dynamic desire within nature for self-transcendence. A proton does not represent a lack, but it “experiences” a lack insofar as it does not exist on its own, but for the sake of higher unities. These have, over millions of years, moved somewhat inexorably toward higher levels of complexification and interiorization. The “multiple” that was immediately following the Big Bang has coalesced bit by bit. Christ is the lode star that draws all things on to the perfection of creation of which St. Paul speaks.

I think that this universe has resulted from an infinite being. Can I demonstrate this? I think Thomas Aquinas does fairly well:

There are three ways to account for a things existence: either

(a) its existence is part of its essence, or
(b) its existence comes to its essence from without, effecting a composition with it, or
(c) its existence is itself the entire essence of the thing.

It is not the case that (a).
If it is the case that (c), then it is so for at most one thing.
For all other things, it must be the case that (b).

“Teilhard sees the movement of Creation as one from the multiple to the unitary. This process requires suffering and death. Of course, these words must be used analagously, since suffering for a proton is not the same as for a dog, or for a human. But nevertheless, they all share the same genus of metaphysical evil. They all represent some kind of lack, privation, that is the result of all finite creation as opposed to infinite being.”

Questions:

1. What do you mean: “these words must be used analagously”? Why must they be used at all? For example, why not just use the word suffering for hominidae and academic nomenclature for protons?

2. What do you mean: “they all share the same genus of metaphysical evil”? What specifically do you mean by “the same genus” and “metaphysical evil”? What evidence is there that they share the same genus?

3. What do you mean by “some kind of lack, privation”? Can you provide specific examples of how protons represent “some kind of lack”? What do you mean by “finite creation” and “infinite being”. How are they different? Can you give a specific example of something that has resulted from an infinite being and also demonstrate how you know that it has?