Here are some BIG questions. They deserve BIG answers.

An avalanche (hurricane, flood, earthquake, wildfire, volcano, asteroid) wipes out a large area, randomly killing some inhabitants, sparing others. Why, God?

A tornado kills the children of one family but spares a nearby family entirely. Why, God?

An influenza attack kills mostly the young and the old. Why, God?

A baby is born with a diseased liver and dies after two weeks. Why, God?

A father is killed by disease, leaving his family destitute. Why, God?

A child is stripped from its mother’s arms by foreign soldiers, bayoneted and tossed on a bonfire. Why, God?

Prisoners of war are tortured without letup until death mercifully intervenes. Why, God?

Ethnicities are slaughtered in a genocidal holocaust. Why, God?

Whole peoples are enslaved and downtrodden. Why, God?

A sex offender serially rapes and kills a dozen children under the age of nine. Why, God?

A Northern shrike (a small predator bird) impales a baby finch on a thorn and leaves it to dangle and cry until the shrike returns for its meal. Why, God?

A wasp lays its eggs on a caterpillar. The larvae bore into the host and devour it from the inside over the span of weeks. Why, God?

A lioness catches a baby impala and watches proudly as her offspring eat it alive. Why, God?

Have you ever thought about such questions and asked yourself, “Why would a loving, all powerful, all knowing God allow such things to happen?” If you voiced that question to a minister or priest or some other religious authority you probably didn’t get a very satisfying answer. You got no answer at all, or you got a weenie, wimpie little answer, like, “God works in mysterious ways,” or “It’s not for us to question God,” or “Man has free will,” or some such incredible nonsense. You may have gotten the old threadbare cop-out that the Devil is in charge of evil in the world, while God is a loving entity with only our best interests at heart.

Uh uh! That won’t fly, my friend. If a loving God is all powerful and all knowing, supervising and executing every action in the universe, there’s nowhere to go for the evil that happens, as well as the good, except to be laid at God’s doorstep. You can’t, according to the semantic rules of logic, have a construct in your brain that says, “Oh, God can have credit for the good and give credit for evil to the Devil.” Not if God is an all powerful, all knowing, loving entity and words mean anything at all.

So, if BIG answers are to be obtained for the BIG questions, we have to change the premises that have been used to get those little wimpie answers. The short BIG answer is that an all powerful, all knowing, loving God is simply incompatible with the empirical world you and I observe every day.

The BIG answer to natural disasters is that they are the result of natural cause and effect, not supernatural shenanigans. They are, by definition, natural. They rip and tear. Soft materials in their path (like flesh, and wood) are likely to be damaged or structurally obliterated by their power. Prayer or wishful thinking has never been shown to physically deflect this power. Consider the number of prayers that must have been said before and during hurricane Katrina’s rampage on the gulf coast. One could daresay not one iota of difference was made by any of them except in the minds of those praying. It could, of course, be psychologically very worth while to have one’s mind preoccupied with prayer as one’s house is ripped away or as raging waters carry one under. But any ostensibly beneficial physical result seen was purely coincidental to the maelstrom’s random fortunes. Forewarning and appropriate preparation are the only reasonable protection available when a natural disaster is imminent. If its’ coming is unforeseen, only blind luck or heroic agility can possibly stand one in good stead once the disaster is present.

An influenza attack kills mostly the young and the old. Does God have a vendetta against babies and old folks? It seems an all powerful, loving God would take pity on the weak, but quite the opposite is true . The immune systems of these two stricken groups fall short of coping with the flu virus and their ravaged bodies cannot recover. An all powerful, loving God does nothing to overcome their medical deficiency, but allows other more healthy groups to survive the onslaught.

The BIG answer is that medical cause and effect in the form of the health of the immune system of the individuals, and available medical treatments are the real culprits or heroes. It is not an all powerful, loving God. Again, prayer can have a beneficial placebo effect of keeping minds occupied to allay fear and worry.  

A diseased baby dies at two weeks of age. Again, why would a loving God allow this to happen? The medical reasons for lack of viability could be hereditary, in which case evolution played a role, or it could have been nutritional, in which case the mother’s/doctor’s ignorance may have played a role. In any case, the BIG answer lies in medical cause and effect, and not in anything to do with “a loving God.” A series of physical events led to the death. There may have been any number of intervention points at which the death could have been circumvented — or not. In any case, decisions were made by human beings along the way that resulted in actions or inactions. Had those decisions been made differently, history may have changed, just as the decisions made that brought you and I to adulthood could have been different and possibly have changed our history.  

Prisoners of war are tortured without relief until death mercifully intervenes.

Ethnicities are slaughtered in a genocidal holocaust. Whole peoples are enslaved and downtrodden. A child is impaled on a bayonet and tossed screaming into a fire. Why would a loving God allow this? The BIG answer is that these atrocities and the possibility of stopping them have far more to do with politics and mob cruelty than with an all-powerful, loving God. The genesis of such acts is in the minds of men, which explains why a “loving God” is powerless to stop such evil cruelty in progress. A “loving God” is a construct only in the minds of some men, and obviously not in the minds of those perpetrating these acts. 

 A tornado kills one family but spares another nearby. Why the loving Godly discrimination? The BIG answer is that this has more to do with the vagaries of layered pressure zones in the lower atmosphere than it does with an all powerful, loving God’s judgment of the morals or eternal salvation status of neighbors. Nature is unaffected by the status, wishes or beliefs that may reside in the minds of man, except as a possible result of actions precipitated by that status, those wishes or beliefs. A “loving God” is powerless to deflect the power of a tornado, as “loving God” is a construct in the mind of man. 

A sex offender serially rapes and kills a dozen children under age nine. Why would an all powerful, loving God allow such horror? The BIG answer is that innocents who fall under the overpowering influence of sex offenders or, for that matter, of moving Mac trucks with oblivious drivers, are most likely to be injured or killed by the experience. There is no all powerful, loving God to intervene in either case. Only attentiveness by caring adults or blind luck can save a child aimed for one of these deadly traps. Why wouldn’t God “aim” the child away from such a trap? Human beings are part of nature, which makes no allowance for a “loving God” to intervene. Guardian angels are figments of imagination, unless they happen to be one of those attentive, caring adults fortuitously in position to effectively thwart the designs of a sex offender or to alert a given Mac truck driver in a timely manner. Such occurrence would be statistically non-existent, but a possible random happenstance.    

A father dies, leaving his family destitute. Why would a loving God allow such misery? The BIG answer is that this is a common occurrence and though it is true that “God will provide,” it is also true that those provisions are likely to be meager at best. Lack of a father is a major cause of generational lingering poverty. An all powerful, “loving God” doesn’t seem to bring more than a bare minimum to the table in these cases, and in truth, there are no guarantees of provisions, only that life will probably be difficult.

A Northern Shrike impales its prey on a thorn, leaving the hapless creature to twist in the wind and cry until it meets its death by dehydration or trauma by the returning hungry shrike. A wasp lays its eggs on a caterpillar. The larvae bore into the host and devour it from the inside over the span of weeks. A lioness catches a baby impala and watches proudly as her offspring eat it alive. Why would a loving God allow nature to be so cruel? Why would a loving God ordain a food chain system, wherein animal species, including humans, eat one another or die of starvation?  Why would a loving God let a lion eat my baby?

The BIG answer here, as it is to all these BIG questions, is that they are all questions concerning nature, even those having to do with humanity, perhaps especially those having to do with humanity. Human beings are not above nature, regardless of what has been pontificated in this regard. We are every bit a part of nature and subject to its laws and forces. Witness the approach, duration and aftermath of Katrina.

Those on the gulf coast who relied on an all powerful, all knowing, loving God to warn them of Katrina/Rita’s arrival only knew about the presence of the storms when the first gusts of wind and rain hit their face, and with their God’s help were left to the tender mercy of those monsters. Those who relied on the atheistically scientific weather bureau for their information knew about them well in advance and learned of landfall from within the shelters they moved to, some of which were scores and hundreds of miles from the path of the disasters.

The weather service, through television/radio (based on science) told us a lot about Katrina/Rita, such as their origins, steering currents, barometric pressures, likely tracks, and then, the damage that resulted from landfall. Yet, strangely, in later surveys, a majority of survivors said their faith in God had been strengthened by the hurricane. One can only speculate that they really meant that their appreciation for the awesome power of nature had grown by their experience and they probably confused that appreciation with “faith in God.” (They had perhaps been taught to accept without reservation since childhood that the Old Testament God was everywhere and angrily spoke from thunderstorms.) 

The lives of hundreds of thousands of people on the gulf coast were saved, not by their faith in God, but by their faith in science and in the people who plied the practices of science. This is a fact that has been ignored by many quick to give God credit: “Thank God it wasn’t worse than it was,” or “God was with us all the way,” etc. Go figure.

As these BIG answers have indicated, nature is truly all powerful, and makes no allowance for a loving god, but DOES ITS THING AND lets the chips fall where they may. Having made this assertion of the obvious, we can acknowledge that within the mind of man there can exist a “loving God,” if one chooses to call it that. In its bare essence it is the moral code by which the individual person lives. 

It remains for us and our duly established institutions to ensure that we stay out of nature’s rampaging way if possible, while taking advantage of its abundant amenities. Our generally lofty position on the food chain, and our hard won civilization tend to insulate us moderns from nature’s rawest aspects. But when situations arise wherein nature seizes the upper hand and our institutions break down, it becomes painfully obvious that we are still subject to the forces of raw nature and must struggle to regain civilized ways.

Is there anyone who now thinks that nature can’t deliver a blow twice as devastating as Katrina/Rita? Ten times? A thousand times?  More? Be awestricken at nature’s power. Be very, very awestricken by the nature of this raging, unstable planet. But don’t think a loving God will intervene to save us in a calamitous event, or do anything to warn us of its coming. For if the BIG answers to the BIG questions mean anything, they mean that there is no room in TRULY ALL POWERFUL NATURE for a loving God outside the mind of man. If we are to be warned of disaster, it will come as a result of the practice of science. Nature is awesome. It has many mysteries to be investigated and we need to support those who will do the investigating and reporting — those scientists who offer hope for the future.

It is those in the 21^st century who refuse to consider BIG answers for the BIG questions that we find most strange. When wimpie little answers don’t stand up to everyday scrutiny, why not check our premises?      
 

© 2005 R. Leland Waldrip