Making sense of natural disasters
Harvey, Irma and Jose are the latest in a long list of recent disasters inflicting widespread violence on man and nature.
In 2011, three days after Easter Sunday, a super outbreak of tornadoes churned through the Southeast, claiming the lives of more than 340 people. And yet that human tragedy doesn’t register on the same scale with the Japanese tsunami a few weeks earlier or the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that claimed in excess of 15,000 and 200,000 lives, respectively.
No respecters of persons, these disasters decimated trailers, brick homes, shopping centers and churches, killing people who were young, old, rich, poor, religious and unreligious. To some people, it is evidence that we are alone in a hostile, unsupervised universe that is deaf to our cries and indifferent to our pain. For others, it raises again the question of “why?” Why in a world created by an all-powerful, allgood God, are natural disasters, which cause so much human misery, permitted to exist? Is God a monster or merely a klutz?
Over the last several decades, one of the most striking discoveries in science is the integrated complexity of the universe. The array of physical constants and relationships that give structure to the cosmos are so precise and interdependent that if any were varied but a smidgeon, life as we know it would not exist.
Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg is a bristling atheist who admits that the host of delicately balanced parameters is “far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.” It is an unsettling fact for Weinberg and the peddlers of scientism — so unsettling that they have had to conjure up fictions of parallel worlds and multiverses to sustain their commitment to materialism.
Indeed, by all appearances, our cosmic home is a place intentionally designed for us, except for those sporadic hostilities of nature. But maybe those hostilities were not part of the original creation.
In the biblical record, at each stage of creation, God pronounced that what he had made was “good.” The divine utterance suggests that, in its original state, the world was a hospitable place for man and that nature was responsive to man’s nurturing touch.
But after the fall, the world
became less hospitable and nature less responsive. According to the account in Genesis, man’s sin led not only to his removal from God’s presence but to an accursed ground. As the apostle Paul put it, “the creation was subjected to frustration.”
In a real sense, sin loosed a moral virus on creation that corrupted it with new limitations: the laws of thermodynamics, which British scientist C.P. Snow summarizes this way:
› Law of conservation: You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing, because matter and energy are conserved).
› Law of entropy: You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder; entropy always increases).
› Law of absolute zero: You cannot get out of the game (because absolute zero is unattainable).
The laws of thermodynamics make dysfunction, decay and death a universal condition. Another outcome is that every system, no matter how well designed and engineered, involves trade-offs to achieve its intended function.
The design of a high-performance bicycle must balance the competing requirements for aerodynamics and light weight with the needs for structural integrity and rider comfort. The features that make a racing bike fast also make it prone to flat tires, bent rims, broken spokes and its rider more prone to saddle sores.
Likewise, the combined influences of the gravitational, geological and meteorological conditions that are necessary for biological life make the Earth more prone to floods, hurricanes and earthquakes than a planet not suitable for life. Consider just one of the Earth’s features: its 24-hour rotational cycle.
Among other things, the Earth’s rotation 1) stabilizes the Earth’s temperature, 2) provides global coverage of solar radiation for photosynthesis and 3) generates a magnetic field that shields the Earth from the harmful effects of cosmic radiation. Each of those functions is essential for the fecundity and well-being of biological life.
But the Earth’s rotation is also what causes curving weather patterns that organize into the spinning air masses of tornadoes and cyclones. What’s more, as the Earth turns, it causes friction in the viscous regions of the Earth’s core that generates subsurface heat that gives rise to volcanoes and earthquakes.
Paul writes that we groan, longing for the “redemption of our bodies” so that mortality “may be swallowed up in life.” The universal human desire to transcend the limitations of the present world is a sign that the present world is not what it once was or will one day be. Paul suggests that, like a woman in labor, the whole creation is in the throes of childbirth waiting for redemption.
Thus, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes are the wails of a world that longs to be “liberated from its bondage to decay” and “for the sons of God to be revealed.”
Chattanoogan Regis Nicoll is a fellow of the Colson Center who writes commentary on faith and culture for a number of print and online publications. His book, “Why There Is a God and Why It Matters,” is available on Amazon.