Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 1.6V2

[Both nature (spontaneous order) and human efforts (designed order), will alter the formal elements in order to adapt to recurring (statistically frequent) instrumental failures.

Applying this to the realm of freedom and morality, (that is, the realm of virtue and sin, or perhaps, I should say, the realm of culture and designed orders) I sense that the challenge of evil (perceived as the occurrence of failure through instrumental causes or formal requirements, which are statistical) induces us to feel that we should change formal designs to prevent particular failures.

The statistical character of evil pushes us to become either control freaks, always designing a better system, or reactionaries, clinging to what works in a stubborn effort to keep everything intact.

Here, we encounter a “demand on God” that resembles the previously discussed “demand that God preserve us”.

In this demand, we fail to acknowledge that we are beings in a spontaneous order and, if God did literally preserve our homeostasis, metabolism and definition, other aspects of the spontaneous order would suffer.

In short, we ask for a cure.  We ask God to remove failure (evil) by intervention (instrumentally) or decree (formally).]