North of the Shire

Here’s a fascinating article. I heard it mentioned on the radio today and was intrigued.

Apparently Dr. Bloom has conducted studies that conclude, at least to his own satisfaction, that it is demonstrable that babies have the recognition of good and evil from the time they are born.

My response is a long drawn out, “duhhhh!”

Of course they do. Let us think back to the book of Genesis. What was that tree that Adam and Eve were warned against by God? The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Let’s think about that for a second. The knowledge of what is good and what is evil is not a bad thing per se. is it? I don’t think so. The sin of Adam and Eve, we have always been taught, was disobedience and falling for the line that Satan gave them, that they would be like God, knowing good and evil.

I heard from a Baptist preacher one time that he thought, speculating of course, that God would have eventually taught Adam and Eve the concepts of good and evil, perhaps even instructing them to go ahead and eat of the tree. If that had been the case there would have been no sin involved. I tend to agree with his assessment.

But what about the tree and its fruit? Was that just a nice little story and a metaphor, or was there something quite real about it? I don’t think there is any reason to doubt the story as literal, but either way, the sin was in the disobedience but the consequence was also that Adam and Eve suddenly had to contend with conscience. They quite literally had acquired the knowledge of good and evil.

The Church has taught since the beginning that “original sin” is transmitted to every human being from birth, other than Mary mother of God (doctrine of the immaculate conception) and Jesus himself. We can now verify that the knowledge of good and evil is transmitted from generation to generation, without the benefit of social conditioning, as many have been want to believe in recent times.

One of the questions that the radio interviewer asked today was the obvious one. Why then do people do bad things? Dr. Bloom essentially replied that knowing and doing are separate things.

If we look at “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, this is the first and primary argument that he brings for the existence of God. That is to say, the fact that we recognize right and wrong, yet do not always and consistently do what is right and avoid what is wrong. He calls the objective standard of right and wrong the Natural Law which comes from God.

The fact that we know it and don’t always do it yet always want to hold others to the standard, is how we know that there is an objective standard over and above social conditioning. The tendency to do what we objectively can know is wrong is a function of our freedom but is the core of original sin. And it appears here that it is now demonstrated that the legacy of Adam and Eve is just as the Church has taught.

That is also why we baptize infants, to cleanse them of the guilt of that original sin. It does not remove the tendency to be tempted to do wrong, what we call concupiscence, but it corrects that first guilt problem that is inherited.

(Further to this discussion there will soon be a post that answers the question “why did God create time and space?” The answer is actually quite simple, yet involves a certain mystery.)